Leaking emails and phonecalls can prevent bigots like Kerry Smith standing for Parliament, but its growing popularity should terrify us all

If one is searching for a positive slant on Kerry Smith – the resigned Ukip prospective parliamentary candidate – and his leaked phone calls, it is that at least they reveal him to be an equal opportunities curmudgeon and bigot.

In the private calls – now revealed for public enjoyment – no one escapes Smith’s scattergun approach to sniping and snarkery. Lesbians, “disgusting old pooftahs”, and anyone else in the “BLT” brigade received a shout-out.

Ukip members Olly Neville, Lucy Bostick and head honcho Nigel Farage were also honoured by his smite. Most ambitiously of all, Smith slapped down all of Chigwell as shootable peasants. As Mr Smith shuffles away to lick his wounds, no one can say he lacked a capacity for resentment

Forgive me for finding this septic sod’s downfall amusing – racism and homophobia are rarely a giggle – but the breadth of his Alf Garnett-style twaddle, mixed with his rush to blame it on “strong medication” for his poorly back, is a 1970s sit-com B-plot in the making. You may as well get hung for a sheep as a lamb, the old phrase goes. Smith swung for a whole woolly herd.

Smith’s downfall – of course – was not medication. Smith’s problem was that in his now infamous phone calls – made around two years ago – he was being secretly recorded by someone who presumably sat on this material until they decided it was appropriate to release it. We don’t care about this, it seems, because in this case it suits us. But the easy, jocular manner in which Smith chats suggests to me that the calls were made to someone he believed at the time to be a cohort, or at least someone who wouldn’t blanch at his words.

While I enjoy it every time people like Smith are wrong-footed in their path to power – because let me be clear, he shouldn’t be in charge of the Radio Times Christmas issue and a felt tip, let alone a parliamentary seat – I’m also mindful of the increased normality of taping or storing private words, in order to remove rivals or enemies at a later date.

I often wonder, if push came to shove, who is left born after around 1970 who hasn’t taken part in a Facebook chat, iChat, WhatsApp group or Twitter DM exchange which someone could use to floor them. My career advice to any bright, ambitious teenager reading this would be invest in a whopping great indestructible hard-drive or “cloud” space, simply identify your strongest rivals, and begin harvesting their idiocy now.

Screengrab your contemporaries’ Twitter spats, gather up their risible post-midnight rants, store away their foolish Facebook allegiances, telephone them and tape their regretful ramblings, lure them into WhatsApp groups where they think they are off the record, then keep it all filed away for the future: at some point any one of these contemporaries might cause you a grievance, or a career hiccup. And you’ll be prepared. No one will think ill of you for this.

This may seem Machiavellian advice to children, but I’m only stating facts. In 2014, in our excitement to watch Smith’s demise – and I was jolly excited – or hear David Mellor’s secretly taped taxi-cab tirade, or read the private words of Sony movie executives bitching about Angelina Jolie, or read what football manager Malky Mackay really texts to his friends during transfer season, we gave away our personal right to spend a single second of our human existence “off the record” too.

The David Mellor fandango – a black cab driver’s secret recording of him spluttering and complaining while name-checking his achievements – was hilarious and galling in equal measure. Yet part of me felt sad that here was a cosy private institution the British take for granted – off-the-record candid chats with cab drivers – now available for public consumption should the driver, for any reason at all, feel that betraying you is to his advantage or the right thing to do.

“Well if you don’t want to be taped, don’t be rude,” many intelligent people informed me. At this point, I acquiesced.

So in fact, in 2015 I look forward to the endeavours of snooping hairdressers with mic lapels trying to help themselves to my candid musings. I welcome Royal Mail delivery drivers with secret mics recording how annoyed I am by 6am deliveries! I embrace Year 7 children taping their teachers just in case their Year 13 exam results don’t go entirely to plan. As long as none of us ever put a foot wrong, ever, even in private, then we really have nothing to worry about.