Rona Dougall: Sorry but an apology with no genuine contrition really means nothing at all

Another quiet week in politics then? There are roller-coasters complaining about all the ups and downs. Who needs soap operas when Westminster is providing the drama?

Liz Truss’s days were already numbered when she was forced to say sorry at the beginning of the week. After weeks of blaming the anti-growth coalition, the war in Ukraine and probably Boris Johnson’s dog for the utter chaos she caused in a month and a half, the former Prime Minister finally uttered the S word.

Truss said she was sorry for going “too far and too fast” with her mini budget; although if that was a mini, I’d hate to see the full-fat version to snap the country out of the doldrums.

It was never going to be enough to save her, but it looked like every word had to be dragged kicking and screaming from her mouth. Sometimes sorry really is the hardest word.

There seems to have been a lot of contrition going around. Another big-name apologiser last week was Gavin and Stacey star turned US hotshot James Corden, who grovelled profusely to the owner of an iconic restaurant in New York after being accused of rudeness to the serving staff.

The Late Late Show host apparently kicked off after finding a hair in his food and on another occasion when his wife was given the wrong meal. Keith McNally from Balthazar in Soho said Corden was a hugely-gifted comedian but “a tiny cretin of a man” after he went ballistic. Hmm, I don’t know how happy I’d be if I found a hair in my dinner but being a huge celebrity Corden should have realised this would come back to bite him.

After the owner named and shamed Cordon on social media, the star ate a big slice of humble pie and called him to apologise and now his ban from the restaurant has been lifted. But will he want to go back after all that?

Apologising can be cathartic and healing. And sometimes it can lead to more trouble. Look at what happened to the former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg when he tried to make amends for doing a u-turn on scrapping student tuition fees. His party political broadcast was met with derision and praise, but mostly derision. People thought he was just trying to boost the party’s waning popularity.

A disaster for the Lib Dems but one bright spot in the whole debacle was the spoof remix of his words called the “Nick Clegg Apology Song”, still available on a YouTube near you.

To apologise though is to accept responsibility. And the apology issued by the chief executive at the NHS Trust in Kent on Wednesday must have felt like far too little far too late for the parents of the babies who died as a result of what was found to be substandard care.

An independent report found that the children’s deaths could have been avoided but that there was a climate of bullying and cliquey behaviour among some midwives, with some obstetricians having “challenging personalities, big egos, huge egos”. Staff were also disrespectful to women and disparaging about the capabilities of colleagues.

No one ever owned up to making mistakes so nothing changed. And tragically this had been going on since 2009. All those years when the senseless deaths of precious babies could have been avoided. It’s a tragedy. A fascinating study into hospitals in America where litigation is rife found that when doctors owned up to mistakes and worked with patients after medical errors occurred, they actually avoided lawsuits.

But the point of this approach, the report’s authors said, was not to drop malpractice costs, but to improve patient safety.

You can only learn from mistakes and improve performance if you actually admit to the mistakes in the first place. But we are only human and no one likes to admit to mucking up. For most jobs, it doesn’t matter.

If things don’t go according to plan in my role for instance, I’ll look a total fool but it’s not the end of the world.

Although during Covid when I had to do my own make up, it sometimes felt like it.