A strain of moral cowardice appears to infect the British state. An unwillingness to be held accountable for its failings and errors, whether by the media, MPs, or its victims. It has an established pattern of claiming righteous motives in its actions but shying away from scrutiny of the consequences of those actions, never mind accepting responsibility.

The unprecedented super-injunction against discussion of a Ministry of Defence data leak that put thousands of lives at risk and may have claimed an unknowable number of those lives is just the latest display of dishonourable conduct, and hardly the most egregious.

Consider the infected blood scandal, victims of which are only now able to access the Infected Blood Compensation Scheme. From the 1970s to the 1990s, over 30,000 NHS patients were infected with HIV and hepatitis C by infected blood or clotting factor products, killing at least 3,000 people.

The history of this scandal is marked by stubbornness and cover-ups from the outset. In the 1970s, American scientists, including Judith Graham Pool, a pioneer in haematology, were characterising the products infecting patients with hepatitis C as “dangerous” and “unethical”. The World Health Organization was warning the UK not to import blood from countries with a high prevalence of hepatitis. They were ignored.

So too were doctors like Spence Galbraith, the founding director of the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre in England and Wales, who warned the Government in 1983 that blood products may be transmitting HIV. An NHS pamphlet for blood donors distributed in September 1983 stated that HIV could “almost certainly” be transmitted by blood products, and the consensus among haemophilia physicians by this point was that blood products were........

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