Gabriel Weston made a mistake at work this summer. It doesn’t define her – she was and is a well-regarded NHS surgeon and author – but it was serious enough, as she explained in an extraordinarily candid series of Instagram and Substack posts this month, to prompt an investigation that left her feeling “ashamed and alone and really quite nervous”. Whatever went wrong in the operating theatre was bad enough to be classed a “never event” (something that should never be able to happen if the process is working properly) and triggered a nagging anxiety that she might somehow do it again, unless she figured out where she had unexpectedly gone wrong.
It’s a fascinating insight into a process that most people never have the courage to talk about openly. But it also highlights why it’s so hard in practice for doctors and other professionals to acknowledge and learn from mistakes – as every public inquiry into every public scandal ends up recommending, only to repeat it all over again after the next one – rather than close ranks and cover up. Weston says she only spoke up out of frustration with what she saw as her employers’ failure to support her (she had asked to reduce what she considered an overloaded operating list to take some pressure off, which she says has now happened, leaving her full of praise for the hospital’s ultimate response). Judging by the responses to her posts, she’s not alone.
I thought of Weston this week when Liz Truss published Bank Job, the second book she has written in two years circling the drain of her career. This one seems if anything even less self-aware, blaming the Bank of England, not herself, for the spectacular failure of her mini-budget (even her old cheerleaders at the Telegraph called it deranged). But it’s also oddly sad. There’s something near-pathological about the inability to engage with an excruciatingly public failure, as if the truth would shatter her. She can’t seem to leave the whole episode alone – can’t withdraw, as Keir Starmer has, into stony silence about his own prematurely curtailed time in Downing Street – yet can’t really face it head-on either.
How does anyone learn from cataclysmic failure? I don’t mean the frothy, early-career kind that seemed the end of the world at the time, but which you can laugh about now from the security of knowing that eventually everything turned out fine. Those aren’t the kind of failures the state really cares about avoiding. Nor do I mean the kind whose authors somehow manage to fail upwards anyway – or at least onwards, like Truss, into some strange reincarnation on YouTube. The failures that most haunt their authors, but which often hold the most useful lessons for preventing such a thing ever happening again, are often of the “there but for the grace of God go you and I” kind, involving formerly blameless and conscientious people who make one inexplicably dumb mistake, often under pressure or when exhausted.
Richard Jackson was a high-flying civil servant working on counter-terrorism, who one night accidentally scooped up two classified documents that should never have left the building along with some routine papers he was taking home. Realising his error that night, he fatally compounded it by deciding to sneak the files back before their absence was noticed, only to accidentally leave them on the train – where they were found and handed into a BBC reporter, resulting in a security scandal that cost Jackson his job and left him close to suicide. The advice on coping he shared in a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s Life Changing series – get dark thoughts out of your head by writing them down or telling someone; keep a note of all the nice things people have ever said to you; don’t let your life be defined by one mistake – seems useful for individuals in the eye of the storm. But so perhaps is what Weston calls a degree of professional “care and acceptance” for good people who have failed, and want help working out why.
Shamelessness has a deservedly terrible reputation in public life, and for some mistakes forgiveness can be too much to ask.
But it’s shame that prevents thoughtful people learning from failure; shame that drives the cover-up; shame that ruins, and sometimes even ends, lives. People willing to honestly examine their own mistakes for others’ benefit deserve some grace in return. The true shame lies with those refusing to offer it.
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