Editor of Spectator semi-apologises

Last week, The Spectator published an editiorial about the response of England, and especially the city of Liverpool, to the murder in Iraq of Ken Bigley, who had been held hostage by insurgents. The editorial criticised the "the mawkish sentimentality of a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood", and noted that more grief was being expressed for Bigley than had been for any of the soldiers who have been killed in the War. The editorial turned its focus on Liverpool:

The extreme reaction to Mr Bigley’s murder is fed by the fact that he was a Liverpudlian. Liverpool is a handsome city with a tribal sense of community. A combination of economic misfortune ... and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians. They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society. The deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but that is no excuse for Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon.

The editorial staff of the Spectator is of course entirely within its rights to make such comments. A complication arose, however, since the editor of the Spectator, Boris Johnson, is also MP for Henley and the shadow arts minister. The leader of Johnson's party, Michael Howard of the Conservative Party, ordered Johnson to apologise to Liverpool, and today he did. Johnson, who The Guardian describes as having a "reputation for buffoonery", made what he called a "pilgrimage of penitence" and writes about it for today's Daily Telegraph. After describing the experience of being in Liverpool and meeting the people he offended, Johnson writes about how he regrets causing upset, but stands by the message of the editorial:

I was able to say sorry for causing offence, and sorry for any hurt done to the Bigley family, and sorry for having reopened old wounds over Hillsborough, and that, in so far as we inaccurately represented the characteristics of the Liverpudlians, by resorting to some tired old stereotypes, I was sorry for that, too.

But, as I said on the radio, as I said on the street to a bunch of trainee nurses, as I said to everyone I met, this was only a partial and qualified apology. Michael Howard had called The Spectator's leading article, "Nonsense from beginning to end."

Well, I know of no doctrine that means members of the shadow front bench have to see eye to eye about every article that appears in the press, and in my view Michael is wrong on that. My view of our piece is that it spoke a lot of good sense, vitiated by tastelessness and inaccuracy.

There are some who say that it was outrageous that Johnson the editor should have been ordered to eat humble pie by Michael Howard. But they miss the point, that I was already consuming large quantities of humble pie before Michael made his suggestion, that any editor would have felt obliged to make some amends for that article - in view of the outrage that was provoked - and that, in any event, Johnson the politician apologises for and refuses to apologise for exactly the same things as Johnson the editor.

The leader was about the cult of sentimentality in modern Britain, which is allied to the cult of victimhood, and I wanted a leader on it not because I wanted to insult the people of Liverpool, but because I believe that we have a serious problem, in that we tend these days at every opportunity to blame the state, and to seek redress from the state, when things go wrong in our lives.

Yes, it was tasteless to make this point in the context of Ken Bigley's death, and I am sorry for the hurt this has caused his family. But when the late hostage's family said that Tony Blair had Ken Bigley's "blood on his hands", that was nonsense. Only those who killed Ken Bigley had his blood on their hands, and it should not be taboo to say so.

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 emotions and affections that might once have been directed at family or neighbours are diverted into outbursts of sentimentality.

We are so ready to see ourselves as victims that we live in an increasingly hysterical health-and-safety compensation culture in which lawyers try to find someone else - usually the state - to blame for the misfortunes of their clients. That was the gist of the leader, and for that I make no apology.

Johnson's poise and humility in apologising but also his principled stand of not retracting his (or at least his magazine's, since the editorial was unsigned and Johnson hasn't confirmed or denied that he is its author) comments are admirable.