Every few months another institution says sorry. A health trust, a police force, a religious order, a government department; the wording varies less than you would expect. The people on the receiving end have usually waited years for it, and the wait was not accidental, because the same bodies spent those years denying there was anything to be sorry for. I take none of that lightly. The wrongs were real, the resistance to admitting them was real, and someone who wants the word said out loud in public is not being sentimental. But an apology is two things bolted together, and we have got into the habit of treating it as one. It carries a statement about what happened, meaning who did what, who knew, and when. It also carries a display of feeling about it. Only one of those halves can be checked.

The factual half can be set against the records. It can be shown to be inconsistent with a later disclosure. It can be relied on in a courtroom. It can be proved false. The other half cannot be handled that way at all. An organisation does not feel anything. The person reading the statement out is very often somebody appointed long after the events, and whatever is happening inside them, it is not the remorse of the people who did the harm, who have retired, or died, or moved on to another authority operating under a different name. So when a campaign spends its pressure on getting the word said, it spends that pressure on the half of the apology nobody can audit, and leaves the half that can be audited to whoever drafts it. The drafting is done by lawyers whose brief is to concede as little fact as the sentence will carry. That is how we arrive at statements that sound stricken and disclose almost nothing: profound regret for what happened, with not one line on how it was allowed to happen.

I am not arguing that apologies are worthless, and I am not telling anybody who wants one to stop wanting it. Someone who has been told for thirty years that they imagined it may need the public sentence more than they need the file, and I would not talk them out of it. My complaint is about where the pressure goes. A campaign that wins a form of words has won the thing an institution finds cheapest to hand over, since the wording can be reused and costs nothing to reuse. A campaign that wins a dated, specific admission of what was known and by whom has taken something the institution cannot withdraw and cannot redraft. The two come apart in negotiation as a matter of routine, and when they do, the admission is the one to hold out for. Sorry is what an institution says once it has finished deciding what it is willing to have on the record.