My memory gets addled sometimes, so maybe I’m wrong about this. But didn’t it used to be the case that when politicians were caught out lying, they made some sort of shame-faced apology to the nation and begged for our forgiveness? I’m sure that was it, you know. So if I’m right, to judge by the case of our Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, things have turned precisely 180 degrees. Mr Grieve has just offered a full and unqualified apology for having told the truth. I thought that politicians were meant to do that — tell the truth?
And what an apology. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Mr Grieve said the following: ‘We have minority communities in this country which come from backgrounds where corruption is endemic. It is something as politicians we have to wake up to.’ Asked by the interviewer if he meant the Pakistani community in particular, Mr Grieve said that he did. Although he added that the whole blame should not be laid at the door of any single community. Cue, then, a fugue of idiocy which eventually led to the absurd apology.
First, Grieve’s party colleague, the MEP Sajjad H. Karim, said that the comments were ‘deeply offensive’ and — remarkably — ‘not based on fact’, then the rest weighed in. Mr Karim is either an idiot or deluded, as we shall see. And so, after only a few hours, Mr Grieve said a really big ‘sorry’. Here is his apology — you can cut it out and keep it if you wish, as it’s full of asinine genuflections to the hysteria of the mob and therefore a model of its kind: ‘Mr Grieve said he was wrong to give the impression that there was a problem in the Pakistani community. In a statement, he said: “It is not my view.
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