The Rusty Wire Service

Apologies are not likely to suffice. The air is thick with them right now. Mealy-mouthed shit-eating sorries from the likes of Kelvin MacKenzie or Boris Johnson just won't cut it. Platitudes from the police or empty phrases from the chairman of the FA count for nothing because talk is cheap. For the best part of the last two and a half decades, talk has proved a lot cheaper than acknowledging their roles in a tragedy that claimed 96 lives and destroyed many more. The narrative created by this tragedy manages to be both complex in its detail and incredibly straightforward in the fundamental truths it reveals. For 23 years, the victims' families were made to wait for the truth. There have been many opportunities since 1989 to set the record straight and there has always been a sense of inevitability about the outing of this truth and yet these ordinary decent people were made to wait 23 years. What a shameful and disgusting thing to do. There's plenty of b...

London 2012. It's been great, really it has. From the opening ceremony onwards, this Summer has been a showcase of London at its best (and no, the tourist board didn't pay me to say that).   But if there wa s an aspect of the London games that vexed me, it would have to be some of the ill-judged choices in the area of corporate sponsorship . Now I'm as pragmatic as the next cynical hack and I have precious little time for sanctimonious political correctness. Consequently, because I live in the real world, I accept that a certain amount of shameless plugging and product placement is bound to go on at a global bunfight of the Olympics' magnitude. However, I would love to hear the conversation and the thought process that Lord Coe and his flunkeys employed when they convinced themselves that McDonalds was the embodiment of healthy living and athletic prowess. (OK, so Usain Bolt famously consumes large quantities of chicken nuggets but I'd have thoug...