They take us for fools: The Conservatives have wreaked havoc and sorry isn't good enough

Disgraced former Prime Minister Liz Truss and former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.

Our leading politicians are a sorry lot. Don’t take my word for it, listen to them. Throughout 2022, a notable feature of our political life has been the number of politicians who have issued public apologies for their dreadful conduct in office and expected our forgiveness.

It’s the great new political idea. Just say sorry and voters will admire your candour. They take us for fools.

Matt Hancock is the most ludicrous exemplar of this political posturing. He was paid a reported £400,000 for going on to ITV’s I’m A Celebrity and ingesting a camel’s penis – the contemporary version of eating humble pie.

He thereby sought our forgiveness for breaking the Covid rules for which he was responsible as health secretary. He also ate a sheep’s vagina and a cow’s anus but he could eat his way through every cowpat in West Lothian and I wouldn’t forgive him.

Former Health Secretary Matt Hancock on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng nearly wrecked the UK economy. But apparently we shouldn’t be nasty to them as they’re really sorry now.

However, on the Matt Hancock Gastronomic Scale of Sorrow, Kwarteng doesn’t even reach a pellet of sheep poo. The former chancellor recently told the Financial Times: “People get carried away, myself included. My biggest regret is we weren’t tactically astute and we were too impatient.”

Those are his biggest regrets! Mine is that his misjudgment cost my country billions of pounds.

As an aside, it interests me that people thought he was really clever because he went to Cambridge and could speak Latin. I am president of Murray Edwards, a Cambridge University college. I admire my colleagues who can speak dead languages. I don’t get them to run my personal finances.

Liz Truss’s apology for wrecking the UK’s reputation for economic probity amounted to just a rabbit dropping of regret.

She said it wasn’t that she did anything wrong but that “we went too far and too fast”. Try that on a sheriff, Liz. “I was driving really well. It’s just that I went too far and too fast.” She would have been banned from driving and, indeed, she was forced to leave office.

Truss’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, became the first sitting prime minister to be sanctioned for law-breaking when he was fined by the Metropolitan Police for attending a birthday “gathering” during lockdown. But don’t be too hard on him because he apologised “unreservedly”. He said it hadn’t occurred to him this “gathering” was in breach of the law.

Correct me if I’m wrong but, when you give an excuse, your apology is not “unreserved”. Also, when did you last attend a “gathering?” I bet you called it a “party” and didn’t try to usurp a biblical term to justify your behaviour.

Rishi Sunak was another, also sorry for being caught out breaking Covid rules, so all three of our recent prime ministers are sorry people. That reassures one about the standards of political life.

self-employed — Chancellor Rishi Sunak during the Covid pandemic.

Maybe it is because he has erred himself that Sunak is such a forgiving bloke? He reinstated Home Secretary Suella Braverman after just six days following her apology for sending confidential government documents to a political chum.

In fact, she later admitted, after being dragged to the Commons to explain, that she had broken the rules six times by sending official documents to her personal email account. Of course, she was sorry and apologised. Of course, she was and, of course, she did.

And hey, isn’t she doing a great job now? Of the 68 million people living in the UK today, she is definitely, absolutely the best person possible to run home affairs.

The forgiven forgive each other. In politics today, you just have to say sorry to carry on regardless. Wouldn’t it be lovely if, in 2023, politicians could aspire to avoid wrongdoing in the first place? Because sometimes saying sorry is simply not enough.