Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Cameron’s apology isolates No.10

So Cameron said come out and said sorry. Again. The first stage of his S-Word was that apology on the Andrew Marr Show which was interrupted when the signal from North Kensington collapsed. Today he said….

“Of course I’m sorry that we have got some things wrong, we were right to call time on government debt but should we have said more about banking debt and corporate debt, yes, we should have done.  Actually saying sorry is the easy bit, the difficult bit is for politicians to look back and say right where did I go wrong; it’s that, that needs to take place in order to build this trust with the public so we can get this economy out of recession and into recovery.”

So why the mea culpa? Sure, this isolates Gordon Brown in that almost everyone (including his ministers) are saying sorry. But Cameron is on a more serious mission: to gain credibility with the public. And the first stage of that is to admit that he (like everyone else) got things wrong. The apology is for carefully-chosen errors: very few spotted bank and corporate debt. Promising to match Labour’s unaffordable spending plans was the real error. But it’s the positioning that matters: Cameron has shouted out the hardest word. The loudest sound now is the silence from 10 Downing Street.

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