The foundation myth of modern journalism – Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate revelations – depended on secrets being confided to them by people who had, in some cases, sworn to keep them confidential. Often, what they were confiding to the Washington Post reporters were indeed details of misdemeanours, or crimes: still, the proper thing to have done would have been to go to the police, or some other authority.

And often what journalists are told when fishing for secrets are nothing like crimes or misdemeanours: they are decisions, conversations, manoeuvres proceeding from people in power which are interesting, or even important, but which the person betraying the secret – even if it’s the person who is the subject of the revelation – shouldn’t be making public. But if it can be shown to be in the public interest, then the journalist and the news organisation for which s/he works will usually be immune from any action.

The publication, or if you want to be severe the betrayal, of confidential information has been inscribed into the practice of journalism since its beginnings. It’s more intense now. Journalists, at least in the rich societies but in many others too, are no longer much constrained by considerations of propriety, deference and respect for confidentiality. The trend towards celebrity has hugely grown that sub-sector of journalism, and it exists on “revelations” – usually, to be sure, managed by public relations people, but in the cat-and-mouse game celebrity reporters play with their sources, sometimes not. Most of all, the web makes revelation and gossip global.

Still, revelations continue to cause waves, and controversies: people haven’t just accepted that this is the way things are. The publication of The Third Man, Peter Mandelson’s political memoir, is reported as having annoyed two former Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown: and is assumed to have at least irritated other cabinet colleagues. Writing in The Observer Labour’s former deputy leader Roy Hattersley accused Mandelson of writing the memoir merely for cash, and of shaping it to get a large payment and larger newspaper serial rights by retailing conversations that are “derogatory, demeaning or just plain abusive”, and prepared to “damage men and women he once called colleagues or even comrades”.  Replying to that, Nick Cohen argued that “politicians already use our craven lobby system to feed their pet journalists flattering information about themselves and derogatory information about their enemies from behind the coward’s cloak of anonymity. For all the ugliness that follows, it is better to pull away the mask and hear them speaking plainly”.

Hattersley’s strongest point is this: that “repeating revelations is better than working to understand political principles and policies. And the easiest of all articles to write is the denunciation of ministers for deciding the nation’s destiny in smoke-filled (private) rooms. To behave as Peter Mandelson has done, encourages such nonsense”.

That’s probably true, but it’s too late to change. The rewards available for high-level indiscretions; the temptation to tell them, even for no money; the net’s carriage of vast amounts of gossip; the celebrity-sation of all prominent people; the end of deference, at least in the media; judicial acceptance of a public interest defence for any information which can reasonably be said to be dealing with public affairs; the fact that, in the lobby system, and indeed in all briefing by those employed by people in power to spin a positive story, private disinformation is fed constantly to journalists – all of these argue against the return of confidentiality and the honourable maintenance of secrets.

I agree with Hattersley that it’s always self-seeking and sometimes a betrayal to write memoirs of the kind Mandelson has. But we live, not just in an open society in the sense Karl Popper meant it – a liberal order – but in one in which openness, willed and unwilling, increasingly eats away at the boundaries between private and public lives. I am keen on privacy, and would defend it against its breach, including by fellow journalists. But I don’t see how such positions are more than personal preferences, without hope of succeeding generally.

We’re thus left with a world in which, for both good and ill, that which is secret is liable to be divulged – especially if it is publicly interesting, and sometimes if it is in the public interest.

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There’s another side to this. The revelation of the private is felt to be significant, because it was private and because journalists revealed it. The most dramatic moment during the UK’s election campaign in May was the comments the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, made about Gillian Duffy, a woman he had met while campaigning and had expressed some alarm that so many central European workers had settled in her town (Rochdale). In the supposed privacy of his car, Brown called her a bigot: a Sky TV microphone was still attached to his lapel, and his comments were picked up and recorded. It was a misjudgement of a pensioner’s anxiety, and an interesting shaft of light into Brown’s thought processes. But important in terms of policy? His government clamped down on immigration – though not of those from central Europe, who, as European Union citizens, were free to come and go.

A large head of steam was built up round private comments made by Barrack Obama during his primary election campaign in April 2008, when he spoke of rural voters “clinging to guns or religion” because of economic uncertainty: Hilary Clinton, then trailing in the race for the Democratic nomination, made much of it, and for a while positioned herself as a friend of the rural voter to gain their votes. It was a somewhat elitist view; but it hardly spoke to his governing philosophy nor, as it turned out, his governing practice.

The most famous revelations of private views, and one which had the largest consequences, were the indiscretions of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, as reported in a July 8 article in Rolling Stone magazine. These were reported as being close to disloyalty to the Obama presidency – though in truth, the most critical of these were voiced, sometimes attributing their source to McChrystal, by his aides. McChrystal was directly quoted only as saying that the US ambassador Karl Ekenberry had “covered his flank for the history books” – and that after an expression of friendship for the ambassador. He was fired because, as the President reasoned, his comments “undermine the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system”.

They didn’t seem to do that to me: and even if he believed all of the positions his aides took, would it have mattered?  He was obeying orders and working to a plan agreed between the political and military leaderships. He believed in an eventual victory over the Taliban and was pursuing that end with vigour, and with – it appeared, from the Rolling Stone article – the respect, even affection, of his soldiers. The White House overreacted – perhaps, as Christopher Caldwell speculated in the FT because he didn’t want to seem weak in the face of falling popularity.

If we are to live in a state of radical openness, we have to learn that revelations don’t always matter more – and often, as in all the cases above, matter a good deal less – than the public policy, actions and declarations. Letting off steam, cursing, defaming, blaming – all of these activities, which people in pressured posts do constantly, may mean something – or not. May reveal an important facet of character – or not. May be spur to action – or (more often) not. It’s true, as Cohen observes, that White House Oval Office tapes revealed President Richard Nixon to be foul mouthed, paranoid and anti-semitic. But the important issue was his activity – both that which contributed to a less dangerous world, as a rapprochement with both China and Russia; and that which showed him descend into criminality, as the radical undermining of political opposition through dirty tricks. Item: his anti-semitism did not stop him relying heavily on Henry Kissinger, a (non-religious) German Jew – who under his Presidency became the most powerful secretary of state of the post-war era.

It would be ideal if – like the characters in Ricky Gervais’ “The Invention of Lying” – we were all converted by the radical openness of our society to tell the truth all the time (though the film was ambiguous about how good that was). More likely, and maybe better, we’ll begin to understand that the private revelation isn’t more of the truth than the public statement. Journalism could help us see that, even if it is tempted always to do the opposite.