I have endeavoured to discover the best of the many excuses put forward for the sinking of the Titanic - whether by the shipbuilder who designed the 'unsinkable' liner, the captain who steered her into an iceberg, or the shipping company who assembled this disastrous team of losers.

The winner, by about 5,000 fathoms, is: 'The sea was too calm.' This was the line taken by one of the look-outs on the night of the tragedy, echoed by Captain Smith before he went down with his ship, and subsequently used by the White Star Line in the official inquiries. They blamed the weather - for being just too fine.

The audacity of the excuse matches the magnitude of the catastrophe. The brilliance of it is that it is true. If the sea had been even slightly choppy instead of 'like a millpond' then the iceberg almost certainly would have been sighted in time and 1,522 lives saved. The reason: however invisible a 'berg might be in the North Atlantic, you can always spot it by the waves breaking around its base. But that night there were no waves . . .

Public failure - whether in politics, sport, business, or any field of human endeavour - demands that the blame should be swiftly apportioned on someone or something else. Time after time, the weather carries the can, as it did with the Titanic, and still does with British Rail and the Gas and Electricity boards who recoil in shocked surprise that it should snow in January, catching them totally unawares.

The weather is so popular an excuse that property speculator William Stern managed to blame it -metaphorically - for the financial collapse of his business empire. Asked why his companies had gone bankrupt to the tune of £104,390,248, Stern replied: ' The summer was so beautiful that no one could believe it would be replaced by a hard Siberian winter.' In less poetic moments, Stern blamed the Bank of England 'for keeping the property crash secret'.

Jim Slater, on the other hand, was let down not by the weather but by a monster:'I created a monster that was beyond my personal control.' Later, in his book Return to Go, the monster assumed a more human form: 'Some of the executives were not of the right moral fibre or ability and, when the markets turned, their limitations became only too obvious.'

In other words, no one could possibly have foreseen their limitations before the collapse of Slater Walker Securities. This is a fine example of what Management Today magazine has described as 'management by excuse'.

Bernie Cornfield made the collapse of his £940 million Investors Overseas Service sound like a game of chess that he had played with himself, beating himself through sheer brilliance and skill: 'My problem was that I always have to create problems for myself to solve,' he said. Later, when charged with fraud, criminal mismanagement, and abetting speculation, he said: 'I am a born leader but not terribly well organised.'

Most businessmen find it more convenient to blame their failures on strikes, Government policies, inflation, or currency fluctuations. Rolls-Royce chairman Sir Frank McFadzean managed to blame all four in his 1980 annual report announcing losses of £58 million against profits of £1 million the previous year.

Politicians either blame the voters (Ted Heath: 'I told them but they didn't listen') or the Establishment (John Stonehouse:' They closed ranks'). Or they refuse to admit defeat, the excuse here being that they in fact won. Harold Stassen, America's least successful politician, who stood for office for more than twenty years without being elected, always talked about 'my winning life'. He said: 'Superficially, a political defeat appears to be a disaster. But often it is the only means of communicating something you believe in, of seeing your ideals catch fire.'

Actors blame 'insufficient rehearsal' because that's down to the producer or director; but sportsmen mostly blame the other player for having an unfair advantage. '

'I don't know what he was playing, but it wasn't tennis,' said Hie Nastase after his defeat by Borg at Wimbledon in 1980. This is a variation of the well-known boxing excuse, 'He wasn't human', in which the fighter blames his manager for sending him into the ring with a bear or a gorilla.

Muhammad Ali, after his defeat by Joe Frazier in 1971, made it sound as if everything had gone according to plan. 'It''s a good feeling to lose,' he said. Motor-cycle stuntman Evel Knievel just said: 'I gave it my best', after his Snake River jump flopped. But It let him down.

Dave Smith, captain of Berwick Rangers, blamed the fans for his team's 9-0 defeat in the first game of the season. Or rather the absence of fans. 'In the past I have felt we deserved better support at our matches,' he complained in the local paper.

Tradesmen blame the customer: you obviously have the wrong sort of hair, or your feet are too hot. An excuse gaining in popularity by the hour is: 'No one ever complained before.'

Soldiers don't make excuses, because they never concede defeat, preferring to gloss over their less glorious moments. After Japan had been A-bombed into submission in 1945, Japan's imperial transcript announcing the surrender simply said: 'The war situation has developed, not necessarily to Japan's advantage.' The author no doubt then went out and disembowelled himself in front of what remained of the Emperor's palace.

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