I think it’s probably reasonable to believe that classification (and therefore the removal of documents from the public’s ability to view them) exists to protect the country and nothing else. You don’t get to stamp SECRET on something because it makes a minister look silly, or because it would spare your department an awkward morning on the news, I think in my mind that’s not what the system is for. There are however a few different types of “protecting the country” and “protecting the self” that overlap here in the venn diagram of risk - that mean that some countries have developed different doctrine.

The tidy version of this concept written down is from the United States. Executive Order 13526, Section 1.7, is refreshingly blunt: you may never classify information to conceal a violation of law, inefficiency, or administrative error, nor to prevent embarrassment to a person, organisation or agency, nor to restrain competition, nor to hold back something that doesn’t actually need protecting. It’s a nice little list of “forbidden motives”..

This raises a question for me; in that if the US felt the need to explicitly forbid classifying for embarrassment, then presumably someone, somewhere, allows it?

They do! And (perhaps disappointingly to me) it’s the United Kingdom that screams to the front! Below the SECRET and TOP SECRET tiers the UK applies a marking called OFFICIAL SENSITIVE, and the official policy describes the kind of harm it’s there to guard against. Among the examples is compromise likely to cause moderate damage to the work or reputation of the organisation, and of HM Government itself. Reputation, listed plainly, as a legitimate thing to protect. There’s no anti-embarrassment clause anywhere in the British system to pull the other way.

So if we imagine a document that’s genuinely awkward for the government that holds it, but it exposes no source, endangers nobody, and gives away no advantage.. It is just embarrassing. In Washington, classifying that to keep it quiet is expressly prohibited by the order that runs the system. In the UK, protecting it because release would dent the reputation of HMG, the same document, lawfully protected on one side of the Atlantic and unlawfully classified on the other, and not because anything changed.

The part I didn’t expect is that this runs straight through the middle of the Five Eyes. New Zealand comes down on the American side, and has done for decades: its classification guidance forbids classifying to prevent embarrassment, to restrain competition, or to delay release. There’s a lovely tension in the New Zealand version, mind - the top of its scheme is framed around reputation as a trusted ally and whether partners will keep sharing with it, and yet it still bars classifying merely to protect reputation.

Australia sits in an interesting spot in that gap: no explicit prohibition, but its model treats “loss of confidence in government” as a legitimate kind of damage, which edges a little towards the British position without ever stating it quite so explicitly

A few countries come at it from another direction again. North Macedonia’s law says (Article 21) that if information conceals an abuse of office or an unlawful act, it simply isn’t classified at all, and whistle-blowers who report it are protected. That’s an anti-cover-up rule aimed at hiding wrongdoing rather than at sparing blushes, and the two are worth keeping apart. Concealing a crime and dodging a bad headline aren’t the same act. Although the genuinely icky cases, I suspect, are the ones where a document is embarrassing because it records the wrongdoing, and then you can’t really separate the two motives from the outside..

So the honest map has four regions rather than two: a small group that expressly forbids classifying for embarrassment, a smaller group that expressly allows it, a related cluster that bars cover-ups without naming embarrassment, and a the remainder who don’t really say either way.

Whether a government may classify something just to save its own face isn’t a settled fact with one universal answer. There’s a disagreement written into laws that runs through the largest and most successful alliances we have.