The hardest word for Blair is "sorry"

Comment Monday September 29, 2003
The Guardian UK
The hardest word

As Tony Blair sticks doggedly to his guns despite calls for an apology over Iraq, Simon Jeffery discovers a precedent among politicians for choking on the 's' word/

It would be a strange world if politicians apologised to their electorates. As men and women elected to exercise good judgement on our behalf, it would be a poor career move to admit to a mistake. A child can say "Sorry, I didn't mean to ..." (put a football through a window, give laxative to the dog, etc) but fast-forward forty or fifty years, turn them into to a minister, and it becomes rather more difficult.
There is a certain trade-off to be made in relation to candour, integrity and trust - and various other attributes the Blair leadership is frequently said to lack - but there is only so far you can take this. The prime minister has refused to apologise over the Iraq war, saying he does not think "we've got anything to apologise for as a country", and his reasoning is probably quite clear. He would not regain trust by apologising for the war, but rather lose his job. He may also sincerely believe that he has nothing to apologise for.

That not to say that politicians, or other high profile public figures, never say sorry. The US evangelist, Rev Billy Graham, really had no choice when 30-year-old tape recordings of his White House conversations with Richard Nixon were released last year and revealed blatant anti-semitism. He complained that Jews had a "stranglehold" on America and said that a second Nixon administration "might be able to do something" about it. He soon apologised, saying that "racial prejudice, anti-semitism or hatred of anyone with different beliefs" had no place in the human mind or heart.

Nixon, however, never quite managed it. In his resignation speech he expressed regret for "injuries that may have been done in the course of the events" but suggested that he never meant any harm. "I would say only that if some of my judgements were wrong, and some were wrong, they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the nation," he said. Covering up the robbery of documents from a Democratic campaign office at the Watergate hotel was, it seems, in the interest of the nation on that particular occasion.

In an earlier speech, when he was running for vice president in 1952, Nixon denied embezzling political donations other than a "little cocker spaniel dog in a crate" called Checkers. "And you know," he told opponents who were baying for his blood over very serious charges, "the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it".

One of Nixon's more colourful successors, Bill Clinton, admitted a more damaging failing than a soft spot for freebie dogs when he conceded a "not appropriate" relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Over a few weeks in August and September 1998 he moved from saying he must "take responsibility" for his actions to admitting to a bad mistake he was "sorry about". But it was never really clear whether he was apologising for the affair or his repeated denials of it. It was, after all, not so many months earlier he had declared that "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky", in what was perhaps the most iconic lie of the 1990s.

Another category of the political apology concerns the institution that the politician represents rather than the individual. This is how the pope came to apologise for the pogroms against the Jews, the excesses of the crusades and the Inquisition, while Tony Blair similarly apologised for the Irish potato famine of the 1840s.

The exact wording used tends to be of supreme importance in these cases, treading a fine line between doing what sounds like the decent thing and accepting culpability.

The Australian prime minister, John Howard, would only go as far as to express regret for the treatment of the country's Aboriginal population, and when Mr Clinton said slavery was wrong while on a tour of Africa he was careful to talk about the actions of "European Americans" to put some distance between the United States and what happened in "the time before we were even a nation". He was not suggesting, as many African-Americans have demanded, that the US should pay reparations to the descendants of its slaves. Nor was he making an explicit apology.

There was a time when Mr Blair too admitted to mistakes other than historical ones. At the 2000 Labour conference when, a little like today, his leadership appeared to be under threat and his vote-winning shine tarnished, the prime minister sweated profusely as he conceded that the government had made mistakes over the Millennium Dome and a paltry rise in state pensions. But in a key passage he said that "it's an irresponsible government that fails to choose." Whether on foreign policy, foundation hospitals or tuition fees, Mr Blair has now made his choices. That leaves very little room for apologies.