Mark Easton - Britain Etc.

PR agencies have become as much about privacy as publicity. Members of the Public Relations Consultants Association in the UK saw incomes rise from £18 million in 1983 to £401 million in 2001, a phenomenal expansion explained in part by anxiety about protecting the reputations of the rich and famous in the media age.

From its earliest days, the PR industry involved itself in reputation management. Ivy Lee, regarded as one of the founders of modern public relations, convinced the Pennsylvania Railroad to publicise rather than hide details of the 1906 Atlantic City train disaster, issuing what is said to be the first ever press release. It proved an effective way to calm the angry mob.

A century later, with company executives increasingly conscious of corporate identity and reputation, the polished skills and black arts of PR were in greater demand than ever. Manning the institutional defences, the spin doctor and publicity consultant were joined by a third key figure — the corporate lawyer. The legal representative’s role was to defuse the danger from accident and error by treating them as technical matters, events to be dealt with by experts in insurance, health and safety, litigation and risk analysis.

In the first decade of this century, the corporate legal sector in Britain grew exponentially. Law Society figures suggest the number of qualified solicitors directly employed in company legal departments more than doubled. It is estimated that there are now at least two hundred city lawyers being paid more than a million pounds a year in the UK. Protecting big business from accident and error has become big business itself. A government report in 2010 described the environment in which firms attempted to respond to such risks as ‘a climate of fear’, where health and safety consultants, insurance companies and legal experts contrive to create a growing view that if there’s a blame, there’s a claim.

The author ofthat report, Lord Young, was later to be a victim of the changed relationship with error and misjudgement himself. What would once have been a private indiscretion, a candid remark to a friendly journalist over lunch, was splashed on the front page of a national newspaper and from there quickly accelerated into a national media storm. The Conservative peer had been secretly recorded saying that, despite the recession, most people had never had it so good. Before the sun had set, David Cameron’s enterprise tsar was out on his ear.

Of course, corporate negligence and political incompetence need to be exposed. Hypocrisy and humbug are fair game. But the climate of fear for those in public life, the terror of being caught with your trousers down, has seen an increasingly defensive response to accident and error. That, in turn, has resulted in a more distrustful attitude from the general public, which encourages the press to search out stories that play to that anxiety. It can look like a market dealing in suspicion and dread.

The tactics to deal with accident and error have become more sophisticated. Take the apology: once an ignominious admission of fault, it has become a vehicle for neutralising blame and parading humility. Greg Dyke, when Director-General of the BBC, realised that a new electronic expenses system he’d introduced was an unmitigated disaster. It was time to eat humble pie. ‘I sent out an email to everyone saying, I’m sorry, we got it wrong,’ he later explained. ‘Management generally have a terrible habit of failing to admit when they’ve made a mistake. We all mess up. If you admit it, everyone likes you.’

Such candour may seem refreshing when public figures are increasingly guarded about admitting their shortcomings. But contemporary apologies constructed with the help of PR advisors have their roots in the public acts of penance once demanded of wayward public figures by the church. After his knights had murdered Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, for example, Henry II eventually accepted the Pope’s order for contrition. In a highly theatrical act of atonement, the king walked barefoot to the crime scene, thrust his head and shoulders into one of the openings of Saint Thomas’s tomb, and allowed himself to be flogged by monks and prelates.

These days, political apology has become such a feature of contemporary governance that social researchers have begun cataloguing hundreds of examples. Tony Blair features prominently in the archives of regret. In 2005, he barely opened his mouth without apologising for something or other. In that one year he said sorry to the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, Irish men and women wrongfully convicted of IRA pub bombings years earlier; he formally apologised to British survivors of Hurricane Katrina for a disorganised response from the Foreign Office; he made a public apology to Walter Wolfgang, a Labour activist expelled from his party conference for heckling; he apologised in advance to the people of Auchterarder in Perthshire for the disruption and inconvenience of hosting the G8 summit there. On other occasions, Tony Blair said sorry for the Irish potato famine and the slave trade.

He was a political leader who recognised there was capital in contrition. But would he, could he say sorry for the one decision of his political career for which many of his own supporters demanded an apology — the invasion of Iraq? As Mr Blair prepared to address party delegates in Brighton in 2004, his spin doctors briefed the press that his speech would include a statement of regret. When it came to it, however, it was far from the admission of guilt that his critics wanted. ‘The evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong,’ he said. ‘I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can’t, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.’

The writer and commentator Allan Massie thought the media had been hoodwinked and the public short-changed. ‘When we demand apologies from a politician, we are not looking for an act of healing as a prelude to reconciliation, though we may persuade ourselves that this is what we are doing,’ he wrote. ‘Instead we are hoping to see him abase himself. There is in reality for the politician only one satisfactory form of apology, and it is resignation.’

Apologies may imply swallowed pride, painful humiliation and negative consequences. But in the media age they have become a first line of defence in reducing the damage from some highly public error.

Analysis suggests there are three keys to their successful use: a statement of regret; an admission of responsibility; an offer to remedy the situation. When President Bill Clinton went on US television to apologise for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, he offered a model of how to do it.

‘I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.’ Tick.

‘I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. And that is why I am speaking to you tonight.’ Tick.

‘I must put it right, and I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so.’ Tick and a gold star.

Such is the power of the apology that the British justice system is increasingly incorporating it in its response to crime. Restorative justice is popular with legislators because it is cheap and appears effective: studies suggest it can cut reoffending by a quarter and reduce stress in those affected. Most victims of youth crime now accept the chance to meet the perpetrator face-to-face for a structured meeting that usually follows the classic apology script: an admission of guilt; a statement of regret; a discussion of how to repair the harm caused and prevent it from happening again.

It is, of course, entirely sensible for institutions to try to learn from error. The phrases ‘something must be done’ and ‘it must never happen again’ routinely echo around when fault or failure are exposed. But the environment of rolling news, what my BBC colleague Nik Gowing described as ‘the tyranny of real time and the tyranny of the timeline’, requires an immediate and vigorous response to mistakes.