Some years ago I got a mysterious phone call at my desk in the House of Commons, suggesting I nip downstairs to an alcove near the MPs' tearooms where I would find 'something that might interest you'.
It turned out to be a brown envelope containing a copy of an as yet unpublished Ministry of Defence white paper: a proper old-fashioned leak, from the heart of a supposedly top security department, writes Gaby Hinsliff, the Observer's Polical Editor.
We got duly excited, but looking back I have to admit the paper itself was deeply dull: probably the most interesting thing about it was that I shouldn't have had it.
Neither I nor the MoD ever found out who it came from, but I'd bet, ooh, enough to buy me a peerage that it wasn't secured via high-level espionage - more likely (as in the case of the only other draft white paper I've ever been leaked in its entirety) somebody accidentally left it in a pub.
I was thinking about this last week when first the mildly embarrassing emails from Desmond Swayne, David Cameron's parliamentary aide (sample: he calls an unnamed colleague a 'mincehead'), and then a briefing note from John Reid's special adviser, Steve Bates, on the extradition Natwest Three (sample: critics should be accused of 'knee jerk anti-Americanism) pitched up in the papers. Neither of them quite earth-shattering scoops, but given spice by the fact that they were leaks.
There has been a lot of Tory huff and puff about electronic security and bringing in experts to see if anyone hacked into Swayne's computer but it's probably sheer bluff: the most likely explanation I've heard is that he has a habit of logging onto his personal emails from the computer terminals in the Commons library, and it's quite easy not to log yourself out properly.
So the next (un)friendly Labour MP to sit down at the terminal could easily have scrolled through his emails, printed off the juicier ones and then handed them to a mate in Downing Street for making mischief with. As for Bates's briefing, it's more likely someone left it on a photocopier than that anyone broke into the Home Office for them.
As a journalist, there's nothing I love more than the human ability to lose stuff. Just as regularly as I leave my umbrella absent-mindedly in a taxi, there's always some M16 man leaving a laptop in a tapas bar/secretary hitting the wrong number on the fax machine/overworked gofer stuffing the secret briefing note into the wrong pigeonhole (I know one opposition MP who made a career out of the fact that his name is next in the alphabet to a senior Cabinet Minister, so notes intended for the latter were always ending up in his Commons pigeonhole instead).
Technology just offers us even more ways to screw it up (as the Treasury official who recently emailed a tasteless joke to the entire political press corps, by accidentally forwarding it to the names in his office address book instead of his personal one, found out recently).
Just occasionally, those leaks can be (politically) life-changing: like when Labour's war book detailing its entire election strategy in 1997 was apparently left behind in a fast food joint and ended up in Tory hands, or when a late and much-loved Conservative aide to the Major government left their entire planned response to the Scott Inquiry into arms to Iraq on a train (it was never found, but he had a sweaty few hours imagining someone finding it and handing it to Robin Cook).
More often, leaks are small beer spiced up by the fact that they were once supposed to be confidential: I have some sympathy with the junior minister who moaned last week that if he stamped 'Restricted' all over his boring press releases and distributed them across Whitehall in brown envelopes, we'd be more likely to write about them.
Nonetheless, if Lord Levy ever mislays any long lists of names in full view of any Observer-reading cab drivers or barmen, do let us know ...
