You’d think they would know better at their age!

THEY’RE not two men who’d normally feature in the same sentence. Indeed, if you had to pick a pair of middleaged blokes with less in common, and less reason to find themselves linked by happenstance, you’d be hard-pressed to beat the unlikely duo of Donald Tusk and Liam Neeson.

And yet linked they were this week after both succumbed to a sudden and alarming bout of ‘foot-in-mouth’ disease. Worse still, both were struck down by the condition in the full glare of the media spotlight. Strangest of all, though, was that both had deliberately lifted their expensively shod feet and placed them, with obvious premeditation, into their open gobs.

The baffling similarity between both men’s outbursts is that they were equally clearly planned. There was a definite whiff of rehearsal about Donald Tusk’s ‘special place in hell’ comment, aimed at those who pushed Brexit without a plan.

And Liam Neeson made a point of cautioning the reporter, after he’d made his ‘black b ****** ’ revelation, to be sure to use his anecdote with care. If she didn’t, he joked in full Taken mode, ‘I will find you…’

Both men have done countless interviews and press events in their careers so there’s no chance their comments were a result of nerves, naïvety, or inexperience. Both of them, then, chose to make statements that they knew would cause global shockwaves, set social media alight and aggravate painful wounds. Both also spoke their own truth, no question about that.

Mr Tusk is entitled to be angry and frustrated at the Brexit mess, and the British failure to anticipate the problems it would cause. He’s right to say that Brexit was sold to voters without any caveat about its potential consequences.

And Mr Neeson was being entirely honest when he admitted that revenge, in real life is neither as moral nor admirable as the Hollywood version suggests.

He has enjoyed a late-career bonanza by playing ordinary men driven to extraordinary acts of vengeance by the sufferings of loved ones. In Taken, his daughter was abducted by Albanian people-traffickers. In Cold Pursuit, the film he was promoting this week, he plays a father systematically hunting down the killers of his son.

Gratifying as those plots might be – because we’ve all toyed with the notion of vengeance at times, even if it was only towards the white-van man who almost knocked you off your bike – in reality the instinct is best subdued. As the saying goes, before you embark on revenge, dig two graves.

YET the real question, about both Mr Tusk and Mr Neeson is not whether they were honest but whether they were wise. Sometimes your truths are best shared with friends you trust or kept safely inside your head. Unless there is some purpose in making a controversial revelation, unless it challenges a complacency or provokes a necessary debate, baring your private angst can look a lot like self-indulgence.

Both Mr Neeson and Mr Tusk are powerful men in their spheres and they are used to folk hanging on their every word. From the top of your pedestal in showbiz or global politics, it must look as if you are indeed a very important person, a giant among ordinary minnows, whose every thought is a gem.

Neither man can defend his outburst by claiming he was bravely voicing a truth that needed to be said. Mr Neeson really didn’t have to use the words ‘black b ****** ’ even in the context of his own indefensible rage of 40 years ago.

He must have known that, given the subtlety and nuance of the point he was trying to make, those would be the only words to resonate.

And Tusk must have known that Brexiteers would similarly cherrypick from his statement. It was inevitable they’d edit out the final words to make it look as though he was condemning all the UK’s 17million pro-Leave voters to hell in a hand cart rather than targeting those cynical politicians and business leaders who led them down this dead-end path.

Mr Neeson’s career won’t suffer because of what he said but he has torn a scab off a racial wound in the US, a country already riven by bigotry.

And Mr Tusk may congratulate himself on calling out the folly of the extreme Brexiteers, but in reality he has handed them a huge publicity coup, by uniting the hesitant with the extremists under the same flag.

The point of bravely speaking an inconvenient truth is it inconveniences hypocrisy or dishonesty. An inconvenient truth ought to be undeniable. If it fuels cynicism, empowers hypocrisy or facilitates misrepresentation then it’s not just meaningless noise.

It is a convenient fiction for the malicious, and it is dangerous.