Brendan Rodgers, David Cameron, and the art of forgiveness

One fan summed up the general attitude. “We all make mistakes in life, let’s get on with it.” There may be doubters among the Celtic family, but for now they are taking a back seat. As one former player said, once Rodgers starts to win games any past hurt will be forgotten.

While forgiveness was in the air at Celtic, elsewhere it was either on order, in short supply, or absent. Margaret Ferrier, the MP convicted of culpable and reckless conduct for exposing her constituents and others to Covid, is asking voters in Rutherglen and Hamilton West not to sack her.

If 10% or more of voters sign the recall petition, the first in Scotland, she will lose her seat and a by-election will be held. “I made a mistake - for which I continue to apologise and have faced severe punishment,” she said, insisting the episode had not prevented her from doing her job.

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In London, meanwhile, David Cameron left the UK Covid-19 inquiry to shouts of “Shame on you”. The former Conservative Prime Minister, the first politician to be questioned at the inquiry, had to answer accusations that his government’s austerity policies left the UK in no fit state to battle the pandemic when it came. He denied this.

Following him into the witness chair yesterday was George Osborne, the former Chancellor and main author of austerity. He “completely” disputed the claim that his policy had left health and social care services weakened.

What a blast of cold air from the past Messrs Cameron and Osborne have been. Since leaving frontline politics one has had an easier ride from the public than the other, though you can hardly say either man has suffered.

Mr Cameron ended his premiership by infamously humming a little tune as he headed back through the door of Number 10 after resigning. He had badly mishandled the threat from Nigel Farage and called a referendum to quell the rebellion in his own party. Despite that act of supreme selfishness, and the chaos that followed from it, Mr Cameron behaved as if he had not a care in the world. Ask for forgiveness? It did not even enter his mind then, nor does it still.

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His efforts to make a living by touting his influence as a past premier ended in embarrassment. No harm was done, except to his ego, and life has carried on. Perhaps not as well as it has for his chum, Mr Osborne. Whether acting as an adviser to business (one gig, for a single day’s work per week, reportedly paid £650,000), public speaker extraordinaire (earned £320,000 in 31 days), even a newspaper editor, Mr Osborne has found doors opening wherever he goes.

Until recently he could be seen as one half of a double act with Ed Balls on Channel 4’s The Andrew Neil Show. Quite the joker Mr Osborne turns out to be. Elevated above the fray by time. For all the money he earns outside politics, Mr Osborne still wants back in somewhere. He will probably succeed, too.

The former Chancellor is another one who would not dream of asking for forgiveness. Why? Because he does not accept that he did anything wrong.

Mr Cameron conceded it was a mistake to believe a flu pandemic was on its way. But he denied that spending cuts had left the NHS in a weakened and vulnerable state, as doctors and trades unions, among others, have claimed. If anything, he argued, it was austerity that put the economy back on track and allowed the Government to save for a rainy day. When the time came to spend vast amounts of cash, for example to fund the furlough scheme, the UK Government was able to do so.

His Chancellor argued along the same lines. Without austerity, he said, “Britain would have been more exposed, not just to future things like the coronavirus pandemic, but indeed to the fiscal crisis which very rapidly followed in countries across Europe.”

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This is rewriting history to an extent that is shameless even by the standards of Conservative governments. In 2019, a year before Covid struck, a UN report concluded that “UK standards of wellbeing have descended precipitately in a remarkably short period of time, as a result of deliberate policy choices made when many other options were available”.

We know the choices were deliberate because time after time ministers said so. They were proud of the policy, promoting it at every turn. How can you forgive someone who does not ask for it, who does not believe they have done anything wrong?

Politicians are remarkably prone to insist they are in the right, long after facts have proven them otherwise. Has anyone ever heard, for example, anything approaching a convincing apology from Tony Blair over the Iraq invasion? Would anyone have believed Margaret Thatcher if she had admitted her policies went too far? There can be no forgiveness without contrition.

Remorse matters in politics because so much is at stake. It is one thing to leave a football club in the lurch. People rightly felt hurt, betrayed, abandoned. But no-one was directly harmed. No-one died. In politics, by choosing this policy rather than that one, lives are changed, maybe even lost.

Where mistakes have happened they must be acknowledged. Boris Johnson shows no understanding of what he has done wrong and why it matters, so there is no forgiving and forgetting where he is concerned.

He leaves the Commons just as the UK Covid-19 inquiry begins, with the separate Scottish investigation still waiting to catch-up. It will be years before reports are published. In the meantime, the furious reaction to the video of Conservative staffers partying while Covid raged shows how raw the wounds remain. For now there is no forgetting any of this, far less forgiving, and that is how it should be.