Foreign readers: see the latest outlandish development here in the UK.

A highly-placed civil servant is suspected of leaking government material to a senior Oppostion MP.

So the police descend on the MP’s house and arrest him, while also arresting the leaker.

This development – arresting a politician for receiving allegedly ‘leaked’ information – is something quite new here. Hence an angry reaction, focusing on both the unfathomable stupid stupidity of the police move and the even more unfathomable hypocrisy of the whole business:

New rules on research and development. Looser consumer protection measures for utility consumers. Consideration of the future of the Rosyth dockyards. Cabinet arguments on the use of European regional funds. A review of ways to cut housing benefit. A plan to reform invalidity benefit. A possible reform of family policy. The potential for reductions in sick pay and pensions.

Each of these was the subject of one of the many Conservative Government documents that were leaked to Gordon Brown during the years that he served as an opposition frontbencher…

One point is that there always have been leaks and there always will be. To quite a large degree they are a barometer of a government’s own credibility and internal morale.

When the massed ranks of civil servants feel that broadly speaking things are going well, the tendency for leaks diminishes. When government is flailing around, its inability to convince the public has an echo in a declining sense of purpose and loyalty within civil service ranks.

That said, it is highly unusual for a Private Secretary to be involved in leaking, as looks to be the case here.

Normally the privilege of working at the very policy centre of a Ministry and developing a close relationship or even a lasting friendship with a Minister is enough to give the civil servants in question a loyalty boost. Plus a good PS reliability record is strong step towards a turbo-boosted career.

There are also important technical and procedural questions to be answered, of course.

Who decided to launch this arrest? What did the Speaker’s office in Parliament know and do about it in advance? Did no Minister or Minister’s office know what was about to happen?

Yet the real damage goes deeper.

The whole point about the way the UK has run its affairs for centuries is that it is all based on a sense of Limits.

Our constitution does not exist. We have instead a luxuriant growth of conventions, procedures, precedents, standards and other such rather open-ended phenomena which together complement the Law.

These mechanisms have at the heart of them the idea that Limits matter. Limits on the language used in debate. Limits on the way political opponents are treated. Limits on the way public money is managed.

Again, it is not easy to pin down precisely what these norms mean or where they come from, but they are there surely enough.

Some other countries see our Limits as a source of weakness – something to be exploited. Putinism represents this explicitly – it is a constant prodding away at British and wider Western resolve to see whether our willingness to resist Russian political and psychological pressure is edging downwards.

Terrorists represent the ultimate Absense of Limits – people who will kill other people randomly (including perhaps themselves) to make a political point. This is the extreme anti-Limits idea that the end justifies any means.

So in arresting an Opposition politician under the footling circumstances prevailing here, the police (either with a highly placed government wink, or acting under their own initiative – hard to say which is worse from a freedom point of view) have crashed through a formerly robust Limits barrier and set a new, lower standard for the role of state v citizen.

Some argue that this development is good news, in that it reveals with horrible unambiguous clarity a deeper truth about what is going on:

Yes, comparisons with Hitler are over-dramatic, as are the more common comparisons being made now in all the other pieces like this one being scribbled and blogged by all the other no-name scribblers and bloggers like me, with Robert Mugabe’s hideous misrule of Zimbabwe…

…  For that is what goes on at the very bottom of the slippery slope we are on here. Those are the comparisons that spring to mind, even as you realise that they are out of all proportion.

They go to to kind of deed this was, to its dramatic structure, so to speak, even if the scale and intensity of this particular deed was trivial by comparison…

… That our rulers now swear a lot more than they used to is all part of that atmosphere, that tone, that they have been so busily creating. It is an atmosphere in which there are now so many laws, and laws which are so sweeping in their scope, that all are now guilty.

The law simplifies down to the question: do they like you? If they really really do not like you, look out, they’ll come for, and find or make up the laws they need as they go along.

That a front bench politician has been, very publicly, on the receiving end of this parody of the idea of law is cause not for rage and more swearing, but for rejoicing.

Maybe. Maybe not. 

Back in 1987 or so I drafted a speech for Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, about the psychological impact on the communist world of communism ending.

The key idea was this:

Imagine a group of prisoners in a very dark and disgusting cell. After years of suffering the lights are turned on and they see for the first time their surroundings.

Are they delighted at last to be able to see?

Or are they first disgusted then resentful then furious at the sight of the bugs and squalour surrounding them?

Now we start to see with unbearable clarity how our country is being run as Limits quietly erode.

Does it cheer us up?

Update (30 November): not exactly clear from all the media reports whether the civil servant involved in the case was/is a Private Secretary of some sort (ie one of the inner team tasked with helping the Minister manage the flow of papers) or a rather more junior official such as a diary secretary. Or the latter then the former.

So some of the arguments above might need qualifying a bit in the light of Developments.