As Bill Clinton and others have learned to their cost, in the end it鈥檚 not
the misdemeanour that brings you down but the cover-up. If the British
government was not last week trying to bury the news that its scientists had
wasted four years injecting mice with the wrong sort of brain tissue, it had a
very strange way of showing it. Not only did it issue a statement on Wednesday
night long after most journalists had gone home. It chose to write it in alien
code. Worse, everything the government has said since about the fiasco has
simply piled confusion upon confusion.
Take the key question of whether the astonishing failure to find even a scrap
of sheep brain in the samples tested means the government鈥檚 all-important effort
to trace BSE in sheep from the early 1990s is now completely ruined. Last week
the answer seemed to be a clear yes. But since then the government has suggested
that some of the research might have been done on sheep brains after all. This
is at best unlikely and at worst nonsense. The head of the scientific team
involved in the blunder made it clear to New 杏吧原创 that if the
three samples tested so far do indeed contain only cow brains, then every mouse
in the experiment will have been exposed to the material, wrecking the entire
project.
The fact that ministers are apparently unwilling to accept this is not
surprising. This magazine has learned that Margaret Beckett, the minister
handling the mix-up, did not fully consult the scientific team on the
significance of the tests before making the announcement. A year ago this week,
we were writing about Britain鈥檚 great BSE inquiry. It was supposed to blow away
the cobwebs of incompetence and obfuscation. The cobwebs are still in place.
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