over lunch, was splashed on the front page of a national newspaper and from there quickly accelerated into a national media storm. The Conservative peer had been secretly recorded saying that, despite the recession, most people had never had it so good. Before the sun had set, David Cameron’s enterprise tsar was out on his ear.
Of course, corporate negligence and political incompetence need to be exposed. Hypocrisy and humbug are fair game. But the climate of fear for those in public life, the terror of being caught with your trousers down, has seen an increasingly defensive response to accident and error. That, in turn, has resulted in a more distrustful attitude from the general public, which encourages the press to search out stories that play to that anxiety. It can look like a market dealing in suspicion and dread.
The tactics to deal with accident and error have become more sophisticated. Take the apology: once an ignominious admission of fault, it has become a vehicle for neutralising blame and parading humility. Greg Dyke, when Director-General of the BBC, realised that a new electronic expenses system he’d introduced was an unmitigated disaster. It was time to eat humble pie. ‘I sent out an email to everyone saying, I’m sorry, we got it wrong,’ he later explained. ‘Management generally have a terrible habit of failing to admit when they’ve made a mistake. We all mess up. If you admit it, everyone likes you.’
Such candour may seem refreshing when public figures are increasingly guarded about admitting their shortcomings. But contemporary apologies constructed with the help of PR advisors have their roots in the public acts of penance once demanded of wayward public figures by the church. After his knights had murdered Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, for example, Henry II eventually accepted the Pope’s order for contrition. In a highly theatrical act of atonement, the king walked barefoot to the crime scene, thrust his head and shoulders into one of the openings of Saint Thomas’s tomb, and allowed himself to be flogged by monks and prelates.
These days, political apology has become such a feature of contemporary governance that social researchers have begun cataloguing hundreds of examples. Tony Blair features prominently in the archives of regret. In 2005, he barely opened his mouth without apologising for something or other. In that one year he said sorry to the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, Irish men and women wrongfully convicted of IRA pub bombings years earlier; he formally apologised to British survivors of Hurricane Katrina for a disorganised response from the Foreign Office; he made a public apology to Walter Wolfgang, a Labour activist expelled from his party conference for heckling; he apologised in advance to the people of Auchterarder in Perthshire for the disruption and inconvenience of hosting the G8 summit there. On other occasions, Tony Blair said sorry for the Irish potato famine and the slave trade.
He was a political leader who recognised there was capital in contrition. But would he, could he say sorry for the one decision of his political career for which many of his own supporters demanded an apology — the invasion of Iraq? As Mr Blair prepared to address party delegates in Brighton in 2004, his spin doctors briefed the press that his speech would include a statement of regret. When it came to it, however, it was far from the admission of guilt that his critics wanted. ‘The evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong,’ he said. ‘I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can’t, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.’
The writer and commentator Allan Massie thought the media had been hoodwinked and the public short- changed. ‘When we demand apologies from a politician, we are not looking for an act of healing as a prelude to reconciliation, though we may persuade ourselves that this is what we are doing,’ he wrote. ‘Instead we are hoping to see him abase himself. There is in reality for the politician only one satisfactory form of apology, and it is resignation.’
Apologies may imply swallowed pride, painful humiliation and negative consequences. But in the media age they have become a first line of defence in reducing the damage from some highly public error.
Analysis suggests there are three keys to their successful use: a statement of regret; an admission of responsibility; an offer to remedy the situation. When President Bill Clinton went on US television to apologise for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, he offered a model of how to do it.
‘I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.’
‘I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. And that is why I am speaking to you tonight.’
‘I must put it right, and I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so.’
Such is the power of the apology that the British justice system is increasingly incorporating it in its response to crime. Restorative justice is popular with legislators because it is cheap and appears effective: studies suggest it can cut reoffending by a quarter and reduce stress in those affected. Most victims of youth crime now accept the chance to meet the perpetrator face-to-face for a structured meeting that usually follows the classic apology script: an admission of guilt; a statement of regret; a discussion of how to repair the harm caused and prevent it from happening again.
It is, of course, entirely sensible for institutions to try to learn from error. The phrases ‘something must be done’ and ‘it must never happen again’ routinely echo around when fault or failure are exposed. But the environment of rolling news, what my BBC colleague Nik Gowing described as ‘the tyranny of real time and the tyranny of the timeline’, requires an immediate and vigorous response to mistakes.
Within hours of some revelation one can guarantee there will be calls for urgent structural and systemic reform. Woe betide anyone who suggests a sense of perspective or a time for reflection are needed: such calls are likely to be condemned as complacency or callousness. Indeed, in the febrile atmosphere that accompanies public outrage, the voice of calm can also end up being drowned in the duck pond by the angry mob.
Policy shaped by panic almost always turns out to be a bad idea. Systems hurriedly assembled as a response to headlines can prove to be blunt and inefficient tools, unnecessary or counterproductive. Many institutions are hampered by the bureaucratic legacy of some long-forgotten scandal that demanded something be done. Britain’s Vetting and Barring Scheme is a child of just such a moral panic: a textbook case of how media storm and political expediency combine to demand reform that later appears disproportionate or simply daft.
The saga began in the summer of 2002. That August, like every August, news desks were searching around for stories to fill their papers and bulletins. With Parliament on holiday and little else happening, an appalling child abduction story from Cambridgeshire dominated the front pages. The Soham murders became a national talking point and when it emerged that the killer, school caretaker Ian Huntley, had previously been investigated for sexual offences, the question of responsibility extended from the criminal to the political sphere. Would any blame for the deaths of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman be pinned on the government? Political opponents were circling. Ministers had to respond, and respond quickly.
The Home Secretary David Blunkett bought time in the traditional manner: he announced an inquiry. The man he chose to lead it was Sir Michael Bichard, a Whitehall mandarin whose crisis management skills had impressed Mr Blunkett as Education Secretary five years earlier. At that time, according to press reports, details of Mr Blunkett’s complicated love life were threatening to spill out into the public arena and Sir Michael had been instrumental in ensuring tempers were calmed and details hushed.
Mr Blunkett hoped that the Bichard inquiry into Soham would both satisfy the demand that lessons must be learned and help shift any blame away from the department. Sir Michael delivered. He severely criticised the chief constable of Humberside, David Westwood, for not keeping records of child abuse allegations concerning Ian Huntley, and demanded the officer take personal responsibility for ‘very serious failings’. The scandal had its fall guy and, despite support from his local police authority, David Blunkett used new executive powers to order Mr Westwood’s suspension. The chief constable subsequently took early retirement.
Sir Michael’s report, though, went much further, recommending the creation of a huge vetting system requiring those who wish to work with children or vulnerable adults to be registered. The government had little option but to accept the idea — rejecting it would have left ministers potentially open to blame for every case of child abuse thereafter. Lawyers and legislators spent years working out how this new register might work, eventually announcing a system that was likely to see one in four of all adults being vetted by the state. An attempt to ensure an error could never happen again had resulted in the development of a giant, expensive and intrusive bureaucracy that many argued would actually damage the relationship between adults and young people.
Within weeks of taking office in 2010, the new Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May announced that the registration scheme would be scrapped, the vetting process scaled back and ‘common sense’ would be used to protect children and vulnerable adults. There was barely a murmur of opposition.
Public life is, of course, riddled with misjudgement and failure. It is quite right that mistakes are identified and, where necessary, acted upon to reduce future harm. Health and safety systems backed by inspection regimes
