‘Did he report every contraction back to the police? What use was that for information purposes? That is a moment so intimate, and I shared it with a ghost.” The first compensation award, of £425,000, has been made to Jacqui, one of the women impregnated in the mid-90s by a police officer pretending to be an activist. She said last year that it felt as though she had been raped by the state: there was discussion at the time about whether or not those two things could ever be comparable, non-consensual sex and consensual sex under false pretences.

The language doesn’t exist to describe this crime, and that consigns us to imperfect analogies: it is an invasion beyond privacy and beyond sex, into a person’s destiny, holding them hostage forever to the love of a child conceived as the byproduct of state reconnoitre. Nothing is too low for an authority that would stoop to this – it could bore into your subconscious, alter your DNA. Its only boundary is the limit of technology.

The impact on Bob Lambert, the police officer, cannot be ignored. His life has been completely denatured by this duplicity. Surveillance, like torture, brutalises the agent as much as it violates the victim. Floating on the surface of these very profound questions is one practical one: did Lambert report every contraction back to the police? Well, no, that bit’s rhetorical – but at some point, it must have been obvious that this woman was not a threat to the state. One day, using average human judgment, of a woman he knew inside out, Lambert must have known that Jacqui was not a terrorist but rather a person of radical views. The thing we will never know is how long after that penny had dropped he continued to spy on her. One year? Three? Five?

When, for that matter, did MI5 realise that Eric Hobsbawm had no intention of defecting to Russia, and was simply agitating for radical left possibilities within UK politics? When did it realise that Christopher Hill was not intending to restart the English civil war, with a mind to recreating a Leveller revolution three centuries later? These two men were academics and communists, and last week it emerged that they were trailed by security services for more than three decades. The extent of this surveillance is still considered too incendiary to be released fully into the public domain, with sections still redacted. The reason, I suspect, is that if we had the full records, it would be plain that no sensible person could have considered either man a threat to the realm, after the initial pass of their activities. Let’s say it would have taken five years to nail this down. That leaves decades of spying unexplained, and inexplicable.

One plausible explanation is that, to the police and the security services, to have radical views at all is to be de facto an enemy of the state. Reasonable grounds to suspect a crime are rendered unnecessary when the entire mindset is considered criminal. It’s sweet of them but unnecessary to be so protective of the centre ground, which is self-policing when it comes to the expression of any interest beyond “what’s best for me?”

The monstering of Russell Brand has, in recent days, helpfully provided a complete compendium of criteria one must fulfil before one is allowed to challenge the status quo. So, in order to care about poverty, you have to be poor. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what the thresholds are, because the person who is poor enough to be allowed to care, and is still accepted into the public discourse, doesn’t exist. If you critique the existing order but don’t stick within quite a narrow set of possible alternatives, you are anti-intellectual – the pro-intellectual thing to do, of course, is to leave serious discussion to the intellectuals. If you point out that capitalism leaves a lot of people unable to support themselves, however hard they try, and you have ever taken drugs, you are a drug-addled maniac. And if you question the verities of neoclassical economics, and yet are not a neoclassical economist, you might as well have pooh-poohed gravity. To think the left wing needs intricate surveillance, lest it grow and contaminate the host, is really to underestimate the health of the conservative immune system.

The alternative explanation for these Stasi-style outrages (which may be rare, or may only be rarely discovered) is that once you start spying on somebody, it is incredibly difficult to stop. It doesn’t really have anything to do with politics – you could be trailing a communist agitator or an environmentalist, a potential jihadist or a suspected white supremacist. Once you’ve started, the piece of evidence that comprehensively proves innocence doesn’t exist. All that exists is absence, the lack of definitive proof of guilt. One more push might be all it takes.

Just one more project ... one more pregnancy ... one more quick decade. It is imperative to look at the “snooper’s charter”, or draft communications bill, in this light: politicians fall over themselves to frame it in terms of balance between privacy and security. All normal people agree on this, they say: people like privacy well enough, but are prepared to sacrifice a bit of it (or a bit of somebody else’s) for peace of mind. But the assurance we need, more than balance, is that an authority invading someone’s privacy will be able to exercise restraint; and that is the bit that proves such a challenge.