All apologies

Sorry seems to be the easiest word, lately. Everyone's apologising. If you're reading this in the UK, surely you must have noticed. Last week, following the damning conclusions published by the Hillsborough Independent Panel, we witnessed the editor of The Sun newspaper in the UK, Dominic Mohan, rightly issue an apology on the newspaper's website as he expressed sorrow for the tabloid's inaccurate reporting of the 1989 disaster at the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield. The Prime Minister also later apologised on behalf of the nation.

This week we also saw the Sheffield MP and the UK Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, said sorry for breaking his election pledge to oppose increases in university tuition fees. His broadcast was then satirised in the form of a song. You can even download the song as a charity single and listen to Clegg's autotuned apologies to your heart's content. Then we also discovered that on Wednesday, another MP, Andrew Mitchell, had allegedly sworn at a policeman and had called him a pleb. Typical of their journalistic restraint, The Sun – who first reported the story – even indicated the preceding profanity in print. The BBC and others were less explicit, though the damage had already been done.

As indicated in a previous blog post, we now live in an age where, thanks to the permanence of the Internet, every ephemeral faux pas and many grave errors can be replayed ad infinitum. As a result, the general public as well as the political and media elite are becoming more aware of how acts of contrition are received. And while they may not be familiar with Brown and Levinson's work in Linguistics on politeness (including an examination of the apology); I believe people are becoming increasingly able to tell the difference between a sincere apology and a PR stunt or a damage limitation exercise. In turn, this increased level of scrutiny concerning the genuine sincerity behind an apology now frequently leads to it being rejected – by either the wronged party or by others (the public at large) who, at least in the first instance, were not the intended recipient of the apology.

In my opinion, this is the case with Andrew Mitchell MP. In days gone by, he would have apologised sincerely to the policeman concerned and then to his boss (the PM) – both of which he has now done. That would've been the end of the matter. But these days, only a resignation or a sacking will suffice. Clearly every case has to be assessed on its own merits; though as we watch these sorry sagas from the sidelines, we are only satisfied when our preferred form of punishment is meted out.