Some good advice via Guido from Dizzy on how civil servants can blog with reduced chance of detection.

An interesting area. One of my first blog posts referred to a case of deliberate leaking by an FCO official which reached the courts where the case crashed.

Does blogging = leaking? Not necessarily. But there is evidently potential for overlap.

Voters can not expect to have their cake and eat it. If they want more or less effective goverenment, having officials who weigh up options and present them to Ministers both to take decisions and then defend them publicly is not such a bad way to run things. There has to be some arrangement made for reasonable privacy/discretion in the way those policies and decisions are worked up. If everything is open to real-time public scrutiny and attendant controversy, the chances of much useful getting done seem to me to decline.

Ditto with formal Ministerial accountability – do we want that to erode by virtue of the fact that civil servants will inevitably get sucked into step-by-step controversies if more or all of the process is made public? 

As for blogging by officials, in my view Ministers and Ministries will be wise to take a light touch in drafting digital-age rules for what civil servants can say and when.

The overwhelming mass of civil servants will never be bothered to blog. Of those who do, not all will write about their work. Of those who do that, not all will be looking to stir up trouble. Of those who do want to stir up trouble, some of that trouble will be trivial: plus, the more specific the accusations in a blog are, the more readily identifiable the source of the blog anyway, thereby acting as a brake on mischievous behaviour. 

And anyone who really wants to get out something newsworthy to affect policy will simply pass it on to a major blog or media outlet anyway, rather than rely upon what is likely to be a modestly-read blog to spread the word.

In short, a non-problem? Simple standards of common sense, mutual professional respect/trust and good manners cover almost everything that matters here – the current official FCO and other Ministry guidelines do look to be much too heavy in style and substance and so come over as … unattractive.