Bernard Ingham: Government through a goldfsh bowl isn't an extension of our democracy

This arrogance has got worse in the interim. It has also spread.

Of course, we all think we can run the country better than the politicians. They are past masters these days at converting me into a passable imitation of Victor Meldrew. This is perhaps why we are surprised that those strangers to responsibility, the Liberal Democrats, have performed tolerably well in coalition with the Tories, whatever their travails over tuition fees.

Perhaps, after all, it's not experience but common sense that really matters.

There is also a curious notion around that governments would perform so much better if they operated in a goldfish bowl. The average Guardianista – and lots more "teenage scribblers" – take the view that it is only their critical oversight, achieved through Freedom of Information law and endless leaks, that keeps Britain in order.

It is a wonderful conceit.

After 24 years in the higher reaches of the Civil Service, I regard open government as a contradiction in terms and its advocates howling hypocrites. There is a large amount of information held by government that would not necessarily be to the country's or the world's advantage if it were in the public domain – as WikiLeaks has shown, though not, so far as we know, disastrously.

Think only of national security, defence, economic and trade intelligence and negotiating positions before you come to consider the basic entitlement of innocent individuals to privacy. In my experience, some of the strongest advocates of open government are the most secretive about their own governance and conduct.

From this you might imagine that I was one of those old-fashioned, tight-lipped civil servants who regarded journalists as agents of Satan. Far from it. For nigh on 25 years as a press secretary, I was in open war with officials who sought to deny me information and papers. Some did so while cultivating their own presumably compliant pet correspondent.

The Treasury consistently sought to keep me in ignorance about Budgets while cheerfully briefing their own tame reporters. This had the benefit of confirming for me that cuts would be less or the goodies better than they were letting on.

All this has evolved today into the systematic "leaking" of every worthwhile announcement overnight before its delivery by virtually every institution in the land.

They tell journalists what they want them to write, which may not be precisely what is being brought forward, but, by the time they know, it is old hat. The world, as they say, has then "moved on".

This is not open government. It is manipulative government. There is a lot of it about.

My concern is – and always has been – to recognise the limitations on open government but then to free up access to information that illuminates the facts behind often thankless options that confront real governors.

It would do the arrogant good to read this stuff.

The current system whereby campaigners and media drag material out of government using Freedom of Information law is anything but openness. Instead, it confirms the impression that government is chronically secretive and has ultimately to be threatened with its own laws to get it to part with information that is invariably not even a one-day wonder.

We should not be surprised that WikiLeaks has emerged as an extension of the goldfish bowl syndrome.

It is the logical consequence of the war on secrecy – even in such relatively open societies as the United States – the worship of the whistleblower and the opportunities created by internet technology.

So far, to no one's surprise, it has demonstrated that diplomats retail loads of gossip back to HQ – a lot of it so accurate that we might have proudly written it ourselves – and that the system seeks to provide a warts-and-all brief about the characters they have to deal with.

Nor is it amazing to discover that some governments are content to say one thing and do another. After all, they are made up of human beings.

But let us not kid ourselves that leaks – "unauthorised disclosures", as they are defined – whistleblowers and WikiLeaks extend our democracy. They don't. They usurp it. They mean that essentially irresponsible individuals take it upon themselves to make judgments that those out of the democratically accountable Ministerial loop are dangerously unqualified to make.

It is time we abandoned Guardianista arrogance and grew up.