THEY really couldn’t have got it any more wrong. Thomas Cook has lurched from one public relations disaster to another in its quite appalling handling of the Yorkshire family whose children died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a Corfu holiday hotel bungalow nine years ago.

In responding to the quite needless and now officially unlawful deaths of Christi and Bobby Shepherd, as recorded by the inquest jury a couple of weeks ago, Thomas Cook has committed the classic error of other corporate conglomerates before it.

For board members appear only to have listened to company lawyers and insurers rather than exercising a degree of humanity and reaching out to the children’s traumatised and grieving family.

They’ve hidden timidly behind the skirts of not admitting liability in some cack-handed, self-protectionist bid to protect the share price and the company’s reputation but instead, have potentially all but ruined both.

A £3.5m compensation payout the holiday firm received has sloughed around in its bank account for heaven knows how long, and only now is half of it being donated to charity in some misguided bid to reduce growing anger from the children’s family. But was this donation to Unicef made following discussions with the family or was it done as a PR exercise? If so, that backfired too.

Following the inquest verdict an apparent letter of apology to the family from chief executive Peter Frankhauser was released to the media before they’d even seen it. But even then it still didn’t address the core issue of the failure of the company’s safety management systems and policies that were a factor in the children’s deaths.

Now Frankhauser has said he is ‘deeply sorry’ from the ‘deepest of his heart.’ But did he initially make his ‘heartfelt’ apology to the cameras rather than looking into the eyes of Christi and Bobby’s mum and dad as he did so?

No doubt at the behest of intense egging-on from lawyers, only until now Thomas Cook has wriggled quite shamefully on the hook of common decency. And it’s only when the blood baying reached a crescendo that the company finally got its act together and attempted to do the right thing by meeting the family face to face. Bit late though isn’t it?

The actions of Thomas Cook remind me so much of how the rail industry got it completely and utterly wrong with the bereaved and injured following far too many high profile rail accidents in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

And I should know, because I was working in the industry at the time and was tasked with clearing up the mess left by senior managers who had spent too long listening to backside-protecting lawyers.

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my working life was, on the orders of my board chairman, go up to a grieving father wearing a t-shirt with the message ‘Railtrack killed my daughter’ and try and start to build a relationship with him and other families in a bid to put just a smidgeon right of so many corporate wrongs.

The second hardest thing was spending the afternoon with a rail disaster victim suffering severe post-traumatic stress disorder who couldn’t understand why rail insurers were refusing to pay out compensation for his subsequent loss of livelihood because to do so would mean they’d have to admit liability.

As lawyers argued the toss behind closed doors for months on end, his health continued to deteriorate and he had a family to support.

Constant internal nagging and pestering of the lawyers by our little team in a bid to get through to anyone who would listen enough to exercise some common decency on his behalf, finally resulted in him getting financial support when the only thing he’d done wrong in the first place was get on a train to go to work.

It so shouldn’t be like this. Big companies shouldn’t be allowed to hide behind legal and insurance indemnity when it’s quite clearly the victims who need protecting, rather than the bloody share price.

It should be made compulsory that every company with a statutory duty to protect the public through its safety management systems has to demonstrate it has learned from the mistakes of other organisations before them.

And they should also have in place a fund – a ‘without prejudice’ one if the lawyers insist - to offer financial sustenance and support in the event of trauma. But above all, they need to put themselves in their victims’ shoes and do as they would be done by. Oh – and be prepared to say sorry sooner rather than later. And really mean it.