Digested week: Remorseless Reeves and Sarah Vine’s masterpiece of self-delusion | John Crace

Monday

One of the biggest mysteries in Westminster surrounds the inability of politicians of all parties to apologise. For anything. Most of the rest of us go through life saying sorry on a regular basis. For being late, for not doing something we had said we would, for forgetting. And by and large an apology does the trick. The person we have let down feels heard and all is forgiven.

But politicians would rather die than apologise. Take the winter fuel allowance U-turn. Almost the first thing that the new Labour government did was to cut the payment for almost every pensioner. It was Rachel Reeves’s way of showing the financial markets that she could be trusted to take the tough decisions in the interests of fiscal responsibility. Only it turned out that most people didn’t think the…