I Make No Apology For...

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Hello and welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Amazon Yunchi in a studio in London.

And it's Helen Lewis sat opposite him.

Wow.

Sitting opposite him, I will get an email from my mother.

Frustrated reading.

And she will then have to issue an apology, which neatly dovetails us into this week's topic for which we make no apology whatsoever, which is apologies.

Actually, I've been to some, see a play that was relevant to this, which is Giant at the Royal Court in London, which is about Roald Dahl.

And it takes place on one afternoon after he's written a, I think you might fairly call it a strongly worded critique of Israel's actions in Lebanon.

And his publisher wants him to make an apology.

And then what he does at the end of the play is he doubles down on it.

He goes out and he says something even more offensive.

And because this was kind of the pre-cancellation era,

he gets away away with it.

But it does make me think about, should you give an insincere apology?

When you actually, when you said something and you meant it, or you did something and you're not sorry for it, should we have any expectation that people will apologise?

Well,

I think there are two things.

There is now a pressure on people if they've said the wrong word, if they've misspoken, if they've had a bit of a flap on air.

There is a lot of pressure on them to apologise.

The consequences of not doing so are immeasurable and incalculable, is the implication on the other hand there is a thing a tendency of people to make those apologies thinking well i just have to make this apology and then we're done it's like clocking off at the end of the day or signing the visitor's book you know i do this i i make a mistake i apologize and then i i do that and then i make a mistake and then i apologize and then the fact that we're pushing for these more glorified apologies that in themselves are productions in their own right especially for anyone on youtube who has to do an apology they put a lot of thought into the lighting and the framing of it.

I really enjoy that when you get influencers who've been caught doing something wrong, often something incredibly minor to outsiders, but within their own community, it's seen as terrible heresy.

And they will often film themselves crying.

Yes.

And you think, well, you've set up the camera and pointed at you, and then you thought about your dead pet from when you were seven, so you could really get going.

And then you film the kind of tear-stained, like, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.

Yes, and it becomes a kind of level of performance, which is like, you've got to get it absolutely right in that you have to look as if you are genuinely emotionally stricken by the thought of what you got wrong and are not actually pushing for an acting award at the end of it.

Yes.

Yes, insincere, sincerity is the kind of vibe here.

Do you have a favourite apology?

Because I can tell you what mine is.

Oh god.

And I think it's going to be quite hard to beat, which is Henry Kissinger, when he was asked about possible war crimes in Cambodia and Vietnam said, mistakes were quite possibly made by the administrations in which I served.

And as a reminder, he was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State during that time.

So it wasn't sort of like a passer-by.

Absolutely, yes.

And was heavily involved in the bombing of Cambodia, at least.

And I'm sure that will be unquestioned.

I think that's part of history now, but I'm looking around me.

That's fine.

If I got that wrong, Neil Ferguson, I'm going to write on you and you can apologise for it.

To the Henry Kissinger estate, I'm truly sorry.

I'm absolutely devastated.

And if any of you at home have been affected by by my apology, then I am also sorry for that, because I didn't mean my apology to be so heart-rending that it would actually traumatize listeners to this podcast.

And if I have,

then that's possibly the fault of the people behind the engineering and the sound recorders here, because I think they've transmitted it in a certain way that it heightened the kind of whine in my voice to such a pitch of intensity that it's provoked this, I'd say, unnecessary response from listeners that I had nothing to do with.

So, in some ways, you'd say that you misspoke and it was regrettable.

Yes.

There we go.

That's two of the other kind of keywords I think that has an apology.

I think on reflection, I should have just said that.

No, but what is your favorite apology?

Well, it's actually a new trend, which is the apology for the apology.

Because YouTuber Laura Lee, do you know who Laura Lee is?

I've no idea.

I'm 61.

I've no idea idea who Laura Lee is.

Is she at all related to either Baby Gronk or The Rizzler?

Aren't they in Batman?

This is when you know.

Yeah, every, yeah, this is.

Okay.

So Laura Lee.

Laura Lee,

in 2018, she had 5 million subscribers in 2018.

I don't know where she is now and how many she has now.

I just haven't been bothered to look that bit up.

I'm sorry.

No, I'm not.

But she said something that was misconstrued as being racist.

Again, I've no idea what it was and what she said.

I'm not going to quote it.

So anyway, but she then filmed herself making a very tearful apology.

So tearful intense that most of the video of her apology was her going, this is the worst, most devastating video I've ever had to do.

So she was sort of describing how difficult it was to make this video of her apologizing.

People noticed that she was wiping from her eyes stuff that wasn't there.

There were no tears as such, but the emotions were wiping.

Anyway, it was very, very tearful.

She got huge negative feedback from her followers, so that in the end she had to then issue another apology apologising for the apology, saying that she got it wrong and her tearful apology didn't represent the emotional maturity that she was now at.

There's a sort of possibility of infinite recursion there, isn't it?

It could just go on.

I think what's really powerful is saying that you got something wrong.

I remember when I first started in journalism, I was a copy editor, so it was my job to fix other people's mistakes.

And sometimes you wouldn't do that.

You'd insert a larger, worse mistake instead.

Not deliberately, I know.

No, not deliberately.

But a much older copy editor who'd been around for a while said, and I still remember this because it's a magnificent phrase that I don't think I've ever heard from anyone else since, which is, if you drop a bollock, fess up.

And that's

been my watchword ever since.

Yes, it's always the, you know, it's not the mistake, it's the cover-up, so don't do the cover-up.

You know, you've got to kind of come out with it.

Right.

I think that's what people often want when there's an apology for something in politics, is a recognition that that the wrong happened, right?

You don't want someone to cry crocodile tears pretending they're sorry for something that happened 10 years ago.

You just want to, you know, whether I'm thinking of things like whether it's Grenfell or Hillsborough or any of those kind of disasters, and that people want to know, yes,

this acknowledge that this terrible thing happened to you.

It is real.

We're not going to contest your reality.

Then beyond that, I'm not sure whether the emoting really adds anything.

No, and people can tell when it's in the form of an apology, but when you analyse the language, there is no real contrition.

so it's it's done in the passive you know i'm sorry if you were offended by my remarks that was never the intention and if you were then i can only apologize i can only apologize you know i've got no alternative but to apologize what else am i going to do in this situation but fundamentally it's your fault for finding offense that i didn't intend that's the kind of implication but now i think there's the much more foolsome I mean we had Justin Welby the other week apologizing but it was very personal the shame that you know, the really

taking contrition to

a religious level in a way.

But I think also people sometimes read that as being, and I'm not saying it wasn't genuinely felt in his case, but it reads it as you've made it about you and how sad you are.

And you think, well, hang a minute, you weren't the one who was abused as a child.

So I don't actually, in this case, really need to hear a lot about your feelings.

I also wonder whether or not we're going through a sort of course correction now, where there was a kind of over-apology time, particularly when, you know, in the heydays of social media, where it was, you know, people were kind of witch-hunted, really, and there was a kind of suddenly feel like, this is amazing, we can hold brands to account, and suddenly some tea bag maker is going to have to apologise to us.

And now, actually, there's a kind of mood in the air of, I'm not going to apologise.

Yeah.

And actually, people thinking that the apology sort of made it worse.

So why bother?

Well, that's recently Boris Johnson, the writer.

I'm not going to call him the politician.

The writer, Boris Johnson, because it was about his book, his autobiography that came out.

While publicising, he now kind of apologised for his apologies over Partygate and COVID, saying that that was his biggest mistake.

He called it a mistake to issue, quote, a general grovelling blanket apology for what had happened, because he said that then led to people thinking he was apologising for everything, including stuff that then emerged after the apology.

But I'm drawn to that phrase.

So if you think of it as a general grovelling blanket apology, was that what was going through your mind at the time when you were making it?

That sense of

people now deciding that, you know, fighting back and saying, no, I'm not going to apologise.

I mean, you're getting that a lot at the moment from Kirstama, Rachel Reeves, and so on, who start everything now.

When they're faced with a criticism of, you know, national insurance, small businesses being affected, you know, heating bills and the pensioners.

And

they always start with, well, I make no apology for.

And then the thing they say, I make no apology for, the thing that it's for, is for something that nobody would ever ask them to apologise for.

I make no apology for wanting to rewrite the economy.

Yes, I make no apology for caring about fiscal discipline.

I make no apology for taking tough decisions, to go back to a previous episode, that will benefit Britain.

And you go, well, I don't think anyone thinks you should.

I make no apology for wanting to put more money into the NHS.

No one's asking you to apologise.

Yes, for putting money.

Is that a kind of recognition that if you say right at the start, I make no apology for, you're kind of issuing a kind of blanket ban on apologising further down the line if it doesn't work out?

That's interesting.

You're kind of inoculating yourself against, you know,

well, at least I tried.

Can I have points for effort, I suppose?

Yeah, but I can understand if you're a politician, you want to stress that you've got good intentions.

Because I think one of the things that people often do with politics, I'm sure I'm guilty of it myself, is think that politicians are being bad or stupid or lazy, whereas in fact what they're doing is trying something and it doesn't work.

Yes.

So I guess, yeah, if you kind of pre-butt the criticisms that are coming down, that's a great word, isn't it?

Pre-butt.

Not re-but, but pre-butt.

The criticisms that are coming down the track to you, then I can see why that's very appealing.

Did you say that Mark Zuckerberg did an apology you enjoyed?

Well, this is...

I've been obsessed with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook slash Meta for quite some time.

Because for the last 20 years, Zuckerberg has been apologizing for getting things wrong.

Usually after after he's been caught or the Meta's been caught or Facebook's been caught, having changed how they're going to work with data that contradicts something they said earlier.

I just quickly dug out the career of Mark Zuckerberg in apologies.

So in 2003, when he started Facebook, it was called Facemash.

And he had to apologize because, you know, it was a way of asking students to rate the attractiveness of their classmates.

Already sounds creepy.

I mean, there was a much loved 90s website that was called Hot or Not, which you could upload your photo to, and people would tell you if you were hot or not.

So, when that creep factor emerged, he issued an apology in 2003 thinking, This is not how I meant for things to go.

We move on now.

I know we're busy, Your Honor, but so I'll just rattle through these.

2007, we've made a lot of mistakes building this feature.

I've no idea what it was, but clearly it didn't work.

But we've made even more with how we've handled them.

We simply did a bad job, and I apologise for it.

That doesn't stop him, because in 2010, he calls remarks he made previously about people dumb and absolutely regretted those remarks.

In 2011 he issued an essay entitled Our Commitment to the Facebook Community in which he admitted a bunch of mistakes.

In 2017 he apologised to everyone who was offended by a video chat in which he was trying to explain how Facebook worked and offended people somehow.

2018 this Facebook scandal on lack of content moderation, strict content moderation on certain images.

Facebook has a responsibility to protect its user data.

And if that fails, we don't deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.

We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility.

And then it goes on.

That's such a weird trajectory there, because all the way through he's doing all of that, Facebook is just getting more and more popular and more and more profitable.

Yeah.

And every now and then, if I do, I kind of, that's not who we are, we've got to learn.

But being very honest about how I've cocked up.

But then after that last apology, he's now said, I'm done with apologies.

We asked what his biggest mistake had been he said some of the things that the others were asserting we were doing or were responsible for I don't actually think we were when it's a political problem there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame so he's actually said I'm done with apologizing I think that's so interesting because it's also part of this bigger Silicon Valley drift towards the right that you've seen in the last year There was a feeling, I think, you know, among lots of tech executives that they donated lots of money to the Democrats and they said various sort of left-wing things and they didn't get any love back for it.

That they were still subject to congressional inquiries and calls for more regulation.

And I think there was a certain level of this year, some of them went, well, stuff you then.

Maybe I'm right-wing.

What do we think about that?

And then I'll never have to apologize again because where the American right is at the moment is very much a sign of your power not to back down.

You know, Tony Hinchcliffe, the comedian who made the joke about Puerto Rico and Madison Square Garden at that Trump rally, didn't apologise for it.

Someone previously tried to cancel him for using an anti-Chinese slur about another comic on the same bill, and he said, I'm not apologising.

What are you going to do?

Like, what are you going to do?

I do have some sympathy for that, in that I think that the sorry has become such a debased coinage.

Then I can understand why people say, I'm not, I'm just not going to play along.

But it is the Trump, what everyone says of Trump, that his kind of mantra is never apologise, never back down.

Yeah, I mean, sort of related to the Queen Mother's Never Complain, Never Explain.

Yeah, finally, the overlap we always wanted.

But I think the worst forced apology of all, if you may remember a news story about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard brought their dogs into Australia.

Australia has, unsurprisingly, is an island with its own unique ecosystem, very strong rules about not randomly bringing

Johnny Depp in.

Yes, exactly, in case he starts eating the native bush.

Anyway, he had to film an apology video in which he said sorry to the unique plants, animals and people of Australia.

So he's apologised to a plant.

Apologised to the plants.

I hope the plants accepted his apology.

It's almost like there is a kind of apology apology industry now burgeoning.

I'm sure, you know, influencers and YouTubers and vloggers and so on now have their own

apology expert.

The big law firms have now moved into, you know, the ones that would have once been libel law firms in the UK, because it's become harder to get libel convictions, have moved into reputation management, which is all designed entirely to calibrate, you know, like, well, we'll sort out your Google results for you and we'll work out, crafted an apology, like the exact millimeters of how sorry you should be in order to get away from this scandal.

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There's an implication here that you know the apology has been so overused, so elaborated that it doesn't have quite the impact that it used to.

I mean, it used to be 20 years ago, it would be very rare and big news if, say, a politician actually went on air and said, I'm sorry about something.

And that was seen as like honourable and would then reside as well.

But that was seen as the right thing to do.

But now,

all we expect is a politician to say, I'm sorry, but without any consequence, that it's just part of the mechanics of the job.

But the question is always post-apology and then what?

So the one that comes up a lot is people saying of Profumo, you know, the scandals in the 1960s, that he then went and quote-unquote cleaned toilets in the East End for 20 years, right?

That he went, oh, this is so bad.

I'm going to leave politics rather than the sorry and then go back to doing exactly what you wanted.

And then Keir Stahmer had a similar version of this at the recent meeting of the heads of the Commonwealth in which he was asked to apologise for Britain's historic colonialism and pay reparations.

And I think there was a feeling that the two of those things were kind of very close together.

And actually, if you are genuinely sorry for Britain having exploited other countries, the question then becomes, and what are you going to do about it?

And actually, I think that's a part of the caution about apologies now, is the feeling that they should come with a kind of enforcement mechanism, right?

You need to do something.

Yes, there's a sort of implication that there are legal consequences.

If you apologise, are you therefore admitting fault?

And therefore,

if you're admitting fault, are you open to being sued?

I suppose.

But I also think they seem quite unnatural because in our everyday life, people don't think that they're in the wrong.

There's a book title I think about a lot, which is a by two psychologists, which is called Mistakes Were Made, but not by me.

Yes.

And it's all about the kind of, you know, the kind of ideology of self-justification and the way that almost all of us will go back, the word they use in science fiction is retcon, right?

We will retrospectively work out a way in which actually we were right all along or it wasn't that bad or how could we have known.

So people don't apologize and actually even confronted with when their own wrongdoing, indisputable evidence thereof, people often don't apologise.

Their mind sort of does a backflip into some way in which that's actually okay and they were still right.

Yes, oh there's an explanation for why I did wrong.

The Matt Hancock, I was in love.

Yeah.

You know,

as if no one else in human history has ever been in love, yeah.

And therefore I was so giddy that I gave contracts to people who really shouldn't have had.

You know, it's all just a, you know, I was just, you know, I was just tizzy.

But I was right to leave.

You know, it's a kind of amalgam of self-flagellation and yet defiance at the same time.

Yeah.

I'm defiantly

thwacking myself in the back

with a whip.

But at the same time, staying right here.

Yeah.

And yes, and it puts, again, it goes back to putting you back at the centre of the story.

Me and my fine feelings.

You know, this is about me and how I felt about this and what happened to me.

Yeah, and it's also, I think, what you were saying about people can't quite believe that they've made a mistake.

I think that's why there is usually, you know, a five or six day period before a politician eventually has to concede by apologising or resigning, where they're in a state of bewilderment as to why they are being blamed.

I always think that, you know,

Labour think they're thoroughly nice and therefore they couldn't do anything that's corrupt.

The Conservatives think that they're to kind of, you know, strengthen the state.

That's a very noble aim, so they couldn't be corrupt.

And the Lib Dems think they're very fair-minded,

so they couldn't be corrupt.

So to be accused at any point of mishandling something or being corrupt or to getting it wrong is it takes a period for them to work out that that might be them.

That's a hard thing to

factor.

They're always the people who think that they're the most moral sometimes have the hardest time apologising for things.

I remember someone close to Jeremy Corbyn saying that to me about his mishandling of the anti-Semitism in Labour, which is, you know, his entire self-image is that he is a crusader against racism.

He has been all his life.

And, you know,

that is true.

And so when somebody said, well, I think you've got a bit of a blind spot here, he simply couldn't reconcile it with his image of himself.

And that's why he found it so impossible to say sorry.

Although, blind spot,

the clue is there.

Yeah, yeah.

You've got a blind spot there.

Well, I can't see it.

No, I'm just reminded of when Rupert Murdoch was up before a parliament and he said, this is the most humble day of my life.

Not up against particularly stiff competition, I would say.

It sounded like an apology, but it wasn't.

It was just this is...

So it's again, it was about me.

You know, I am humbling myself so much that I'm really hating it, but I'm prepared to say how much I'm hating, how much I'm humbling myself.

Was that before or after that guy hit him in the face with the pie?

Because I imagine that made the day significantly more humble.

yes i humble pie in fact um it was i think it was literally about 30 seconds before

some great writing by the uh the university script writers there now whether you know news international actually made an arrangement that he would say this is the most humble day in my life and then someone would come going not yet it isn't and

smack him in the face with some cream i don't know but uh that kind of summed it up that was for me where the nature of apology went through a massive gear shift.

Yes, I know what you mean.

It's sort of like MDF in furniture, right?

It was a sort of apology effect pattern without actually being, you know, like

veneer on wood.

I think, though, that...

Certain times just hearing someone say sorry means an awful lot.

I think a lot of the campaigners behind injustices and historic injustices, although all it is, as it were, is a politician, but someone senior in the state apologizing to them, but to the public.

I think that can mean a lot.

I'm reminded, this is a very, very trivial example of my actually wanting an apology, but I remember this is what made me decide I no longer want to make Veep.

And it wasn't anything to do with the show.

It was to do with being in America.

And I was trying to get home to...

to surprise my daughter who was going to sing in a school concert.

She was like seven, very nervous.

And so I didn't tell her that I was going to fly back and be there for the concert.

And I got the last flight out of Washington.

It was at 10 p.m.

At 2 a.m.

It hadn't moved and we were all told to get off.

At 4 a.m.

we were told that we would be told when things were back to normal.

And at 7 a.m.

we were told the flight had been cancelled, by which time it was too late.

And in fact, you know, UK was waking up.

My family was waking up.

So I had to tell them we'd be there.

And then what got me, no one, none of the staff would at all apologise to the the long, and there was a pretty long queue by then of people just demanding, not just an apology, but some knowledge as to what might happen next.

People saying, well, I'm out at the airport.

Have I got a room?

Can I stay at a hotel now?

Can I, and the staff would just say, if you go on our website,

that should help.

Okay, so how do I get onto the web?

Just go on the website.

Hello, hi, do I get my money back?

Just go on the website.

Okay, I've missed a massively important meeting that will change my career.

What do I do now legally?

Just go on the website.

And I just thought, this is mad.

This is crazy.

I'm sure those people who are working for them want to apologise, but they know that they'll go through some kind of legal hell if they do.

And that was the point where I just thought, this is a crazy place.

I'm not coming back.

Right.

If only I could get a flight out.

Yeah, I was going to say, unfortunately, as it turns out, you were stuck there for some years afterwards.

That's interesting.

Sometimes when someone does apologise profusely in a situation like that, it takes the kind of wind out of you.

You're on your pie horse ready to kind of start invoking the Consumer Protection Act.

Yeah.

And they just show you a little bit of humanity.

And then you suddenly go, oh, you've probably been up all night too.

Actually, this is, you know,

so I don't know in cases like that whether it was actual company policy or whether it was the employees' fear that there was a company policy that might implicate them if they said sorry.

It increased the amount of hostility in the room, really.

I bet it did.

Do you have any final words you'd like to share with the clients?

Every now and then, you know, at the end of every

podcast, we pick another word that's been doing the right.

And my word is skeet.

Do you know what to skeet is?

No, please don't Google this

because I've subsequently found it has various meanings, one of which is quite obscene.

But it's been used more and more for those who have switched from Twitter slash X

to blue sky.

And if you tweeted on Twitter, you skeet on blue sky.

So people are skeeting you.

And it's used now as an indication that you've made the switch.

I had, I think in the early days, there was an attempt to try and make it a bloot.

A blut.

And then people were like, no, that we feel we feel profoundly stupid.

It reminds me of ablutions,

which is just wiping the dirt off you.

Well, skeet.

And again, please do not google the word skeet because it will take you to some extraordinary sites.

I do like the way that these words just suddenly evolve to describe a very specific action.

It's used specifically for those who've moved from X to Blue Sky, of which I am one.

Although I haven't officially moved, I'm cohabiting.

I've still got a bag and a spare room at X.

I like doing how I'm straddling the political divide

by being on both of them.

But I did, talking of apologies, I did see a milestone.

I saw the first person having to

really step back from their job because they got a bit overwrought on Blue Sky.

So the first,

the editor of Scientific American went on a bit of a tear on election night and said everyone who voted for Trump was basically a fascist and then did a kind of, it's come to my attention that I

shouldn't

blue sky is like, is meant to be like a lovely room where people have afternoon tea,

not the gladiatorial room.

Not the shouting parlour.

No, not the...

Everywhere on the internet turns into the shouting parlour.

Not the dodgy basement.

No, we can't have that.

Well, and despite the apology, I'm afraid she had to step down.

I always feel at the moment that Blue Sky is a little bit like going to see a film on a Wednesday afternoon, in that there are some people there, but not many.

And it's still quite nice.

I think that tricks people into thinking that unfortunately they can turn to the person next to them and go, do you know, I hate my boss.

Not realising that it's public.

It's a full public.

And the person behind you goes, I am your boss, and I'm here as well.

Yeah.

Checking up.

But I've got a reader email to share with you from Henrietta Rose, who said...

Did she?

Yeah,

she said it's a wonderful programme.

it makes me laugh but also makes me think which is what we're going for do you have any thoughts on the use of sadistic language in political discourse and particularly thinking of the phrase holding their feet to a fire oh yes why would anyone want to do this to anyone and I think that there are those phrases occasionally that you remember that you use with having completely no thought feet to the fire I mean that's like a form of medieval torture presumably

and and just it's passed so much into cliché that you don't no one even thinks about and it's usually used by sort of well-meaning campaigning groups saying we just want some answers from the minister.

But

I'm going to use the language of medieval torture to get this message across.

We're going to go and see the education secretary and I'm going to nail his hand to a tree.

What?

I'm going to put him in an Iron Maiden.

No, that seems bad.

I'm going to slit his stomach open and show him his guts.

Then he'll talk.

Feels excessive.

Sorry, she, then she'll talk.

For which I apologise.

Right.

I think that if we run over, we really will have to say that.

Okay, well, we must, yes, no, I think we must do one on sadistic language, the rise of sadistic language in otherwise polite uh discourse okay yeah

well thanks for listening to strong message here we'll be back next week all episodes are available in our feed so make sure you subscribe on bbc sounds goodbye goodbye

Hello, this is Marion Keys and this is Tara Flynn.

We host a podcast you might like for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds called Now You're Asking.

Each week, we take real listeners' questions about life, love, lingerie, cats, dogs, dentists, pockets, or the lack of anything really, and apply our worldly wisdom in a way which we hope will help, but also hopefully entertain.

Join us, why don't you?

Search up Now You're Asking on BBC Sounds Tanking You

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