This Britain

Is it irony? Or bathos? Just to note the contrasting behaviour of two sets of public servants, in yesterday's bombs crisis.

First, the good. The Independent reports:

Scotland Yard said that if the car parked outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Haymarket, where 800 people were partying, had exploded it would have caused carnage. The bomb - made with propane gas bottles used in patio heaters, 60 litres of petrol and large quantities of nails - was spotted shortly after 1am by an ambulance crew attending an unconnected incident. It was defused by a police explosives expert who disconnected the mobile phone trigger.

Well done to the ambulance crew who spotted something and alerted the police who in turn got an explosives expert on the scene double quick and defused the bomb at considerable risk to himself. Splendid action by all concerned.

Second, the not quite so good:

Police confirmed last night that the second car, a blue Mercedes 280, also contained a large amount of petrol and nails. Mr Clarke said it had been issued with a parking ticket on Cockspur Street at 2.30am on Friday, near the Thai Square nightclub. It was towed to the compound on Park Lane an hour later.

So, over an hour after the first incident, and despite the fact that the whole of London's West End would have been flooded with police, someone (presumably a policeman) calmly gave an illegally parked car a parking ticket at 2.30 in the morning. At 3.30 someone else calmly hooked up this unexploded bomb to the back of a lorry and towed it to Park Lane, not bothering to consider whether it might be suspicious and never once connecting it with the fact that two or three streets away a bomb had actually been discovered. 'More than my job's worth, mate', the unknown driver might have said.