It was hardly Watergate. The head of Labour’s policy review tips up at the Compass annual general meeting (I am the organisation’s chair) and tells its members how he feels it’s going for Labour. Unbeknown to Jon Cruddas, the other participants or anyone else, a journalist or contact of the Sunday Times had sneaked in, surreptitiously recorded it all and turned it into a front-page splash.

So what’s wrong with that – if they said it? Shouldn’t it be reported? Isn’t that in the public interest? No. The Sunday Times got its cheap splash, but in the process our political culture is diminished, maybe fatally.

This is now happening on a regular basis. The same paper was “passed” a tape of what the Labour MP John Denham said at another event the week before. The Sun has been up to it, too. Politicians, and Labour ones in particular, are being systematically tracked down, and their every word being secretly recorded and then used in evidence against them and their party.

For the papers who do this it’s an easy, cheap hit: no research, no digging, just someone with a smartphone who is willing to sit through boring meetings on a Saturday afternoon – or even interesting and lively ones, in the case of Compass.

But what will be the result? Politicians won’t attend events, or they will be so guarded, so cautious and so robotic that their appearance won’t have been worth it. All this in a world in which Westminster politics is already becoming dangerously remote and irrelevant to the people it is meant to serve. Just when we need politicians to think and act more freely, we will get the opposite.

Are there no spaces in which our politicians can test, discuss and get feedback on ideas with their friends and supporters? Are there no places where an audience can ask a question and hope to get a vaguely honest answer? Is nothing private? I’ve got images of Minority Report running through my mind, and the notion of pre-crime. If the politicians think it, should we know it? Shall we bug their minds?

As ever, context is everything. This was a semi-private gathering in which you had to register on your way in as a member and receive a voting card. The media were not invited and no media announcements had been made about the event. No press release was issued or speech released. No member of the press was briefed before or after. Endeavouring to foster a welcoming atmosphere of inclusion, the Compass border guards for the event were obviously to be found wanting. Whoever “passed” the tape to the paper snuck in, didn’t reveal themselves, made the recording and snuck back out.

Of course if there is wrongdoing, illegality or rank hypocrisy, then such subterfuge may well be justifiable. But this was an event for the members of a political organisation to think about the year ahead, discuss issues and vote accordingly. It should not have been violated.

What happens next? We either accept that the Murdoch empire – and maybe others – make toxic yet another level of public life and succeed in shrivelling our body politic still further. Or we make whatever stand we can.

Their goal is not just to destroy Labour or even any alternative to the individualistic, me-first politics of the past 30 years. They want to destroy the possibility of such an alternative. Invading the spaces in which such an alternative is discussed, such as the Compass event, is just a means to an end.

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