Good old Sir Humphrey. Tories, Labour, Lib Dems – whoever is in power, he always seems to win. In recent years, there appears to have been a veritable explosion in the number of leaks in Whitehall and, with them, the inevitable Cabinet Office inquiries.

In July 2022, one was launched by Cabinet Secretary Simon Case after Cabinet Office papers, which damaged Penny Mordaunt’s chances in the Conservative leadership race, were leaked. The year before that, another inquiry was set up to look into leaked text messages between Boris Johnson and James Dyson, detailing their conversations over ventilators during the pandemic. And, of course, there was the infamous ‘chatty rat’ leak in October 2020 over the second national lockdown.

But it appears that the Cabinet Office wants to reveal as little as possible as to the extent and nature of these inquiries. In response to a Freedom of Information request sent in by Mr Steerpike, they stonewalled in classic Whitehall-speak – by claiming that the request for the number and cost of these inquiries was exempt from disclosure under a number of conditions.

One of these was that the information apparently ‘contains details about the detection and prevention of crime which would assist criminals to plan and execute criminal acts and to avoid detection.’ This was weighed up against ‘the general public interest’, and it was determined that the information should be withheld in ‘the interest of safeguarding national security’, and ‘the defence of the country.’

So, no confirmation as to how many leak inquiries there have been and no figure as to how much this has cost the taxpayer? Good to see Sir Humphrey has not lost his touch – nor his habit of conflating the national interest with his own personal one…