Terry Prone: I'm a celebrity... Get me out of any chance of taking responsibility for my actions 

It seems that this is the drill: Get lucky, get famous, lose contact with the real world, make crazy damaging decisions, make an 'apology' without making amends. Repeat.

Former minister and sitting MP Matt Hancock says he is participating in 'I'm a Celebrity' to make amends. What's not entirely clear is exactly for what, to whom, and how he is making amends. File picture

You don’t want your boyfriend or husband to decide the size of your boob job, according to the cosmetic surgeon on the radio. Not that he called it a boob job, although he didn’t seem to be greatly bothered when Sean Moncrieff called it exactly that. 

Nor did Dr Ahmad Salman express strong views on feminist autonomy. He just said his breast enhancement was likely to outlive the boyfriend or husband. Which is, you have to admit, a fresh approach to marketing.

But then again, maybe this surgeon doesn’t need to do marketing at all, given the proportion of his boob jobs (oops, breast enhancements) which are repair jobs. Not that he would call them that, either. A fair number of the woman pitching up in front of him, he pointed out, bear scars and distortions delivered by inept surgeons, although he chose not to insult those earlier surgeons. You could tell though, that he figured he was a load more ept than they were.

When people talk about marketing, they tend to talk about “disruption” and fashionable stuff like that, but in the service industry, which includes cosmetic surgery, plumbing, and communications training, repair jobs are your only man. 

If you’re good at your job, you’ll get a lot of customers whose mood ranges from the discontented to the desperate (plumbers get the desperate and also wet end of the market) eager to invest in your services. They don’t always tell other people, because they feel such boobs (you should pardon the expression) for having fallen for the first lousy supplier.

You can't fake sincerity...

The same day that Moncrieff dealt with the boob jobs, I dealt with a job-seeking graduate who had been expensively trained elsewhere but was now looking for repair work, consequent on getting no job despite undergoing several interviews since the training happened. 

Seasoned interviewers can spot a mile off the job candidates who have been coached to parrot buzzwords. Stock picture: iStock

Although the training was very good, she told me apologetically. It was probably just her.

Countdown... Camera on... Recording... 

I lobbed her a “tell us about yourself” question and she proved she’d been trained. She was a leader, she announced. 

Asked for evidence of her leadership in action, she offered, instead, a spiel in flawless jargon about the wider leadership concept. I think that’s what it was about, but me trying to understand her cement grey language was somewhat hampered by the upward inflection at the end of her every sentence, which made all of them sound like questions, and the word “so” creating the illusion of connection where connection was there none.

Asked about the book she claimed to be reading, she delivered a learned-off blurb from its back cover. I knew this because I happened to have the book on my desk and could blurb-check. Word-for-word faithful, she was.

An inquiry on her work experience evoked what she obviously thought was a compliment. 

“That’s a great question,” she told me with a dead smile. She said she often gets asked that question. (Well, yes, if you’re doing repeat job interviews, questions on your work experience are likely to recur.)

Then, towards the end of the recording, I asked her if she had any weaknesses, knowing the answer I would get. She clasped her hands together, namaste-fashion and ruefully admitted to being a perfectionist. In a self-deprecating way, of course.

Whoever had trained her had given her tricks and she had earnestly deployed them, even — sadly — internalised them so she genuinely thought it made her seem humble to confess to being a perfectionist. 

A bit like Mark Zuckerberg and the the Collison brothers confessing to having hired too many people. Shrug, shrug. 

Zuckerberg didn’t say: “I hired all these folk to serve me in arguably the biggest vanity project until Elon Musk bought Twitter.”

The Collison brothers didn’t say: “Because we got it so wrong, we’re going to show how sorry we are by immediately paying back the nearly €50m the State invested in our job creation promises.”

The sorrow of all these tech millionaires is shallower than a puddle, requires no firm purpose of amendment, and perish the thought that it might jump-start them into somehow sharing the misery of their erstwhile employees by cutting back on their own ginormous compensation packages.

...or apologise without change

Apology without a commitment to change means that, in just a few years, the Collison brothers, bless them, will be giving interviews in which they will explain what they learned from the tech-reset. And how it informed their corporate values.

Could we lay down a marker, here? 

Every business journalist interviewing a tech-mogul, and every facilitator at hi-tech love-ins, needs to cut across this corporate values drivel and ask the killer question: “Could you not have cut back just a bit on the millions you’re paid in order to help the people you maintain are the core of your business when things turned down a bit? Given that you blathered on about an upturn being foreseeable in the future, why didn’t you tell your shareholders that you were going to invest in humans to be able to make the best of that upturn?”

It’s curious. If you trawl through the websites of corporate entities of all kinds and grind your way through their boasts, none of them say: “And another thing. During the last recession, during the banking crisis, during the tech-reset, we never, ever laid anybody off.” 

Which is precisely what any half-decent company should be proud to claim. 

And if someone wants to add to the dozens of meaningless awards being dished out to corporate Ireland, maybe they should think about creating one which registers the real commitment to keeping people employed in bad times. Because it’s that commitment that separates the wheat from the chaff.

Right now, businessmen get lucky, get famous, lose contact with the real world, make crazy damaging decisions they describe self-servingly as “mistakes” and make apologies, but never make amends.

Contrition impossible

Some politicians follow the same pattern, most notably Matt Hancock.

Then British health minister Matt Hancock in 2021 with Gina Coladangelo. He resigned due to his breach of Covid regulations after CCTV footage emerged of them kissing. Picture: PA

The former British minister for health ignored his government’s own Covid rules because he had such an overwhelming need to snog the woman with whom he was having an extra-marital affair, got caught at it and was forced to resign, after he had already demonstrated heartless incompetence at managing the pandemic. 

He’s now starring in a reality TV programme where he gets renewed fame for eating pigs’ anuses and sheep’s vaginas while having white slime poured over his head. 

This he describes as making amends.

The producers of the show don’t have to demonstrate a grip on reality, because that’s the nature of reality TV, but, while eating insects and orifices may seem like a disgusting punishment, this is voluntary and well paid for in fame and money, so who, exactly, is he making amends to?

Matt Hancock claims he is on 'I'm a Celebrity' as a way to make amends, possibly referring to last year's reports of an extramarital affair with adviser Gina Coladangelo. File picture: PA/The Sun 

The moral gap between professional failure and damage inflicted by that failure on the one hand and contrition and making amends on the other, grows wider with each episode.