Slowly slowly slowly the disavowals trickle in.

Pan Macmillan has taken the unprecedented step of apologising to its former author Kate Clanchy four years after it parted company with the writer. Clanchy left her publisher Picador in January 2022 after her book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was accused of perpetuating racial stereotyping, an accusation she denies.

The statement put out by Joanna Prior, CEO, Pan Macmillan – who took on the role in 2022, a year after the controversy flared – read: “This was clearly a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past. I’m sorry for the hurt that was caused to Kate Clanchy and many others.” 

Jeezus. If you’re going to apologize then apologize. Don’t make a half-assed feint at apologizing while distancing yourself from the very apology you’re pretending to make. If you can’t manage to say you’re sorry for the harm Pan Macmillan did then don’t say anything. Above all don’t hint that your victim is a whiney baby who gets her feelings hurt too easily.

Also don’t translate “Pan Macmillan behaved horribly” to “a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past.” If the lawyers won’t let you say it bluntly and clearly, then fire them or ignore them or quit the job. Whatever. Just don’t do this all too familiar thing of pretending to apologize while carefully not actually doing so. Have some guts. Have some sensitivity to language, which is after all the field you’re in.

A six-part BBC podcast on the events that took place in 2021 – Shadow World: Anatomy of a Cancellation – is to be aired from 12th November, and features interviews with many caught up in the episode, including authors Philip Pullman and Monisha Rajesh. In a preview of the series now on the BBC, Clanchy says she was “scapegoated”, while one unidentified voice calls what happened to her as a witch hunt. Others, though, saw it as a reckoning at a time when publishers were still responding to the killing of the US Black man George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.

When publishers were still responding to the killing of George Floyd by randomly punishing authors in a different country thousands of miles from Minnesota.