I DON’T know when it happened, and I’m just about getting my head around why, but at some point in the past hundred years, management consultants took over the world.

Stroll into town and you’ll see what I mean. Deloitte. PWC. EY. KPMG. Lining up along the Esplanade, and with offices just tall enough to give the executive branch a sea-view, they all seem to be doing rather well… But what do they actually do? Perhaps their websites can offer some answers.

KPMG apparently has an ‘integrated team of specialists [who] work at deal speed to help you find and drive value throughout your transformation and transaction lifecycle’. Deloitte goes further, ‘[helping] you imagine, deliver, and run your future […] because impact isn’t created alone. Together we can make history’. Much bigger, much better.

Although, PWC takes the biscuit with this contribution: ‘Think bold. Apply technology in new ways. Enhance experience. Realise value.’ So. Innovative.

And. Streamlined. They’ve. Done. Away.

With. Full. Sentences.

Deal speed. (Exactly how fast is that?) Impact. Realising value… I’m reading it all through, and with great distress, when something hits me.

We’ve heard all this before; this isn’t just corporatese, this is polit-speak.

I hurry to the government website and pull up the most recent speech I can find, landing on Chief Minister Kristina Moore’s address to the Chamber of Commerce last week. A brief scan reveals a litany of offences: ‘Putting this narrative into practice… A new sustainable healthcare funding mechanism… Relentless focus…’ (Do some more digging and you’ll find an oldFacebook video titled ‘Kristina Moore’s Three Point Plan for Jersey’ in which she calls for some ‘joined-up thinking’ to address the Island’s problems.) And then there is the curse of threes, like an intern who took a speech-writing course, or watched too much of The West Wing, has somehow got their hands on the final edit: ‘affordable, deliverable and appropriate’, ‘our housing, population, and skills challenges’, ‘our workforce, economy and community’. (It reminds me of my first year at university when I allowed the online thesaurus to rain down hellfire and satanic inflammation into my essays.) It might seem funny, and I might be being overly harsh (despite the atrocious slogan – ‘Moore2Do!’ – the Chief Minister’s relentless focus is on the right areas: housing, the cost of living, the state of Jersey’s workforce), but beneath all the -isms and -tions, something more sinister is at play.

While management consultants take a PowerPoint presentation and a briefcase full of laser pointers into battle, politicians, like lawyers, have their words – language is their primary tool. It is how they affect change in all our lives, and it has been diluted beyond recognition.

In only the past few weeks we’ve seen a catalogue of lies, deceit and outrightobfuscations tear through the political world. Chairman of the Conservative Party Nadhim Zahawi has (at the time of writing) managed to wheedle his way out of any wrongdoing by finessing what appears to be utter misconduct as ‘carelessness’. In doing so, he likened his multi-million-pound tax settlement with HMRC to just a slip of the tongue, an extra zero here and there. It’s not like he was Chancellor of the Exchequer when all this happened… The best example of these linguistic gymnastics undoubtedly comes from across the pond, where Republican Congressman George Santos falsely claimed that he was of ‘Jewish’ heritage.His response: he only ever said he was ‘Jew-ish’.

Look further back and it is easy to see how this inability to address problems head on, to speak with clarity and sincerity, has perpetuated a breed of politics in which no one, especially at the highest levels, is held accountable.

In the aftermath of ‘partygate’ last year, not only was it impossible to make Boris Johnson resign – this seems to be an affliction affecting all politicians, excluding New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern – it was equally impossible to get a real confession out of him. Instead, he ‘offered’ a ‘full apology’ and acknowledged ‘the hurt and the anger’. On failing to wear his seatbelt last week, Rishi Sunak could only bring himself to express ‘regret’, and in doing so turned a forgivable mishap into a much bigger story than it should have been.

Everyone makes mistakes – politicians and hairdressers more than others – and that’s OK. You ask them to apologise, or you go to the competitor down the road.

But if no one is going to resign anymore, or use language any of us actually understands, can they at least drop the false sincerity and start by giving proper apologies? A simple ‘I’m sorry’ would do.

•Oliver Hodges recently graduated from Oxford University, where he read French. He is currently pursuing a career as a writer and journalist.