A SORRY BUSINESS

What is it with this incessant clamour for Gordon Brown to say “sorry” for some nebulously all-embracing omission he is claimed by his political opponents to have made while Chancellor of the Exchequer? A member of the audience on this week’s Any Questions? asked “What part of the word ‘sorry’ does the Prime Minister not understand?” I would counter: “What part of that question could not be deemed snide and which opposition party planted it?”

I thought Westminster was united in deploring what is known as “gesture politics” but evidently, as with so many other matters, if it suits then it serves. It has served to the extent that Mr Brown has been slow to pre-empt the clamour and shifty in dealing with it when it is raised. “When” he might ask in reply “may we expect the Tories to apologise for the poll tax? Isn’t it rather long overdue for the Liberals to say sorry for their suicidal divisions over free trade in the early 1930s?”

Being sorry signifies in personal relationships but not on the public stage. On Monday, it was revealed that the Vale of Glamorgan council had placed in foster care a teenager with a five-year history of child abuse. The couple who took him on were not apprised of the teenager’s proclivities, even though they had two young children of their own. The council has admitted “a serious error of judgment” and expressed its “deep regret” for the “distress and harm caused to the family”. For the nine year-old daughter who has been sexually assaulted and the toddler-age son who was anally raped, I doubt that an apology, however “deep”, suffices. I hope that the family will be suing the council for several million pounds. In such a case, the social services officers on the council payroll are surely far more at fault than those excoriated over several weeks by the press and driven from their posts in Haringey in the so-called Baby P affair.

This requirement for public figures to “put their hands up” – one hand used to be thought sufficient – is a relatively new phenomenon but frequently refers to events of long ago. Pope John Paul II, a great one for rhetorical gestures, apologised for the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and “sins and accidents of omission” against non-Catholic Christians, women and ethnic groups. Why? How does it put anything right if the US President apologises for the extermination of the native Americans: “Red Indians”, as they were called when they still constituted a force in the land, even though named in an ideologically unacceptable manner? What good does it do if the Emperor of Japan apologises for his country’s part in World War II? What manner of fence is mended if the Queen says sorry to the peoples of various countries that Britain plundered and dominated during the building of the Empire?

All well and good if reparations are made. Military spokesmen routinely express their condolences to the relatives of personnel killed by that fearful failure of intelligence known by the horrible euphemism of “friendly fire”. We might think them sincere if they could also report that those families were to receive handsome payments to buttress them against the loss of the breadwinner; that the officer commanding the exercise that led to the deaths had been stripped of his rank; that new strategies were already in place to ensure that such horrors never recur. This they do not do. Who thinks that saying "sorry" is enough? Only those who elect to say it, especially when (as often) that "sorry" anyway sticks in the craw.

But many expressions of regret and apology, like similar ones of welcome and gratitude, are no more than scripted and calculated pieces of public relations waffle. Why should one place any faith in a printed or recorded gesture: “welcome to our website”, “thank you for not smoking”, “we’re sorry to keep you on hold – all our agents are dealing with other customers at present”? What good are these statements? Those who laid them down in the first place have no knowledge of the circumstances of their use. How much mileage is there in my arguing that a website that has refused to recognise my legitimate password or disputes my correct credit card details is in no discernible way making me welcome and is therefore liable under the Trades Descriptions Act?

Nowhere is the apology – routine, anonymous and unanswerable – more prevalent than on Britain’s railways. Older readers who foreswore public transport long ago may be unaware that live announcements, one of the thrills of visiting a big terminus in a ’50s childhood (“Attention, please!”), are a thing of the past. On platform PA systems today, recorded phrases are segued by computer so that details of particular journeys and their fates are constructed like Lego buildings from given materials.

Three of these recorded phrases go as follows: “I am sorry”, “I am very sorry” and “I am extremely sorry”. According to my own observations while attempting to fill the yawning wait as my train slides further and further down the timetable, these formulations are played in conjunction with the phrase “for the delay”, followed by details of the particular missing train. The extent of delay is graduated and seems to comprise, respectively, up to ten minutes, between ten and twenty, thereafter anything over twenty minutes. It may amuse the bored customer to track how accurately timed is the switchover from “sorry” to “very sorry” to “extremely sorry”.

What is not in doubt, however, is that nobody associated with the network is experiencing actual regret on our behalf. To the (usually invisible) station staff, the workings of the trains seem as impenetrable a mystery as they are to us. The distinction between them and us is that, to them, it is a matter of profound indifference. Perhaps it is only the drone operating the computer program who is even aware that there is a delay and that it has been acknowledged publicly at any level of the railway operation. So, is this recorded apology of any value? Not to me.

How different it is on the train itself. There one is treated to a live running commentary by someone termed ‘the train manager’, giving more information than even a congenital train spotter might desire. These commentaries, evidently issued as scripts from head office, use curious constructs about “arriving into the next station stop” and “on behalf of myself and the on-board crew”. Some time thereafter comes a bulletin from the buffet car, lovingly listing all today’s items of an allegedly comestible nature. Needless to say, the rather good full silver service cuisine served without fanfare on trains in my childhood (not least the legendary British Railways breakfast) has long been swept away, to be replaced by pre-packaged, under-microwaved bacon rolls and other such undesirable matter. Nothing, you would think, for a public service announcement to crow about.

If not already scuppered by a choral symphony of shouting into mobile phones, the tinny buzz of personal stereos and the full-volume persistence of toddlers’ observations (one could have escaped all this in the old compartmentalised carriages), any chance of catching a doze or reading a book is thwarted by the eagerness with which every detail of the journey’s geographic and gastronomic progress must be imparted after every ‘station stop’ has been ‘arrived into’, along with urgings to read the safety drill as if we’re all virgin (as against Virgin) travellers. If this is not too much information, I don’t know what is.

All such affectless public postures are the spawn of the marketing culture that we have enthusiastically embraced for a century and more. A prime ministerial apology is only of import if it is in some sense “saleable”: “look,” the government can say, “our man is big enough to admit when he is wrong and move on”; “look,” the opposition will be able to smirk, “we’ve got him to climb down which only shows him to be spineless”. I don’t want the Prime Minister to be diverted by fruitless considerations of what meaningless form of words will play best with the electorate while surrendering nothing to those who would bring him down. I want him to devote himself to the considerably more urgent business of steering the nation through the present economic mess.