The social services chief at the centre of the Baby P row has been given her marching orders following a PR catastrophe that made her position untenable.
And in the final reckoning the general public wanted Sharon Shoesmith to go, not just because of the blunders that led to the toddler's tragic death, but also her fundamental failure to apologise.
Children's Secretary Ed Balls was left with no option but to sack Shoesmith after the media fed the flames of public hatred for the pen-pushing bureaucrat, branding her as indifferent and arrogant.
Shoesmith, who was earning around £100,000 a year, is known to be a committed exponent of education. Yet if this was the case, why on earth had such a senior public official received so little media training?
This clearly showed when instead of giving a public apology in front of a hastily assembled media, she barked up completely the wrong tree by attempting to talk up the council's service record with the tired patter of performance figures and three-star ratings.
Regardless of whose was the underlying responsibility for the tragedy, an apology would have prevented the justifiable reaction of a public that perceived Shoesmith as idealistic, uncaring and defensive.
And it would have also gone some way towards defusing public distemper and taking the sting out of an inevitable onslaught of media hostility.
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