Something rotten in the heart

A single idiot acting alone can cause chaos. But to make a scandal—the kind of horror that sticks in the national memory—you need lots of people to do their job so badly that whole systems collapse; and then you need more people, probably in very senior positions, to engage in sustained dishonesty and smug indifference in order to draw a curtain of secrecy around the whole mess. Consider the case of the Guildford Four.

Nick Davies’s review of Timebomb: Irish Bombs, English Justice and the Guildford Four in Prospect magazine. The truth of the Guildford bombings