THE bizarre loss of top-secret information on a London commuter train led a top American strategic analyst to remark in a BBC interview: ‘There’s a difference between “this should not have happened” and “this really matters”.

Nearer home, the Mystery of the Virtually Invisible E-Mail is an intriguing tale of what was known, when, by whom, and why it went into inexplicable hibernation.

Then there’s the question of how important, on a scale of one to three hundred and thirty million, is the disclosure that a developer about to pocket huge sums from the public purse was found to be embroiled in a brace of international lawsuits. So much for the obvious. The underlying questions, and indeed accusations, focus more upon probity and the responsibilities of public office.

The Chief Minister is annoyed – in fact ‘never so annoyed in his whole political career’. And 2008 is certainly beginning to look like a pretty annoying year all round. But does his annoyance stem from being misled, or from the fact that the disconnect between information known and information communicated was exposed to his disadvantage?

Lest he be too hard on himself, he was, after all, under House pressure. One senior colleague was even threatening to fall on a blunted sword if the masterplan was not approved. His holiday bags were packed. And aren’t developers well used to facing down local brickbats for all manner of evils, including invasive drain laying or coastland cliff spoiling?

But when it was revealed that the information was out there all the time, the stampede of ‘It wasn’t me, miss’ and ‘My raspberry didn’t work’ from the usual suspects echoed down the underpass with all the predictable hollowness of a leader on holiday.

Ignoring it was at best naive. At worst, it could have been interpreted as deliberately misleading. It’s like the captain of the Titanic, and a first officer or six, trying to deny that anyone had told them that their ship was heading full-steam into a north Atlantic icefield, while admitting that they never understood Morse code anyway.

But please, lads, when your head is on the block, don’t exacerbate your plight by saying in your defence that you haven’t [knowingly] broken any rules, because we’ve become inured to discovering that rules are conveniently interpreted retrospectively. Frankly, I’d prefer to hear either ‘Sorry, but I’m convinced I’ve done the right thing, for whatever [honest] reason’ or ‘I’ve made a genuine mistake, for which I apologise.’

N ow just when we thought it was safe to go back on to the Waterfront, the soft sand off West Park claimed another victim. Although it received less media coverage, far more worrying was the ministerial decision to sign an amendment to the criminal code, which, for a few agonising hours, placed the Island on a par with Guantanamo Bay.

The water turned muddier when, in defending the indefensible, the deputy Chief Minister, who was looking after the shop at the time, found himself on TV, burying his colleague with faint excuses. It was ‘a simple error anyone could have made’, since she apparently failed to proof-read the order she was signing. To which the best response has to be: ‘Thank goodness ministers don’t sign death warrants!’

The minister admitted that she couldn’t recall the exact circumstances in which she signed the order which had the effect of permitting the indefinite detention of a suspect without charge.

Although she subsequently rescinded it, she was sure she’d done nothing wrong in signing it in the first place, and was confident that international law would have nullified indefinite detention in any case. So indefinite couldn’t be indefinite after all. If you think that’s a legalistic or linguistic conundrum, local tongues are not the only players.

The incident of the peripatetic orange document folder which found its way from Cabinet Office to the BBC had MPs demanding a Parliamentary committee of ‘oversight’ in the UK.

Now, for anyone with a mischievous turn of mind, interpretation of the word ‘oversight’ holds intriguing possibilities: ‘surveillance’, as defined here, or possibly ‘negligence’.

Anyway, the fallout had the lesser of the Miliband boys obfuscating the issue in Parliament by saying that the incident had a positive side because it showed that procedures were in place – only they weren’t followed. Well, that’s reassuring news – except that in the wink of an eye, it happened all over again.

Sadly, this ‘oversight’ committee sounds more and more like an organisation for picking up the pieces. At last I understand why, in politician-speak, ‘due diligence’ frequently turns out to be a ‘post hoc’ phenomenon.

There’s a curious ‘economical’ approach to responsibility when actions are exposed to scrutiny. It appears to manifest itself the higher the office. Chief execs, presidents and politicians quickly pick up the skill, however open they promise to be at the hustings.

Rather than shoulder responsibility that comes with the territory, they retreat behind ‘My staff failed to brief me’. Or when those acting on their behalf squander public money or they sign something without due care and attention, they issue a public departmental smacking and a loud demand for an inquiry. It’s the noble art of the sidestep. How often do we hear ‘Mistakes have been made, lessons have been learned’ – all expressed in the third person, ie ‘not by me’?

There are times when the gravity of the mistake is such that it becomes a resigning issue. Jumping or pushing will always be a matter of debate. There’s the honourable resignation in support of a disputed principle, although more often it’s a ‘backs to the wall’ inevitability, having exhausted every page in the Houdini escape manual.
So tune into ‘The Untouchables’ on 1 July and discover the carat of the skeletons to which the political flesh is clinging.