THERE’S a rather cynical side to me that starts pushing itself to the fore whenever someone pops up in public to announce, with the verbal equivalent of a drum roll, that they’re about to “reveal” something really exciting.

My particular bugbear is the promise of “revelations” to promote TV documentaries, whose makers have usually dragged out one or two new facts or a few feet of film footage to dress up some fairly familiar material.

However, I suspect some national news bulletins have been guilty of bringing out at least the mildly sceptical side in many more people in the last few weeks.

First up was Wikileaks, using the internet to disseminate sensitive documents from the files of US administrations. Some of it was quite funny, but the really striking thing about the “revelations” was that hardly any of them were even remotely revealing or surprising. Some of them you could pretty easily guess, while the rest had already been speculated on, sometimes by relatively well-briefed journalists.

Next came the undercover sting worked by Daily Telegraph reporters on various Liberal Democrat ministers in the coalition Government, when the hacks posed as constituents in order to draw indiscreet comments from the politicians, notably the York-born Business Secretary, Vince Cable.

And the result was… well, much the same actually.

So the Lib Dems were badmouthing their coalition partners to people they thought were constituents or supporters while publicly insisting they were all chums. What a shock! Once upon a time it might have been scandalous to unearth such hypocrisy in our public life, but is that true now, after so many scandals and the emergence of journalists whose job it is to let us know the gossip behind the scenes at Westminster? Can one even claim such behaviour is unique to the present government, given what we know about the rivalry and backbiting in, say, the Major administration or the Blair-Brown ministries? Even when Cable put a bullet through his own foot with comments about his “war” with Rupert Murdoch, his views weren’t entirely unexpected.

Certainly, a lot of people who dislike the Murdoch empire were pinning their hopes on Vince blocking the BSkyB takeover, hopes now dashed by Cable’ careless talk.

Some will say: “Good on the whistleblowers for unveiling what politicians are really thinking – what does it matter if they didn’t come up with anything too surprising?”

Well, I’m afraid I think it does matter, particularly in the case of the Telegraph “sting”.

Their reporters didn’t break the law and probably didn’t break media rules, but even so there is something I find deeply disturbing about how they went about getting their “exclusive”.

It seems to me you need a pretty good reason for using false identities and secret recordings.

In the past this sort of journalism, often practised by certain elements of the aforementioned Murdoch empire, has usually been justified by the fact the reporters are uncovering wrongdoing, often of a criminal nature – even that hasn’t stopped concerns being raised about entrapment and the like.

But the Telegraph surely knew from the start exactly what it was going to uncover; not major wrongdoing but hypocrisy and a fair dollop of foolishness. Labour naturally attacked the coalition as “a sham”, but if Labour politicians didn’t feel a chill about what happened here they should have done.

After all, might the next “sting” see their MPs being manoeuvred into saying what they really think about Ed’s leadership? No, I’m afraid this is a case where the ends simply didn’t justify the means, and the result, far from greater openness, will surely be that politicians of all parties will be even less ready to speak candidly to their public, just as Wikileaks will ensure officials don’t record their views on anything remotely sensitive.

It doesn’t look like being a happy new year in politics.