Is a crap apology worse than no apology at all? Gregg Wallace, until Friday a strong contender for the worst public apology of the year, is not of course unusual in his struggle to act convincingly remorseful. Justin Welby, the outgoing archbishop of Canterbury – despite being one of the great institutional apologisers of all time – now seems likely to take the British title; internationally the clear winner is South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol. Even Wallace could tell him that when you’ve carelessly imposed martial law, it’s important to apologise to everyone, not just “the people who were very surprised”.
Plainly, there are differences in style. The Wallace apology, the only one the 60-year-old has yet supplied for insulting “middle-class women of a certain age”, not only made the elementary mistake of apologising “for any offence that I caused” – as if only the pathologically over-sensitive could conceivably have objected – but compounded it, as apology novices are apt to do, with a note about his own suffering, or “poor headspace”.
