[user104658]

Originally Posted by Livia

He's wasting his time trying to explain. The hand-wringers have already got too tight a hold on this they'll never let it drop, he is damned for all time.

I'm convinced that if he said sorry, openly, sincerely and just once and then laid low for six months people would completely forget about it, having long moved on to the next "incident". This applies to pretty much every single celebrity slip up but it seems that people NEVER learn that repeatedly engaging and apologising only prolongs the attention and actually ensures that people DO remember.

Unless something starts being drawn out, the "general public" (and especially social media) has a very, very short memory. He'd probably even have been back on the beeb in a couple of years, but he's making it worse with the follow-up comments.