Colin Sheridan: Public disgrace need not last, someone else will trend tomorrow

Compared with some of the behaviour and conduct that now barely interrupt a career, Tiger Woods’s transgressions almost belong to another moral universe. Picture: David Cannon/Getty

Resign, marry, return. That’s all the telegram said.

In 1890, as Charles Stewart Parnell’s political career appeared to be disintegrating amid the Kitty O’Shea scandal, Cecil Rhodes wired him those three words from southern Africa. It may be the shortest piece of political advice ever committed to a telegram. It was also about 130 years ahead of its time.

Parnell, of course, ignored it. History took its own course. But the sentiment has endured because it contained a truth that perhaps wasn’t fully appreciated until now. Public disgrace needn’t be permanent. Sometimes all it requires is patience.

F Scott Fitzgerald famously disagreed. “There are no second acts in American lives,” he wrote. Sorry, Scotty. Looking around in 2026, it is difficult to find anything except second acts.

The Financial Times this week carried a lengthy profile of Hunter Biden. Whatever one’s opinion of him, the interview itself says something about the age in which we live. There was a time when scandal meant retreat.

A public figure disappeared from view, wrote an apologetic memoir a decade later, perhaps resurfaced to open a shopping centre somewhere, and quietly accepted that Act One had also been the finale.

Today, disgrace increasingly feels less like the end of the story than an inconvenient interval before the comeback tour. Politics does it. Sport does it. Entertainment practically depends upon it.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Reinvention has become one of the defining industries of modern life. We reinvent careers, identities, opinions, wardrobes, diets, social media profiles and, increasingly, ourselves. Why should reputations be any different?

There was something almost quaint about the way we once understood shame. Public life resembled cricket. Commit one serious indiscretion and you were expected to walk. 

These days it feels much closer to professional wrestling. The villain leaves the arena to a chorus of boos, disappears backstage for a while, changes costume, adopts a slightly different persona, and reappears through a cloud of dry ice to thunderous applause from half the audience.

Perhaps that’s unfair to professional wrestling.

Tiger Woods

Take Tiger Woods. In 2010 he stood before the world’s media to apologise for his serial infidelity. It was solemn, choreographed, and almost biblical in tone. He apologised to his family, to his supporters and, somehow, to the rest of us.

Looking back now, Woods must occasionally wonder whether he was simply born into the wrong scandal. Not because infidelity isn’t serious. It plainly is. But because public life has since recalibrated what it considers survivable. 

Compared with some of the allegations, behaviour, and political conduct that now barely interrupt a career, Tiger’s transgressions almost belong to another moral universe.

The point isn’t that standards have collapsed. It’s stranger than that. Standards have become negotiable.

Some reputations are still destroyed overnight. Others seem almost indestructible. Increasingly, it depends less on what happened than on whether your audience still wants to believe in you.

Perhaps that’s the real transformation. There used to be something approximating a shared public opinion. Today there are hundreds of different audiences, each with their own version of events.

A politician no longer needs everyone to think they are honourable. They simply need enough people to conclude that everyone else is exaggerating. That’s a remarkable shift.

Is Ireland behind?

Ireland, thankfully or frustratingly depending on your perspective, has always been slower to embrace these cultural imports. We still place a curious value on reputation. 

We like to believe our politicians should possess a degree of personal decency. We still expect apologies. We still expect resignations.

Remember Golfgate?

Dara Calleary resigned as minister within days of attending the Oireachtas Golf Society dinner during covid restrictions. Whether one believes his resignation was entirely proportionate is almost beside the point. 

The expectation that somebody should lose office over a serious lapse in judgement still felt natural to most Irish people.

Viewed through the prism of contemporary American politics, however, it almost feels like an artefact from another age. Across the Atlantic, resignation increasingly resembles an optional lifestyle choice.

Which raises an awkward question.

Are we genuinely different? Or are we simply behind?

American culture has an uncanny habit of washing up on Irish shores a few years later. We imported reality television, social media, influencer culture, and political branding. We imported the permanent campaign and outrage. 

It would be optimistic to imagine that we alone might somehow resist importing the idea that reputations are infinitely repairable too. Perhaps we already have.

Or are we outraged?

Maybe the reason so many public figures now survive scandal isn’t because society has become more forgiving. Maybe we’ve simply become more forgetful.

Every week delivers a fresh controversy. Every day another pile-on. Every hour another moral emergency. Public attention has become the most finite resource in modern life. Outrage has a shelf life measured not in months but in minutes.

The old political advice was to get ahead of the story. The new advice appears to be much simpler.

Wait. Someone else will trend tomorrow.

None of this is to suggest that redemption is a bad thing. Quite the opposite. Civilisations should believe in second chances. Individuals should be allowed to rebuild their lives. We’d be a harsher society if they weren’t.

The more interesting question is whether we’ve quietly stopped distinguishing between redemption and rehabilitation on the one hand, and reinvention without accountability on the other. There is a difference. Or at least there used to be.

Which brings us back to that wonderfully economical telegram sent to Parnell all those years ago.

Resign, marry, return.

It reads today less like a piece of 19th-century political advice than a 21st century communications strategy.

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Fitzgerald, meanwhile, probably deserves an apology. He was wrong about there being no second acts in American lives.

There are second acts everywhere now. Third acts too.

The only uncertainty is whether Ireland still insists that the interval between them should involve genuine contrition — or whether, like everyone else, we’ve started confusing the simple passage of time with forgiveness.