Andrew Vine: The hardest word in a culture with no idea of honour

It is “sorry”. This simple, yet immensely powerful, word sticks in the throats of too many politicians or those who hold public office, refusing to emerge even when society clamours for its utterance.

They squirm out of its way, avoid it at all costs and tie themselves in linguistic knots in search of an alternative. Instead of being “sorry”, they “have regrets”, or “upon reflection they would have acted differently” or are “saddened that their actions resulted in harm”.

But rarely, very rarely, do they simply say sorry.

It’s perfectly possible that when Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote their song, Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word, getting on for 40 years ago, they never imagined that its title would develop into shorthand for a culture of failing to apologise, which often enough goes hand-in-hand with an apparent reluctance or even refusal to accept responsibility.

The painfully protracted refusal to resign by the South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner, Shaun Wright, over the Rotherham child abuse scandal was an extreme example of this disturbing culture.

Even in the face of calls for him to go by the Prime Minister, the leader of Labour – the party on whose ticket he was elected – and even his own Police and Crime Panel, he tried to ride out the storms of protest.

The S-word did not feature in his resignation statement that finally came after he hung on to office for three weeks following the publication of the damning report into widespread abuse spanning the period when he was the head of children’s services at Rotherham Council.

If “sorry” is not even uttered in the face of such withering criticism, it says much about a mindset that has taken root in public life, and tainted it, to the detriment of the trust that the public is prepared to place in those it elects.

And the culture of failing to apologise or wriggling out of responsibility is a major factor in the deterioration of relations between those who govern and the electorate that gives them the mandate to do so.

Very occasionally, there are examples of politicians who look their critics straight in the eye and say sorry. The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, did just that when he apologised for his U-turn on student fees.

Doubtless he had one eye on trying to limit electoral damage to his party, but even so, it was an honest act by an honourable man troubled by having to go back on his word, and Mr Clegg did not deserve the ridicule heaped upon him, to the extent of his words being set to music and posted on YouTube.

And there’s another word too rarely heard that is bound up with the unwillingness to say sorry. Honourable. The integrity of our public life depends upon it, because those who get it wrong should not have to be dragged kicking and screaming from office, but be honourable enough to shoulder the blame and bow out.

Our politics is that much poorer and grubbier for a decline in honourable behaviour, which only a couple of generations ago was still a powerful influence.

Think of the spring of 1982 and the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina. The then Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, resigned immediately and apologised for failing to foresee and prevent what had happened, despite the protestations of his colleagues.

To him, it was a simple matter of honour because he felt he had let his country down.

That culture of honour, and its accompanying willingness to say sorry, has been supplanted by something shadier and shabbier, a sense of “Let’s see how this plays out. Let’s see if it blows over in a couple of days”. But there is another motive at work. It is the pernicious influence of spin that has become embedded in public life since the New Labour landslide of 1997. Every political party has embraced spin since then, and it has seeped from national politics into virtually every aspect of the dialogue between the electorate and those who hold office.

The tactics of first resort are to rebut and try to push a positive viewpoint of the unpalatable or downright shameful. As a formula for infuriating and alienating a public impatient at being taken for fools, it could hardly be bettered.

Leaving aside the constitutional issues raised by last week’s referendum on Scottish independence, one unarguable fact emerged from the debate in the weeks before the poll – that a substantial section of the electorate has lost faith in a professional political class that it suspects fails to listen to concerns, let alone address them.

The ideal starting point for rebuilding a relationship based on trust would be if that political class learned once more how to behave honourably and say sorry when it gets things wrong.