Sorry — but I’m sick of politicians who apologise for everything except their own sins

LIKE a great many Englishmen of my generation, I spend half my life apologising to my fellow human beings — and that’s whether or not I’m the one who’s at fault. When people bump into me in the street, staring at their smartphones, I’m always the first to say sorry, as if I’m to blame for failing to get out of their way.

I apologise when I’m short-changed (‘I’m so sorry, but I think I gave you a twenty, not a tenner’) or served something uneatable in a restaurant (‘forgive me, but this salad seems to have rather a lot of maggots in it’).

‘Sorry to bother you … sorry I’m late … sorry I haven’t got back to you sooner … sorry about this horrible weather … sorry, but could you turn the volume down, just a bit…’ Such are the phrases that have peppered my discourse with friends and strangers since I first learned to speak.

In some cases, we serial apologisers may fairly be accused of passive aggression (‘I’m frightfully sorry, darling, it’s just that when you said turn left, I thought you actually meant turn left’). But much more often, we’re merely signalling that we want to settle this matter amicably.

Grovelling

As for those occasions when we really are the guilty party, there’s surely no more effective way of defusing the offence and smoothing ruffled feathers than issuing a prompt and suitably grovelling apology.

True, this does involve a small sacrifice of pride. However, whatever folk may say about sorry being the hardest word, in my experience it’s pretty easy — and very easy indeed, compared with the alternative of allowing ill-feeling to fester and grow into a blazing row.

Which brings me to one of the enduring mysteries of our age: why do politicians, in particular, find it so terribly hard to apologise when they’ve said or done something wrong? Of course, they’re happy to grovel like anything over offences that cannot conceivably be said to be their fault.

Only this week, Home Secretary Theresa May was reported to have apologised for the way her department treated Britain’s first policewoman, who was appointed exactly 100 years ago this month.

In a speech at the British Library in London, she lamented that back in 1915 — when women were not considered ‘proper persons’ to sit on juries or vote — the Home Office had resisted giving Edith Smith full powers of arrest.

(I note, by the way, that the toughlooking WPC Smith came from Grantham in Lincolnshire, birthplace of Margaret Thatcher. Is there something in the town’s air that fosters formidable female firsts?)

‘A century ago, policing really was a man’s world,’ said Mrs May. ‘I am sorry to say that my own department was among the first to challenge the recruitment of female police officers … It makes you wonder what those officials would say to having a female Home Secretary!’

All right, it may be stretching a point to describe this as an apology. After all, ‘I’m sorry to say’ is not quite the same thing as saying ‘I’m sorry’. But in expressing regret over the sins of our ancestors, while drawing a veil over her own (how are you getting on with cutting migration to the tens of thousands by 2020, Mrs May?), the Home Secretary is following what is now a firmly established political trend.

Of course, Tony Blair set the ball rolling. No sooner had he come to power 1997 than he expressed profound remorse for Britain’s failure to do more during the Irish potato famine in the 1840s (he didn’t mention that by standards of the time, the Tory and Liberal governments tried a great deal harder to relieve the suffering than they’re given credit for).

He was still at it nine years later, this time beating his breast and voicing ‘deep sorrow’ over Britain’s role in the slave trade — never mind that our country’s most remarkable role in that evil trade was to lead the world in abolishing it.

But when it came to his own egregious sins — whether corrupting the civil service, taking a £1 million bung to exempt F1 from restrictions on tobacco advertising, inflating school exam grades, taking a wrecking-ball to the constitution and the Union or leading us into a catastrophic war in Iraq on a monstrous lie — he just couldn’t bring himself to spit out the word ‘sorry’.

Humblest

The nearest Mr Blair got to it was at the Chilcot Inquiry when, almost choking on the words, he finally managed to express the non-apology apology: ‘I regret deeply and profoundly the loss of life.’

Well, yes, Tony, everyone does. But isn’t there something you ought to add?

Dear old Gordon Brown wasn’t much better, offering his humblest apologies for the ‘appalling’ way the Bletchley Park codebreaker and computing pioneer Alan Turing was treated for being gay. Turing was convicted of gross indecency in 1952, shortly after Gordon’s first birthday. Unless Mr Brown was even more precocious than we’ve been led to believe, I think we can fairly absolve him of any involvement.

As for the economic meltdown of 2008 and legacy of debt that looks like hanging over us for ever, those are different matters. But I don’t recall a peep of apology from the former Chancellor and Prime Minister, who kept telling us he’d abolished boom and bust.

And now his successor at Number 10 is at it, too. Breast-beating came easily to David Cameron in 2011 when he apologised during a visit to Pakistan for Britain’s imperial past. Asked by students about Kashmir’s dispute with India, he said: ‘As with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place.’

But when he says or does something crass, he just can’t bring himself to say sorry. No fewer than 12 times during Wednesday’s Syria debate, he was invited to apologise for his offensive remark the night before, when he warned Tory MPs not to vote alongside ‘Jeremy Corbyn and a bunch of terrorist sympathisers’.

Momentous

Now, I’m not going to defend the dozen anti-bombing MPs who kept pestering him to withdraw the remark, as if their hurt feelings mattered more than the momentous subject of the debate.

I also recognise it’s true that one or two of the people in Mr Corbyn’s circle — most notably Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell (himself a master practitioner of the non-apology apology) — have shown strong signs of sympathy with terrorists. Indeed, since I also have reservations about the Syrian campaign, I’m not a bit happy to find myself in Corbyn’s camp.

But it simply baffles me that the Prime Minister felt unable to say: ‘Look, I chose my words badly and I’m sorry.’

True, he came close to it, by saying there would be ‘honour’ in voting for either side. But that single word ‘sorry’ would have shut up the whingers and made him look a more reasonable and likeable man. As it is, he came across as too proud to admit to any human weakness, let alone culpable guilt.

On this one point, if no other, I would advise him to take a leaf from the book of his lifelong rival and would-be successor, Boris Johnson. Say what you like about the London Mayor (and you may say he has a lot to be sorry about), but he has elevated apologising to an art form.

Famously, he toured Liverpool to say sorry, over and over again, for an editorial in the magazine he then edited, accusing the city of ‘wallowing in victimhood’.

But he was at his grovelling best when Papua New Guinea’s High Commissioner in London took exception to a piece he wrote, describing Tory and Labour infighting as ‘Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing’.

‘I meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea,’ he assured the country’s representative Jean L. Kekedo, ‘who I’m sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity like the rest of us …

‘I am happy to add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology.’

I’m not suggesting politicians should go to my own extremes of saying sorry almost every time I open my mouth. But wouldn’t it earn them a heap of goodwill if, just occasionally, one or two more of them tried it?