Who’s really sorry now, then?

POLITICIANS are never going to be the most popular of people.

It’s not a line of work you enter to make friends, I suppose, or at least not with the public.

Whatever you do, you’re going to irritate people. “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

Abraham Lincoln said that, and look how things turned out for him.

But of all the annoying things politicians do, there’s one that irritates me above all others – a bad apology.

Ted Cruz, the American senator and one-time presidential hopeful issued a classic of the genre recently. He was caught taking a holiday to Mexico, at a time of crisis in his home state, Texas.

Things were pretty bad back home – huge power outages left millions of people without heat or light for days after severe storms. Water treatment plants shut down, so millions more people had no running water, and were left having to boil water without any power to do so.

By anyone’s definition, it was a crisis, and a senator’s job in a time like that is a significant one.

Instead – faced with power shortages himself – he decided a family holiday to Cancun was in order. Unfortunately for him, he was caught at the airport, and returned home with his tail between his legs shortly afterwards.

Now most ordinary people in this situation would have apologised – you’ve been caught red handed doing something it is obvious to all you shouldn’t have done.

Instead, he issued a classic “I’m sorry you feel like that”.

He said: “In hindsight, if I had understood how it would be perceived, the reaction people would have, obviously I wouldn’t have done it.”

Firstly, that’s barely an apology. Secondly, he’s saying in hindsight he wouldn’t have done it because it made him look bad. It’s hardly “I’m sorry I did something wrong”, is it?

Priti Patel made another howler in the early days of the pandemic. When hospital staff didn’t have enough PPE, and people in care homes were literally wearing bin bags with holes cut in them, she said: “I’m sorry if people feel there isn’t enough PPE.”

Mistakes happen, in politics and all walks of life. No-one gets through life mistake free and people understand that.

It’s seldom the mistake itself that matters in the long run, but how you deal with it afterwards.

Sticking both hands in the air and making a good and proper apology will defuse the situation, but a bad apology is often worse than no apology at all.