A Different View with Dave O’Connell

You’d wonder how far any of us would get if every tiny detail of our lives to date was dragged up at a job interview – and yet we expect our politicians to be purer than the driven snow.

If you didn’t screw up at some stage, you haven’t really lived. Whether it was sailing close to the wind in your formative years or committing an error of judgement further down the road, nobody gets to a certain vintage without a couple of suitcases packed with old baggage.

So we tolerate our own past indiscretions, but we absolutely insist that our politicians and public figures should be cleaner than Caesar’s wife.

In a totally different context – Premier League football, to be exact – top referee Anthony Taylor last week put a name on it. Expectations of perfection, he called it.

He was talking about referees, of course, and the pressure they are under to be right every time; it’s a different kind of pressure and stress – but it amounts to the same thing; we excuse our own fallibility, but we won’t tolerate it in others.

That’s not to suggest we should ignore or condone criminal activity, for example, or that we shouldn’t expect our public representatives to be of moral fortitude and high standing.

But who can go through life without getting something wrong? Who can say without fear of contradiction that they have never put a foot wrong?

Who can reflect on the naivety of youth without some modicum of embarrassment at what we thought was perfectly okay back then?

So, what, therefore, entitles us to expect higher standards from others than we do of ourselves?

Admittedly this goes against so much of the raison d’être for media in the first place, because holding people accountable for their actions – or at least making those actions known in the public domain – is at the core of what we are supposed to stand for.

But accountability is also a question of balance; it’s the right to make a mistake and not have it overshadow the rest of your life. It’s the right to be forgiven and, for the most part, eventually forgotten.

The problem is that, if you are a public figure or you have been active in public life, then you are more heavily scrutinised than someone who is sprung onto the political landscape.