Mea Culpa

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? – John Maynard Keynes

If you wanted to encapsulate in a single incident the reasons why the voters in just about every major democracy are losing faith in their politicians right now, you could do worse than to go back to Washington University, St Louis, on October 8th 2004. There, during the second of the three presidential debates with Senator John Kerry, President George W. Bush was asked what his three biggest mistakes as President had been.

He couldn’t think of one.

This struck me as absolutely extraordinary. Leave aside the fact that, for four years by then, everything the man had touched had turned to shit; even accepting that he presumably has a rather better opinion of his record than many of the rest of us, could he really be claiming not to have made a single mistake? In four years? Even Jesus had that whole doubt-in-the-desert thing, but George Bush, apparently, is perfect.

Maybe it wasn’t that – maybe it was a spin thing. Karl Rove had got it into his head that any admission of error would look weak, and would risk giving up valuable ground to the Kerry campaign. Maybe someone had decided that this laughable claim to infallibility actually looked better.

This is an extreme case, but the condition as a whole is disarmingly common among public figures these days. Take our own glorious leader and the incident that, like it or not, will always be a large chunk of his legacy: the invasion of Iraq.

The war was sold on the basis of the threat of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programmes which, unfortunately for the war’s architects but fortunately for just about everyone else, turned out not to exist. Despite the fact that this was becoming increasingly obvious as early as the summer of 2003, Blair stuck to his guns. Instead of taking responsibility for failures of either intelligence or judgement, he went after the BBC for being too aggressive in calling him on it.

Even when, in October 2004, public pressure finally forced something akin to an apology out of him, he managed not to sound like he was admitting to having made any real mistakes. Blair, you see, is far more subtle a politician than Bush. He claimed to have already apologized. “I said at the time of the Butler report that I took full responsibility and indeed apologise for any information given in good faith that has subsequently turned out to be wrong,” he claimed.

The media quickly jumped on the fact that he had never said any such thing. What’s more, while his aides tried to spin his words as an apology, he was careful to appear as if he was simply taking the bullet for his accident-prone intelligence officials. The war, he said, was still right – whatever else had gone wrong, his judgement was sound.

Consider just about any public scandal, and you’re likely to see one of these two responses in action. John Prescott generally opts for the brazen I’ve-done-nothing-wrong-so-sod-off option; Charles Clarke much prefers to apologize unreservedly, before claiming that he has personally made no mistake whatsoever.

Thing is… Noone’s perfect. And while bloggers and journalists alike like to howl with derision every time anything goes wrong in government, most of these guys are doing difficult jobs which the vast majority of people would struggle to do better. That mistakes get made isn’t surprising – and, depending on the nature of the cock up in question, shouldn’t necessarily be a resigning offence.

So why has it become so hard for politicians to admit to these things? The need to keep fighting the next election? The fear of being slammed by a hostile media? Simple, old-fashioned ego?

To see why any of this matters, consider an example that doesn’t come from politics at all. On July 22nd last year, British anti-terrorist police followed an innocent man onto a tube train, held him down, and pumped him full of bullets.

The fact that Jean Charles de Menezes was Brazilian, a non-Muslim and armed with nothing more dangerous than a spanner must have been obvious within minutes of his death. Yet for 24 hours the rumours circulated: that he was wearing a suspiciously thick coat for summer (he wasn’t); that he ran when police shouted (they hadn’t); that he’d jumped the barriers (he hadn’t – and exactly what kind of idiot suicide bomber would skip the fare anyway? Are they really expecting to need the £2 fare in paradise?).

That an innocent man could be killed in this way is terrifying – but it is at least comprehensible. Put yourself in the place of the guys with the guns, and it isn’t hard to come up with scenarios in which shooting first, asking questions later, looks like the best option. You’re told he’s a known terrorist; you’re on edge after two attacks in as many weeks; you’re haunted by the image of a newspaper front page showing the carnage that results from your failure to act. These guys were, presumably, bricking it.

But – where did the rumours come from if not from the police themselves? Why were the Metropolitian police force initially so resistant to the IPPC’s inquiry into the shooting? Why does it look so suspiciously like someone, somewhere, was trying to cover their tracks?

And why, given this reluctance to learn from past mistakes, was anyone remotely surprised when essentially the same thing happened again a year later?

The police, as with any public body, have a responsibility to admit it when they cock up – and to think long and hard about how best to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Because, as Bush, Blair and the rest will insist on demonstrating, those who cannot admit to their mistakes are doomed to repeat them.