Boris Johnson is far from alone in his reluctance to own mistakes

LONDON — “Never apologise, never explain,” the old political adage goes. Boris Johnson knows it well.

No one expected the U.K. prime minister to admit his actions (or inactions) had increased the U.K. coronavirus death toll, which hit the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths this week — one of the highest in the world.

He apologized for the losses but was careful to sidestep blame. He said he took responsibility for the government’s actions but insisted “we truly did everything we could” to minimize loss of life. 

Johnson was doing what most politicians do in a crisis: avoiding any admission of error. Experts argue a hostile press, and the challenge of navigating an issue when the right course of action might not be clear-cut, mean leaders don’t see the use in taking blame — there aren’t many votes in putting a target on your back.

Depending on your point of view, the U.K. government’s well-catalogued missteps since the start of the pandemic are either unforgivable blunders that have cost thousands of lives, or the result of ministers feeling their way along an obscure and perilous path guided only by incomplete and constantly changing science.

Either way, Downing Street has refused to own up, arguing the public probe into the pandemic, which Johnson promised last summer, would be the place for finger-pointing. “There will be a time for us to reflect on the pandemic, but the public would rightly expect us to focus on dealing with the pandemic as it stands,” a spokesman said. 

Some on his own side would prefer the prime minister to act with more contrition, as leaders from around the world did towards the start of the crisis. “I think when other people have died and you have a poor outcome when compared to your peers, it is always worth accepting pretty early on that things could’ve been done differently,” one minister said. 

But apologies without caveats is not the Johnson method. In his first press conference as foreign secretary, he refused to apologize for numerous past writings and utterances that were unflattering to world leaders. 

“I’m afraid that there is such a rich thesaurus now of things that I have said that have been one way or another, though what alchemy I do not know, somehow misconstrued, that it would really take me too long to engage in any full global itinerary of apology,” he explained.

“Johnson reckons any such apology would be taken as a confession of weakness,” said Andrew Gimson, the PM’s biographer. “It would be used against him, and would prompt demands for more apologies.”

Johnson believes, Gimson added, that it would be “madness to give in to the ‘gotcha’ mentality of the British press, and that he would just be treated as a weakling, a lame duck, if he did.”

No sympathy votes

Johnson is not alone. Fulsome apologies — at least from those who intend to remain in office — are a rare phenomenon in politics.

“Politicians don’t apologise because they reckon — probably correctly — that there are no votes in it,” said political science expert Ivor Crewe, who co-wrote the book “The Blunders of Our Governments.” 

There are also less cynical reasons, Crewe added. For example, governance is difficult and most decisions are complex and finely balanced, especially in the midst of a pandemic. There will be forgivable errors, unforgivable errors, mistakes made by previous governments that you end up having to deal with and bad luck — all of which have featured in the U.K. coronavirus response.

“Politicians won’t apologise for the unforgivable errors because the public won’t distinguish them from the forgivable errors and the bad luck,” Crewe explained.

Johnson appealed on the grounds of the difficulty of governance in a second press conference in as many days on Wednesday night. “All I would say humbly and respectfully to those who make criticisms of what the government and all our colleagues have been trying to do is that in situations like this where you have such very, very brutal and difficult dilemmas, there are no easy answers — and very often there are no good answers at all,” he said

In that world where all options are bad options, the government has got the tone of its response on the death toll about right, argued Craig Oliver, former director of communications under ex-PM David Cameron. “Sometimes you’re in a situation where there is no right answer; there’s nothing that you’re going to say that’s going to make something better,” he explained. “But making the point you acted in good faith throughout is worth making.”

Oliver argued Johnson is right to think, as Gimson said he does, that giving the press a free hit would not be worth it. “There are some journalists … who just trade in gotcha, tripping-up journalism. And while that’s ongoing there’s a deep-seated nervousness in terms of accepting responsibility for mistakes made,” he said.

A Conservative former Cabinet minister agreed: “Politicians have run scared of journalists who will take any admission as a reason to demand resignations. This is to the detriment both of politics and journalism.”

The final arbiter

Ultimately, it will be the court of public opinion that decides whether Johnson’s mistakes are forgivable, regardless of whether he admits to them.

Joe Twyman, co-founder of polling firm Deltapoll, said the mitigating factors for Johnson will be the global scale of the pandemic — with the public aware the U.K. is not the only nation that could have done better — and the fact the debate will be about the scale of the death toll, rather than whether deaths might have occured at all. 

“The other thing about COVID is it’s not finished yet, so you can’t really have the reckoning while it’s still going on,” Twyman added.

It’s the court of public opinion Johnson will be most focused on, argued Gimson, with his strategy of going over the heads of the press with frequent broadcasts to the nation and live press conferences. 

“He believes the wider public will not criticise him for failing, on the basis of imperfect information, to take perfect decisions,” Gimson explained, “and will instead see a prime minister who is doing his best to carry people with him, and to adapt or indeed reverse policy in the light of new information.”