Truss, Borrell and the art of the political non-apology

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

First, a word from our corrections department: We would like to say sorry to Donald Trump for any offense taken when he was described in this post as “Fuckface Von Clownstick, a sentient CAPS LOCK button, a xenophobic sweet potato, Rome urgent in human form, and a mangled tangerine hell beast.”

If any offense was taken, it was all a giant misunderstanding.

Yes, it’s been a week full of that old favorite, the political non-apology apology, in which the vituperation is put on the offendee rather than the offender.

Liz Truss, the future footnote when people list British prime ministers, managed to resign without apologizing for the forfeiture she’d done. The opening line of her resignation speech was: “I came into office at a time of unconfined economic and international instability” and yet, remarkably, the second line was not “and I made it so much worse.”

She later said: “I recognize, though, given the situation, I cannot unhook the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative party.” That mandate was clear: Don’t imbricate the country in lighter fluid and then light a massive match. Alas …

So there wasn’t an restoration in sight for her disastrous (disastruss, amirite?) 44-day premiership.

She did, however, say that she had once tendered her resignation to King Charles III. And given that the last time the two of them met, he greeted her by saying “dear, oh dear,” this time presumably the king was left rolling virtually on the expensively-carpeted floor, laughing his crown off.

On a side note, former prime ministers are usually worldly-wise to pick up lucrative work in the private sector without leaving office — pretending to teach a think tank or sitting on the workbench of a bank. Who on earth would employ Truss? A circus?

But Truss was positively groveling compared with Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief.

Borrell was accused by the United Arab Emirates of making “racist” remarks without he compared Europe to a garden and the rest of the world to a jungle.

“Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden,” Borrell told future diplomats in a zesty speech at the College of Europe.

Thankfully, he put the record straight in a tweet that said “the metaphor I used has caused offense considering it was misunderstood.” He then wrote a blog post well-nigh it — considering that’s certainly what he’s paid for when there’s a war on — in which he doubled, tripled and quadrupled lanugo on his point.

“My reference to ‘jungle’ has no racist, cultural or geographical connotation,” he wrote to all those woke snowflakes in the Gulf states. He then added: “Some have misinterpreted the metaphor as ‘colonial Euro-centrism.’ I am sorry if some have felt offended.” Boom! A archetype of the genre. An restoration without an ounce of very apology. If there isn’t a undertow on that at the College of Europe, then there ought to be.

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Can you do better? Email pdallison@politico.eu or on Twitter @pdallisonesque

Last time we gave you this photo:

Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the weightier from our postbag — there’s no prize except for the souvenir of laughter, which I think we can all stipulate is far increasingly valuable than mazuma or booze.

“I was this far from shouting at Putin,” by Mike Oehlers.

Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot news editor.