So, Italian tourism minister Stefano Stefani has finally fallen on his sword and apologised for his anti-German comments in defense of Berlusconi. Except that it’s not really an apology at all;

“I love Germany,” Mr Stefani wrote to (German newspaper) Bild. “If, through my words, a misunderstanding resulted for many Germans, I would like to hereby apologise many times.”

Just like his boss, Stefani merely ‘expresses regret’ that the thick headed targets of various insults – ‘Nazi guard’ or “stereotyped blondes with ultra-nationalist pride” who have no sense of humour and pass their time with belching contests – actually interpreted these comments as offensive. It takes a certain amount of pig-headedness to issue an apology that offers fresh insult, but I suppose that’s inevitable when the apology is triggered by political necessity and not genuine remorse.

Marina Warner, in a series of essays for Open Democracy, examines the history and politics of another kind of political apology; the currently trendy apologies made by leaders for long past acts, an easier task than a heartfelt mea culpa for last week’s gaffe. She notes that direct apologies for recent wrongdoings are the only ones that really count, but that they’re mostly in the female preserve. The grand political gestures – Blair’s apology for the Irish Famine, Pope JP II’s millennium apology to women and Jews – may help bind modern day identity politics, but rarely amount to more than words;

“Apologising represents a bid for virtue and can even imply an excuse not to do anything more about the injustice in question. Encurled inside it may well be the earlier meaning of vindication. So it can offer hypocrites a main chance. It can also, as in the case of the priestly self-fashioning of some political leaders, make a claim on their own behalf for some sacred, legitimate authority.”

So it seems that we may have to wait a century or two for our friends at Forza Italia to (hypocritically) bend the knee.