It's so easy to play the blame game

A student is suing her former boarding school for £300,000 after injuring her back in a fall while drinking at a Valentine's Day ball. She believes the school failed in its duty

of care by leaving her

in an upstairs room, unsupervised, after she'd been drinking heavily. She was 15 at the time and smuggled in illicit booze to drink in her room with her mates.

The student acknowledges that staff stepped in on three separate occasions after noticing she was under the influence. Still, even though she's bright enough to study Classics at Cambridge University, she's clearly too dim to understand the notion that it was her fault for getting so paralytic she nearly ended up being paralysed.

Someone else must pay for her folly, so it's her old school or their insurers who'll pick up the tab.

During the recent rogues' gallery parade of MPs who've been on the make with their expenses, "flipping" homes and other shenanigans that would have had private-sector employees out on their ears with no question of compensation, the usual excuse was that it was "within the rules" and the blame was put on the lackeys in the Fees Office for not spotting their "mistake". As Jim Royle would say: "Mistake?

My a**e."

Mind you, once caught in the spotlight, one or two of them have even been good enough to show some embarrassment and to apologise, though in the delightful case of the perma-grinning, implausibly flame-haired, Minnie Mouse dynamo Hazel Blears it is only because the ex-minister may well be about to become an ex-MP, too. Schadenfreude is a wonderful thing, as is the ability to recognise a cock-up and take the blame oneself, no matter how painful.

All the more interesting, then, to see in last week's MA that 30% of tenants don't even bother to look at the competition and that more than a quarter are too lazy to organise special events or promotions. I wonder just how many of those are grumbling to Fair Pint about their pubco, the tie and the rent.

It's always too easy to blame someone else. Human nature, of course, is as powerful in the pub trade as anywhere else, but if Bec and what happens as a result of it allows the feckless, incompetent and indolent to pin the blame on others rather than themselves, the trade will continue to be a poorer place for it.