Trouble is, all too often, the public doesn’t buy it. It just doesn’t wash. And companies do too little to manage expectations or demonstrate to people that they are trying to cope. Their PR can be the disaster that follows the disaster.

Take the on again-off again relationship that the airlines and holiday companies have been having with that puffy Icelandic volcano. Yes, the clouds grounding flights across Europe have clearly been beyond their control and at first unforeseeable.

But the way they handled the aftermath was very much something they could get a grip on and the negative reaction to those that did little to help their customers could plainly have been predicted. But too many companies just left travellers stranded and only did the bare minimum to help their customers even once the threat of legal action seemed inescapable.

BP has been faced with a PR nightmare of mammoth proportions. The company may fairly claim that the massive oil leak off the coast of Louisiana was unforeseeable and is largely beyond its control – in the aftermath anyway – and we’ll see who gets blamed in the coming months and years.

Certainly there is widespread anger in the US at BP, which has been seen as arrogant, in denial, and more concerned about its share price than the catastrophic environmental damage the leak has caused. Whether this is fair or not isn’t the point. The company should have been prepared for this sort of reaction from the start – and managed expectations accordingly – but BP has instead seemed to be playing catch-up with the media reports and public outcry.

On the other hand, this week’s announcement by David Cameron that tough cuts in government spending will hit everyone and the accompanying “we face years of pain” headlines may just be the smartest move the media-savvy former PR man turned PM has made yet. While there has been a little blaming of the previous guys in charge – as there always is in politics – at least the coalition government is largely taking responsibility for the future and trying to create realistic expectations. There is little point in saying things will get better soon if no one is at all confident they will.

The only thing the new coalition government could have done better is to be a bit more realistic and up-front about the possibility of income tax rises. While the Cameron’s Tories certainly don’t want higher taxes, they could be a necessary evil if this government is to really succeed in bringing down the deficit – at least that’s the opinion a good many of our business leaders voiced in a recent survey we did of top financial mangers across the UK.

People will always play the blame game and those in a position to be blamed need to be ready face the flak. Yet, it never ceases to amaze me how often they don’t see it coming.