Which brings us back to my conversation with that former cabinet minister. At the root of his invincible complacency that it was OK for the state to monitor citizens – and to build and maintain databases of very sensitive information about them – was that it would all happen under legally accountable oversight. Underpinning that was confidence in the permanency of liberal democracy as a rock-solid system of governance. What we have learned since Snowden is that it’s actually much more fragile than we realised and that it depends on political leaders who respect norms and conventions (what Peter Hennessy famously called the “good chap” theory of governance). Those comfortable assumptions were exploded by Trump in 2016 and by Boris Johnson in 2019. And anyone who still believes the state can be trusted to respect the privacy of its citizens (or, in the case of the UK, its subjects) simply hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been going on.