My own near-death experience with Leaks came back in the mid-1980s when I was in the FCO Planning Staff as the official speech-writer for Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe.

Part of the job involved checking draft speeches prepared by other FCO Departments, usually with a view to effecting radical improvements in sharpness and style.

On one occasion I wrote a minute (internal memo) recommending that a draft take a much tougher line against Communism as an ideology and for change in Communist Europe. This was the era of Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika, so talk of reform across the communist world was at last in the air.

I subsequently passed a copy of this memo to my distinguished journalist friend the late Nora Beloff, not with a view to her publishing it (she said she wouldn’t, and didn’t) but simply to show that it was a bafflingly uphill struggle to get the FCO to take a strong public anti-communist line. I saw nothing wrong in this – it seemed like a reasonable use of my professional discretion, as I had seen other senior diplomats showing much more sensitive internal FCO documents to trusted journalists by way of friendly background briefing.

Nora happened to mention to a top Cabinet Office official that she had this paper. This prompted him to make a formal report of an apparent Official Secrets Act breach by me – in the days of the Thatcher government there was not much sympathy for leakers. I was summoned by the Head of Planners David Gore-Booth (later a lively Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and India) and told that this was a grave matter which had had to be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Gulp. Would I suffer a grim fate similar to – or even worse than – that of the woman who had been in my new FCO entrants group in 1979, Rhona Ritchie?

After a few anxious weeks I was told to report to the Head of FCO Security Department, Veronica Sutherland (now President of Lucy Cavendish College at Cambridge). She told me that the decision had been taken not to prosecute. I said that no doubt a Thatcher government had not relished prosecuting the lonely FCO official wanting to be tough on Communism. I rehearsed the outlines of my powerful and witty (and obviously doomed) defence, based on the argument that the release of the document to Nora had been ‘authorised’ under the Act, namely by myself as part of what good diplomats actually do all the time to brief journalists. I even gave her some of the FCO top names I planned to call as Defence witnesses on this very subject; how pleased – nay honoured – they would have been to appear in the witness box at the Old Bailey to explain how such things worked in practice and to speak up publicly for a more junior colleague. She opined that that argument should be left to a good lawyer. I mentioned that I was a qualified Barrister. We parted amicably.

No real moral from this story, other than to note that once a cat comes out of your bag it may go anywhere, even if you think it won’t and it promises not to.

It can now be revealed. Nora Beloff’s fine book ‘Tito’s Flawed Legacy’ published in 1985 described the scale of repression in Yugoslavia under Tito’s reputedly benign ‘socialist self-management’ which was much lauded in Western leftist circles. The Preface says that the book "is likely to displease the top people (though not everybody) at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the State Department". I was part of ‘not everybody’.

I much later found myself in Lewin’s shirt shop in Jermyn Street standing behind the Guilty Man from the Cabinet Office who had reported my alleged breach of the Act. If ever there was a moment to have to hand my poisoned umbrella of the sort used to murder Georgi Markov, this was it. But alas I had left it at home that sunny day.

Before leaving the FCO I asked under FOI and Data Protection procedures for copies of all my records, including those on the security side. Vast piles of brilliant stuff appeared. But the system claimed to have no record at all of any referral to the DPP concerning this incident.

Lies? Papers lost? Did they tell me they were doing it just to make me sweat?

Or was it all … a dream?