Is a crap apology worse than no apology at all? Gregg Wallace, until Friday a strong contender for the worst public apology of the year, is not of course unusual in his struggle to act convincingly remorseful. Justin Welby, the outgoing archbishop of Canterbury – despite being one of the great institutional apologisers of all time – now seems likely to take the British title; internationally the clear winner is South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol. Even Wallace could tell him that when you’ve carelessly imposed martial law, it’s important to apologise to everyone, not just “the people who were very surprised”.
Plainly, there are differences in style. The Wallace apology, the only one the 60-year-old has yet supplied for insulting “middle-class women of a certain age”, not only made the elementary mistake of apologising “for any offence that I caused” – as if only the pathologically over-sensitive could conceivably have objected – but compounded it, as apology novices are apt to do, with a note about his own suffering, or “poor headspace”.
And yet, as shabbily as Wallace’s starter grovel has come across, it was, however grudging and wretched, unmistakably an apology. Repentance-wise, it initially put him some way ahead of the archbishop of Canterbury, who last week treated the House of Lords to a marginally more spiritual version of Boris Johnson’s parting “them’s the breaks”. “The reality is,” Welby said, “that there comes a time, if you are technically leading a particular institution or area of responsibility, where the shame of what has gone wrong, whether one is personally responsible or not, must require a head to roll.”
The suggestion of a noble sacrifice by an innocent man with no connection with whatever had “gone wrong” was received so contemptuously that the archbishop finally decided to apply his advanced contrition skills, so fluent in relation to slavery and other historic offences, to himself. “I would like to apologise wholeheartedly for the hurt that my speech has caused.”
As much as the addition of sincerest regret improved his second version, it risks being as convincing to a public bombarded with apologies as, say, the British Museum’s repentance earlier in the year after it tweeted: “Girlies, if you’re single and looking for a man, this is your sign to go to the British Museum’s new exhibition on the Roman Army and walk around looking confused.” A convoluted explanation still failed to account, fully, for the use of “girlies”. Public apologies, even adequately worded, may simply make an audience wonder what possessed the offender in the first place.
But still, as Welby and Wallace remind us, they persist. The trend for public apologies for historic mistakes, together with the number of official inquiries, has, over and above the routine supply of sexism, racism and other misspeaking, made 2024 exceptionally competitive for anyone in contention for the title of worst apologiser. The Olympics alone were a little festival of regret, from a sports commentator’s unwise “if” apology (for talking about female swimmers “hanging around, doing their makeup”) to the excessive French grovel for inadvertently offending people who’d mistaken a scene of bacchanalia for the Last Supper.
Wallace’s regrets had barely landed before they were overtaken by a tweet from the newsreader Clive Myrie. He finds he somehow omitted to declare to the BBC at least £145,000 earnings for the sort of professional engagements with which some talent still augment their BBC salaries that may be less than £400,000 a year: “An apology – I’ve had several administrative issues, and I didn’t fill out the correct paperwork for some of my external public events, so they haven’t been published until now.”
In an increasingly apology-saturated market, Myrie shows it’s possible for an apathetic offering, as replies to his tweet suggest, to make things worse. The same applied to a semi-apologetic tweet from the actor Hugh Bonneville, which merely added a delusional dimension to earlier comments disrespectful to children’s authors. “Trust me,” he assured these competitors, “I am putting my heart and soul into the project.” If there’s a next time, he might think about emulating a fellow offender in the children’s book category, Jamie Oliver, who volunteered for re-education after offending Indigenous Australians. A convincing apology, research suggests, comes at some cost to the apologiser, ideally with an offer of reparations. While finding a willing educator could, in a Wallace kind of case, be a challenge, the donation of his last MasterChef fee to Women’s Aid would have to have been more promising than his “headspace”.
That so many failed mortifications are scripted by professionals or lawyers only underlines the case for deploying them, if at all, with caution. A tweeted apology on behalf of the Tory donor Frank Hester, for a racist remark about Diane Abbott, might have triumphed in this year’s brazenly unconvincing category (“He wishes to make it clear that he regards racism as a poison”), were it not for the scripted mournfulness with which Post Office executives have been prefacing their long-delayed regrets for being in their jobs when innocent post office operators were being persecuted, fined and imprisoned.
Adopting a “sorry for your suffering” format also favoured by Mark Zuckerberg, Paula Vennells prefaced her evidence in May with the kind of profound regrets that could have been uttered by absolutely anyone, anywhere: “I would just like to say, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do this in person, how sorry I am for all the subpostmasters and their families and others who have suffered as a result of all the matters that the inquiry has been looking into for so long.” Alan Bates commented: “These are just words.”
By July, the former chair of the Post Office, Tim Parker, had concluded that people were “sick and tired” of apologies. And maybe, if the testimony of Post Office management has been fatal to the ritual apology, that’s the one thing we need not hold against them.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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