[sethg]

There is a legal fiction that a government is not merely the vector-sum of actions made by its functionaries, but that it has a corporate identity that decides and acts and persists over time. This is fiction, of course, but it's a useful fiction--a model, if you prefer--and it has some connection with the way humans as social animals identify with their tribes.

So the United Kingdom (represented by its Home Office and judiciary in the 1950s), as a thing with a corporate identity, did wrong to Alan Turing, and it is appropriate for the United Kingom (represented by its Prime Minister) to apologize for its misdeeds.