Gordon Brown has been telling the BBC (The Andrew Marr Show, 30 May 2009; The Today Programme, 1 June 2009) that voters want MPs to be more accountable to the constituents whom “they serve”. And he wants to be the man whose government proposes and introduces the Bills and Acts and independent quangoes which will monitor and control the process.

But we can be sceptical. A starting place would be to attend to the messages of Tony Wright and Peter Hennessy. (The latter was very good on Radio 4′s Broadcasting House about the time Mr Brown was on the Marr show.)

Firstly, Parliament is supreme, so there is no logical possibility of something outside Parliament controlling it. Secondly, MPs already serve their constituents too much, instead of being trusted boldly to represent them in accordance with their own consciences, their party promises and – yes – constituency pressure. Thirdly, insofar as we are in a mess it is because MPs have been weak enough to allow their parties, the Government and their constituents to hijack them.

It follows that this is a good moment for party bosses and the Government to be seen to insist that this is a very good time for parliamentarians to rent a large hall somewhere and not emerge until they have something decent to say about how they’d like to run their institution from here on in.

At this writing, 6000 people have looked at the piece on Number 10′s channel. It isn’t by any means the most popular of GB’s outing on YT. Several others have put him up there with Tony Blair’s ratings. He is said to look awful – hopelessly winsome and fulsome. It’s true, he does. But if you look at some other postings, he’s a revelation. Try this one on globalisation. (Here’s the text of it.) He’s funny and sharp and quite clever, just like his fans say he often is in private.

I say “quite clever”: I have looked briefly elsewhere at the evidence as to GB’s intellectuality.

In general, it’s important that politicians should post informal, short material on line. It’s one of the few arenas in which they stand a chance of reaching the young, and do it on their own terms – without the dreaded intermediation of the professional media cynics.

The YT announcement of the MPs’ expenses idea was horribly wrong of course. Let’s list the reasons.

(1) The young audience couldn’t be expected to know how this sort of initiative should not properly come from the PM at No 10. (It isn’t a government matter after all, and this audience were being misled that it might be.)

(2) Hot-foot announcements are the best way to convey the idea that an initiative has not been thought-through, debated, and made consensual. That’s to say: social media are precisely useless for the work GB chose to use them for that day.

(3) The social media are an elephant trap for leaders, from whom – in perception terms – we need dignity above all. YT is never obviously a good vehicle for dignity and is at least a testing one. That’s its downside.

(4) In a classic PR blunder, GB sets off talking uncontroversially and virtuously about how he’d like people to aspire to be MPs the way they aspire to be firemen. And then, having grabbed our attention as a mentor or a senior statesman, he uses the opportunity to play a political game. It’s a cheat.

Still, GB and the rest of us have much more to gain than lose by keeping the PM on YT.

There is always the possibility that this is yet another case of the modern malaise of a ploddy box-ticking belt-and-braces jobsworth approach to a crisis. Don’t we feel this may have afflicted social services as well as the police? Procedures are followed obsessively, and no ordinary persepective remains. After all, one false step and the media and lawyers pounce.

But here’s another possibility. The police seem to have suspected that Mr Green had been cavalier with state information in documents and emails. If he had, then the police might have felt they needed to shut down Mr Green’s communications before the shredder and hard drive scrubber had been deployed to brush over the tracks in the sand.

As to the central issue, we ought to accept that government has mostly to be done in private. It is about negotiations which end up in deals. These are seldom pretty, and people in power have to be free to take unattractive positions as things get discussed. For all that we love parliamentary and media access to the doings of the state, there are also other principles at work here.

Principles and practicalities too. The less trust there is between ministers and civil servants, the more governments will resort to private and informal discussion. We’ve had enough of that, thank you. We need less deviousness in government, not more.

It may be that the Home Office civil servant who is also thought perhaps to be involved in the alleged leaks to Mr Green was himself a valuable whistleblower exposing genuine Government misbehaviour to a properly privileged recipient. In which case the police really will have damaged their own reputation

We’ll see. In the meantime, I take with a huge pinch of salt the political and journalistic outrage at what’s happened so far. It works from the assumption that leaking is always good when actually it rather seldom is.