Sorry...

‘I am sorry’. A simple expression, one we say every day, mostly over trivial matters.

Failing to apologise has made headlines for weeks now, mainly centred on politicians and the government, their refusal to take the blame for anything.

At the centre of the storm is the prime minister who is a world leader in evasion and truth abstinence.

His latest test has been over the accusations of former government ministers Paterson and Cox to apologise for breaking rules with lucrative second jobs.

Not a word of contrition, just blind, arrogant stubbornness. a steely determination to defend their actions. Even worse than these sordid stories is the long running refusal by Mr Johnson to apologise for anything.

A rare exception was when he ‘unreservedly apologised’ to MP Emily Thornbury describing her as 'the baroness something or other’- her husband is Sir Christopher Nugee, a high court judge.

Since then, silence, leading to his cowardly act of scuttling to a hospital instead of  ‘facing the music’ in parliament and sending a lackey to the Commons.

Thankfully there have been many bolder, more honest politicians.

The latest example of a heartfelt apology was from FW De Klerk, former President of South Africa, in a video released this week after his death.

For hundreds of years most national leaders have never owned up to or apologised for actions that have had catastrophic results.

One exemption was Billy Brandt, former West German Chancellor. Twenty five years after the last war that ravaged Poland he went on his knees at national commemoration ceremony in a wordless apology. He was later awarded a Nobel peace prize.

Another rare outstanding apology, by the Roman Catholic church in 1965, was the Declaration of the Relation of the Church to Non Christian Religions, the Nostra Aetate (Our Age).

The world today has tragically forgotten how to say sorry.