Seasoned PRs might say that the following report, of Gordon Brown’s desperate efforts to apologise to a woman he met on the electioneering rounds in Rochdale, might conform to sound principles of crisis managemnet:
A mortified Mr Brown issued six apologies over the next six hours, including one by e-mail to Labour supporters for letting them down. Despite saying sorry to Mrs Duffy over the telephone, he ignored aides and insisted on driving back to Rochdale from Manchester, abandoning his preparation for tonight’s third and final leaders’ debate, to atone in person for his blunder.
But, as all media go to town on the Brown blunder – and Messrs Clegg and Cameron rub their hands with glee at such munificence from on high, ahead of tonight’s final televised debate – we wonder if what Our Leader has issued is, in fact, a Non-Apology.
Click here to read a transcipt of the incident, which, it should be noted, entails Brown lamenting his meeting with Mrs Duffy in the back of the ministerial car. As he is being driven away, he makes a schoolboy error, neglecting to turn off the mircrophone he had been wearing for his televised meeting with Mrs Duffy. He is then heard to ask whose idea the meeting had been, to which a lackey says he has no idea. Brown then says “Sue’s, I think” and says it was a “disaster”. His aide attempts to mollify him, suggesting that the media “won’t run with that one”. But Brown knows better. “Oh they will,” he says, concluding that Mrs Duffy is “just this sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be a Labour voter”. The whole thing was, he spits, “ridiculous”.
Cue the many apologies when, as sure as night follows day, the incident is shown on TV. PR experts might commend Brown here, for one of the first rules of crisis management is to accept blame if blame is due. However, that rule is qualified by a handy little abverb: skillfully. One should skillfully accept blame if blame is due. The position the beleaguered are seeking is one of due acknowledgement of mistakes made, which simultaneously closes the chapter and moves the issue on.
What, then, of Brown’s TV apology? It is less than skillful on a number of counts:
1.Brown’s demeanour is not one of humilty. He looks aggrieved to be before the cameras, as if he is being made to do so to pay for someone else’s mistake.
2. He sounds, in his opening sentence, just as bad – vexed and irritable. He then blames “a melee of press” for his failure to answer Mrs Duffy’s question on immigration.
3. Brown issues the classic Non-Apology, one which says sorry if he has caused offence. In other words, he does not accept that what he said did cause offence.
4. Moreover, he adds that he would never put himself in a position where he might cause offence. In other words, someone else put him there. Poor Sue – is all this her fault?
5. Brown’s interrogator is astute to his wheedling and asks if Sue is to blame. No, says Brown, it is all his fault, but… Yes, there’s a “but”. We are enjoined to remember that “this was me being helpful to the broadcasters”, leaving his microphone on in the car, and that the broadcasters then went and played his private conversation. Tut-tut – can no one be trusted anymore?
6. Nevertheless, despite the melee of press, Sue and the evil broadcasters being responsible, Brown is sorry. He says he has apologised profusely but, if we conjoin this with his earlier Non-Apology, we can only conclude that he is not sorry in the slightest for any offence caused – because he doesn’t recognise that there was any.
Poor Brown. He wears the look of a doomed man, his face as ashen and unappealing as his Non-Apology. How Cameron and Clegg must be savouring tonight’s debate. And how Sue must be wondering whether being an aide to the Prime Minister is all it’s cracked up to be.
[Who is Sue? Does anyone know?]
Image of Brown’s now habitual expression courtesy of The Telegraph.
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