Was Johnson's covid apology sincere? It doesn't matter - he can fake it

It's not hypocrisy to repent or forgive without meaning it, writes George Pitcher. There's sound philosophy behind doing so, but it's dangerous.

At one level, it’s fairly easy to see why prime minister Boris Johnson apologised for “every life that has been lost” in the UK last Tuesday, as the British covid-19 death toll passed 100,000, the highest level in Europe and the fifth in the world. This was a “day of sorrow” and, answering a question from the BBC, Johnson confirmed that, as PM, he took “full responsibility for everything the government has done.”

Picture the scene at the meeting to prep for this moment. Allegra Stratton, Johnson’s new chief spin doctor, tells him that this is no time for evasion, that the six-figure body count isn’t going to go away and the best course of action is “to take it on the chin” (Johnson’s own phrase last year when herd immunity was fashionable), to show some humility and, in so doing, take the steam out of the criticism of his leadership.

If that’s what happened - and I fully expect it did, with Stratton possibly backed up by Johnson’s long-term fiancee Carrie Symonds - then it’s quite a departure from the tactics of his former bovver-boy advisers, Dominic Cummings and his baldrick Lee Cain. Theirs was the school of “never apologise, never explain”, or rather “never apologise, fail to explain”, as master-classed by Cummings in the rose garden at Number 10, after his lockdown jaunt to Barnard Castle.

There was, at that time last spring, an opportunity for the prime minister to say that he was deeply sorry and took full responsibility for Cummings. But it was not to be - in marked contrast to Stratton, Cummings will have told Johnson that apologies and regret are for weak, little people and not what his Trump-lite voter base wanted to hear.

Politicians can indeed look weak when they apologise

And it’s true that Stratton’s polar-opposite strategy is high risk. Politicians can indeed look weak when they apologise - or foolish, as when Tony Blair apologised for Britain’s role in the slave trade in 2007. Saying sorry for something that happened centuries before you were born is utterly safe, if meaningless.

So did Johnson’s apology have meaning? One view that is prevalent is that it’s meaningless without real contrition. This notion normally arises from the assumption that the Christian tradition of forgiveness requires repentance from the sinner.

Not so. Divine forgiveness is not transactional, any more than salvation is a reward for good works in this world. In both cases, they are gifts of divine grace, unconditional on any human action or agency. The theological term is that God is “impassible”, meaning that the divine can’t be changed by our supplications.

It follows that God’s “mind” can’t be changed by repentance. What repentance does is change us, making us available to be transformed by the gift of forgiveness. And that works in our relationship with other people. It also requires humility - and here, it hardly needs saying, Johnson’s record isn’t exactly sound (or world-beating, as he paradoxically might put it).

The Scapegoat, by William Holman Hunt (1854)

But there’s still hope for him - and it’s worth noting in passing that he spoke of hope as a quality of Christmas, which may have been another ecclesiological lesson from Stratton. The hope comes from the French philosopher Rene Girard, at the heart of whose work is that human behaviour is “mimetic” - that is, we copy the behaviours of the person we want to be and in so doing become that person. So desire precedes actuality.

It means, Girard held, that it’s of no moral use to say that you can’t forgive because you don’t feel it in your heart to do so and, therefore, the act would be hypocritical. Girard’s point was that to say that you forgive is the primary mimetic action, from which the genuine feeling of forgiveness will follow.

It may be that this can explain partly the almost unbelievable acts of forgiveness that we witness, such as the forgiveness of Holocaust survivors for their Nazi persecutors. Less seriously, it gives weight to the aphorism ascribed to George Burns (or French novelist Jean Giraudoux) regarding sincerity: “Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Faking sincerity

If Johnson was faking sincerity in his apology to 100,000-plus families, then Girard’s argument is that he has indeed got it made. By mimetic process, sincerity will follow. The bad news for Johnson is that the process also involves violence, as intense mimetic rivalry becomes murderous, which only the victimising of a blameless scapegoat can resolve, to defuse conflict. “The king” is duly murdered, tribal stress is relieved, then subsequent unification leads them to see the deposed dead king as a god.

Sound familiar? Of course - as the English literature don Terry Eagleton puts it in his book Radical Sacrifice: “The only cure for violence is Christianity.” Though to be momentarily fair to Johnson, while he may want to be Winston Churchill, there’s no evidence that he wants to be the Messiah (to channel the late Terry Jones, he’s just a very naughty boy).

But, in political terms, he doesn’t want to be a scapegoat either. So there are very real dangers when he goes down the apologetic route, adopting mimetic sincerity. Repentance and forgiveness are powerful weapons and not to be toyed with.

George Pitcher is an Anglican priest and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE).