So many of the things that go wrong in life are what Gilbert Ryle called category mistakes. It's thinking the occasion is more casual than it really is, that you're speaking off the record, that is a business conversation when actually it's personal, that's romantic when it's actually not romantic.
The problem with a new invention, especially a new means of communication, is to decide what it's like and what it isn't like. I'm referring, of course, to the dismal end of Damian McBride as Gordon Brown's right hand man.
Although email has the word 'mail' in it, it's not like a letter and although it's sent over a telephone line, it's not like a telephone call. What it's more like is the postcard you send from holiday that you send to someone in the office which they then pin up on the wall. You don't free-associate on a postcard about kneecapping your enemies. You don't spread vicious gossip about close friends on a postcard. There are more appropriate channels for such things.
My own rule about my own emails is this: if there is anything that embarrass me if it were printed out, put on a giant poster and pasted up in Piccadilly Cirucs, then I cut it out.
PS I love the way politicians are shocked, shocked, when the way they talk all the time in private happens to leak out into the media.
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