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“Retribution, it appears, is coming,” says the journalist Tom Newton Dunn. He is referring to the bishops in the House of Lords who had the temerity to collectively criticise the Government’s Rwanda policy. It “shames Britain”, the bishops said. Tory cabinet ministers are furious. “Only Iran also has clerics that sit in their legislature,” one told Newton Dunn. “They’ll go.”
They won’t, of course. The sort of constitutional changes that would be required to make this happen would make Brexit look like child’s play. And the public would have little tolerance for the months — no, years — of rancour spent defenestrating the British constitution. That the Conservative Party is even considering it shows how far out of touch the Tories are with the establishment — that cat’s cradle of interlaced institutions and social relations in which the country is held together. The Party used to value this historic legacy: it was created to conserve it. Chucking the bishops out of the Lords while leaving all those political appointments and Tory donors on the red benches gives off a clear message: King Boris doesn’t like to be crossed.
I used to think that the presence of unelected religious leaders in the Lords was an insult to democracy. It was bad for the country and, even more important, it was bad for the Church: it turned our senior clerics into pliant courtiers, who spent too much time raiding the 17th-century dressing-up box and camping about in pointless processions. It all seems a long way from the carpenter from Galilee. Absent from such deferential flummery, the Church would be free to become a more radical organisation, more aligned to its founding mission. In the US, the separation of church and state was not designed to protect the state from the church — but to protect the church from the state.
The glamour of power is a kind of spiritual kryptonite for clerics, and very few of us are unaffected by it. When I was at St Paul’s Cathedral, it was almost impossible for a sense of self-importance not to seep into your bones. It was all terribly insidious and corrosive; I don’t trust clerics who deny this. I well remember standing in the vestry at St Paul’s in my new canon’s cassock, adorned with a dashing row of red buttons to mark your status. Rowan Williams came into the vestry and looked me up and down, slightly mockingly. “Red buttons,” he said. “It always starts with red buttons.”
Power has a way of finding out your weaknesses. Like the rain, it gets into the cracks unnoticed, then splits you open when the freeze comes. Here is one example: some months before the red buttons comment, I was asked to chair a group that organised a large service for the livery companies at St Paul’s. The service ended with members of the livery returning to their halls for a huge slap-up lunch. I asked whether this was entirely appropriate, given that it was still Lent. Various reasons were given for why this was necessary, but I was marked up as a potential troublemaker.
That year, after the service, I was cleverly invited for lunch at one of the posher livery companies. I ate poached turbot and drank a delicious white burgundy; of the seven deadly sins, mine is probably gluttony. It was here they found me out. I never raised a serious question about the service again.
