Off the record

Front page news in the Sunday Times yesterday was the hunt for a Whitehall blogger -- the so-called civil serf publishing loads of indiscreet comments behind the scenes in Whitehall. The blog has now disappeared.... so I can't comment on the substance -but it is bound to raise the questions of whether civil servants should be allowed to blog.

You won't be surprised is that my answer is yes -- but that the civil serf should probably also be disciplined if not sacked.

The first thing to say is that there is nothing really new in the sort odd pernicious background comment that CS has been going in for -- but what used to happen between a senior mandarin and a lobby correspondent over a three course meal at Quirinale washed down by a lot of rather nice chianti has now, through the internet, been democratised. People not in Sue Cameron or Philip Stephens' rolodex now get a chance to give the inside dope now. Who can forget the hunt just before Christmas for the male permanent secretary being indiscreet in an Italian restaurant.. and one of my principal tasks as Press Secretary 12 years ago was to demand mandarin diaries to see who the upper echelons of the Treasury had been lunching as stories floated about chaos inside government. Now you don't have to have a knighthood to get in on the act.

But the second point is it doesn't make it right - for either category. But I don't think the answer is to gag civil servants completely. Its just conceivable that they may have interesting things to say. The answer should be to apply some simple rules.

First: go on the record. Blog away -- as long as its got your name on it (I know I could always claim that this is the blog of the "other Jill Rutter" - now working at the IPPR - and to be played by Scarlett Johansson in the movie and having a doppelganger can be either useful or embarrassing -- a number of times when working at No, 10 I had to explain that the front page denunciation of govt asylum policy in the Indie was not me but the other one...).

Second, hold people responsible for what they put in ... the rules of blogging should be the same as the rules for what you would say on a conference platform; in a speech;

And third, if what people put in shows that they cannot continue to have the confidence of Ministers then they need to take the consequences.

But the plus side is that we do need to develop a mentality of thinking in the civil service, We overdevelop the ability to produce defensive lines to take and radically underdevelop and undervalue the capacity to think interestingly about issues. And that benefits no one. Maybe having an interesting blog should become an entry level requirement for the senior civil service.