"I'll probably regret saying [this]," Lord Malloch-Brown told Andrew Marr on Radio 4's Start the Week this morning, before going on to make the sort of comment that is sometimes described as a gaffe.
The Foreign Office minister said that British politicians are not very good at apologising. Personally, I don't think the word "gaffe" is appropriate at all, because the point he made was thoughtful, interesting, and (many people would say) true, but, with Gordon Brown under pressure to apologise for not regulating the City more aggressively over the last 12 years, you can see how it's the sort of intervention that Downing Street might describe as "unhelpful".
I was not listening to Start the Week, but PoliticsHome has published the key quote from Malloch-Brown on its Green Box feed.
As someone rather new to British politics, I have to say probably, and probably I'll regret saying it, I just cannot get over the fact that British politicians don't know how to say sorry. I think they don't know how to say sorry because the people who demand they say it then descend on them ... and jump all over them and don't accept the apology but use it to sort of force further concessions.
Malloch-Brown, the former UN deputy secretary general, was one of the "goats" brought into Brown's "government of all the talents" in 2007. Brown felt he would benefit from having a few non-politicians in government. But the thing about non-politicians is ... they don't think like politicians. Sometimes I bet Downing Street wishes they did.
