Just before Easter, News Corp Australia reached a confidential settlement with the human rights lawyer George Newhouse over an allegedly defamatory article by its star columnist and host of Ten's The Bolt Report, Andrew Bolt.
In his confidential document on 16 March, Alexander wrote that it "would make it all but impossible for a coalition to be sustainable if it were formed, and extremely difficult to form without splitting the party".
"Apparently, organised criminal gangs have been stealing confidential personal information on an industrial scale, from many different employers.
He was suspended from his post in March – on the order of the High Commissioner for Human Rights – and put under internal investigation for leaking a confidential UN document.
Exhibit A in the publicly available complaint is the previously confidential 34-page report written by Horowitz, a document that includes his rationale behind the decision.
Threatening reporters with the Official Secrets Act was a sinister new device to get round the protection of journalists' confidential sources.
In a document marked "confidential" and dated 16 March, the head of the secret pre-election coalition negotiating team, Danny Alexander, wrote: "On tuition fees we should seek agreement on part-time students and leave the rest.
Now, I should emphasise that I am not one of those killjoys who believe that ministers and public officials working on confidential documents should be expected to slum it.
"The Oxbridge revolutionaries" had "battled for years to uncover the confidential documents" which did no more than "prove is that the prince is well-meaning, reasonable and polite".
But the information would be confidential, he says.
This relationship is also used to stress the importance of developing CIs (confidential informants) rather than relying on aggression and street busts.
