What I should say sorry for

Saturday, 23rd October 2004

Boris Johnson on his penitential pilgrimage to Liverpool

It is important to make this point about our tendency to blame the state, because we live in an increasingly atomised society, where the state does more and more and where means-tested benefits multiply, and where good human emotions and affections that might once have been directed towards neighbours and family are now diverted into outbursts of sentimentality. We are in some ways as callous in our treatment of old people as any country in the world; and yet we are so sentimental about non-human beings, and so tyrannical in our sentimentality, that we are about to become the first outpost of civilisation to ban hunting.

We are so ready to see ourselves as victims that we have an increasingly hysterical health-and-safety compensation culture in which the chief culprits are scaremongering journalists, cowardly politicians and muddled judges who ought to throw out the attempts by lawyers to blame someone else — usually the state — for the misfortunes of their clients. Such are the views of The Spectator, its editor, and of Stephen Glover and, I bet, of Michael Howard as well. I heartily and sincerely apologise for the offence caused by last week’s leader, and for the tasteless inaccuracies with which the point was made. But I cannot retract that point.