But error is not an automatic reason for severe blame. Indeed, wherever possible, blame is to be avoided completely. A marginal overstatement of legitimate criticism might convince the tabloid-reading public that ministers are either profoundly incompetent or deeply corrupt. Then the stability of the whole system would be imperilled. And stability is the establishment's primary pre-occupation.
Politicians can abuse each other without serious people taking very much notice.
But if a high court judge, master of an Oxbridge college or retired senior civil servant exposed the processes of government as rotten, our comfortable world would never be the same again. So it was no more reasonable to expect Lord Phillips to denounce and condemn the BSE ministers than it would have been to expect his participation in a street demonstration against global capitalism. He did his job in strict conformity with the precedents - a rigorous analysis of what went wrong but a determination not to allocate an iota more blame than the most generous interpretation of responsibility allowed. When, earlier this week, Mr John Gummer refused to acknowledge that he was the man on the end of the mobile telephone, he should have told the assiduous reporter who had discovered his number that he was too busy sighing with relief to speak. Eighty families now know that not to be true.