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Why do politicians struggle to apologise?
‘Aggressive, masculine’ politics may prevent MPs from saying sorry
Perhaps Zack Polanski’s refusal to apologise to Nigel Farage last week wasn’t so surprising, given that sorry seems to be the hardest word in politics.
The leader of the Greens said it was “quite obvious” he had not done anything wrong “apart from make an inadvertent mistake” after he had agreed to a social-media collaboration on a series of photos – one of which showed a man in a t-shirt, an outline of a guillotine and the words: “We’re only making plans for Nigel”. Polanski added: “If I’d done it deliberately, I’d be apologising.”
It was the “syntax recognisable to parents of teenagers everywhere”, said The Economist. But the Greens leader’s position fits snugly into a long-standing tradition of politicians stubbornly avoiding or delaying apologies.
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For “such a short phrase, it is surprising how little ’I’m sorry’ crops up in the UK political sphere”, said Rachel Cordery on The New Statesman. Instead, politicians often “employ a common arsenal of political tools” that include “shifting the blame, denial, resigning”.
After the Suez Crisis of 1956, Anthony Eden “resigned in shame” but “never accepted responsibility for his failings”; instead, the official line given for his resignation was that it was done “on grounds of ill health”.
Today, the “first step is to deny that the problem exists” and if the story persists, politicians “acknowledge the crisis without accepting responsibility”. The “the final stage, if it gets that far”, is to “find a person or an organisation to take the blame”.
Sometimes, an apology is just not sufficient. When Nick Clegg said sorry for his U-turn on tuition fees, the “loss of trust was so complete” that most likely no amount of apologising would have been enough. However “genuine” it might have been, it ended up a “derisive meme”.
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Public figures make an apology for a scandal so “long after the event” it is made “safe in the knowledge that no blame could possibly attach to them”, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. You only need look at “Rishi Sunak for infected blood, David Cameron for Hillsborough” and “Keir Starmer for Grenfell”.
Some opt for the partial apology: Tony Blair said sorry not for the Iraq war, only for “some failures” in its planning and its “aftermath”, and the total of Liz Truss’ atonement for her “disastrous budget” was going “too far and too fast”.
But people “not only need apologies, they are likely to respect them” because there is “nothing nobler than sincere regret”. Offering one could make the public “less cynical towards those in power”.
Politicians “almost never apologise”, said Bence Hamrak on LSE, adding that a plausible reason is the “lack of electoral punishment for dishonesty”. His research found that apologies “may contradict the aggressive, masculine style of politics that voters might expect from leaders”, so saying sorry “might be interpreted as a sign of weakness by voters”.
What next?
Reform UK accused Polanski of “incitement to violence”, but the police decided to take no further action. Polling by the More in Common think-tank suggests the row has damaged Polanski and the Greens. His personal approval rating has fallen to minus 28, making him the most unpopular major party leader in the country.
“If Nigel Farage wants to apologise for all the times that he’s put other people in danger then I’ll be happy to make an apology,” said Polanski.
And therein perhaps lies the point, said Marie Le Conte in The New World. When it comes to the current political discourse “the hypocrisy and bad faith of it all are exhausting” .
Polanski “erred and showed, once again, that he probably isn’t ready for the big time quite yet”. But his lack of apology does not make him “unfit to lead, though: after all, he merely is a product of the times we live in, and these times are really quite rotten”.
Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.
