WHAT an unedifying spectacle of blame apportioning we have been witnessing over the incinerator cost débâcle.

Though it has excited the usual critics, for the general public, who are destined to pick up the tab whatever the outcome, it’s probably wearyingly academic to learn who didn’t know what and who wasn’t responsible for telling whom what they didn’t know or didn’t want to be held liable for if it all went wrong.

What, pray, has happened to collective responsibility? There was a time when honourable men and women who courted authority accepted that with it came owning up to mistakes, both of their own making and by those under their command, and were prepared to take the consequences for individual or group decisions.

Now, however, those who achieve such heights set about coating themselves in morality-deflecting Teflon and data-protection concealment.

Are we therefore to infer that in influential circles, nobody actually makes mistakes? Certainly we are repeatedly told ‘mistakes have been made’, but they are always expressed in the passive mode and appear to be non-attributable. They are owned up to only if – as in the case of the expenses-exposed  UK MPs – the ‘mistakes’ can be served up as euphemisms for downright contrived deception, eliciting a paltry apology little short of the ‘anything else known’ admission in a magistrate’s court.

It is a natural line of defence to cover-up first and reflect later, when all can be ‘put into context’ (that is, laundered with appropriate spin applied).

I take issue with the pompous assertion that there are no such things as accidents or mistakes. We all make them. Read any account of war-time campaigns and you will see that history is littered with them, even if the outcome turns out positive.

For some in high places, however, admitting a mistake is tantamount to an expression of weakness. As a result, you get to the point where the fear of making a mistake leads to avoiding making decisions at all. When circumstances get tough, instead of resolute measures to combat a problem, all we get is a surge of displacement activity – reviews and inquiries by the quango-load.

It is too easy to discount difficulties and write them off like insurance losses, while the perpetrators are indemnified and everyone else, unseen, picks up the tab.

To me, it’s a bit like the little Dutch boy trying to collect all the water in a bucket instead of putting his finger prudently in the leaking dyke.

Hindsight plays a damning hand, too. I once heard executive decision-making described as driving at full-speed down the M1 with your eyes fixed firmly on your rear-view mirrors.

The danger is, if the challenge is considered too great, the goals are lowered. The FA thinks England can’t win the World Cup, so it gives Flavio Capello the target of getting into the semi finals. The government found itself in denial about the influx of cannabis, so, to the despair of the police, it reduced it from Class B to a Class C. (At least, now that even more damage has been done, that decision has been reversed.)

There is, of course, the curse of the serial mistake-maker. Three strikes and your credibility is certainly out, no matter how hard you attempt to justify, explain or excuse.

Look at the predicament facing Aunty BBC: having been tipped into the chasm of the Ross and Brand outrage and the mire of expenses, fees and controversial family outsourcing, it now finds itself accused of wasting public money by spending it on bottled water. It can’t do anything right. Chances are it would be blamed if Big Ben were two seconds short of a chime for the midnight news!

The problem is that if you have been judged as wanting, it is easy for critics to apply repeated layers of freshly dredged Thames mud in the certain knowledge that it will stick like the proverbial barnacle to the keel plates of the Titanic.

Even if we accept that to err is human, you can see why, institutionally, we shy away from admitting blunders. Just last week it was revealed that the NHS paid out more than £800 million last year in claims for mistakes and accidents, many of which were blamed on the pressures now placed on medical staff by the target-ridden culture, imposed by bureaucrats for whom accountability would require surgical implantation under anaesthetic.  

So we are indebted to no less a paragon of intellectual clarity than David Beckham, commenting on the recent mediocre performance by the England soccer team against Holland: ‘Mistakes are going to be made. It’s how you respond.’

Which neatly sums up the quagmire. Mistakes are a vital learning process. There is no point undergoing the agony of soul-searching, internal disciplinary hearings or evasive TV interviews if the humiliation of a day in the hair-shirt doesn’t produce redemption and renewal, rather than retrenchment and repetition.

How seriously are we likely to take all the pious exhortations that the greed and bonus culture in the finance industry which brought us to the brink of economic and social collapse would be abolished, when the promised FSA recommendations are watered down even in their first application and the public is treated to the spectre of ‘bonuses are back’ as if nothing had been learned from the sorry saga? 

But there is a strategy beloved of politicians, war lords, sportsmen and bankers. It involves a stroke of luck and it is not without risk. But if you can turn a disaster – your own, if you can conceal it for long enough, or somebody else’s you might profit by – into success, just ensure your name is on the cap.

Even if you have to stretch the headband to fit!