The year after Columba died on Iona, another mission to convert the British began, this one landing in Kent. This was the official mission. Initiated by the Pope, it was fronted by a Roman priest called Augustine who would become known as the “apostle to the English.” He was lucky. The local Kentish king was married to a Frankish Christian woman, so the new faith was not unknown. Things went so well for Augustine’s mission that he remained in Kent and set up his headquarters there. This is why the current leader of 100 million Anglicans, all over the world, takes his title from the small town of Canterbury.

If things proceed as planned (and they probably won’t) there could be a new Archbishop on the throne of Augustine by the autumn. It has taken so long because the Diocese of Canterbury couldn’t get its act together to work through the thicket of electoral rules that govern the election of three members of the Canterbury Diocese to the Crown Nominations Committee (CNC), the appointing body for the next archbishop. They had three botched elections before they finally got it right. It took the Roman Catholics 17 days from the death of Pope Francis to the election of Pope Leo. That election transfixed the world with its pomp, glamour and excitement. Our process will be done in committees, and though certainly more inclusive, will be as dreary and procedural as taking out a mortgage. And it is being run by the former boss of MI5, so don’t expect any interesting leaks. Though this much he has said: we must avoid a short list “all of whom are white, Oxbridge, male and come from the southeast of England.”

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The problem in finding a suitable person is this: it has become an impossible job. Not just difficult, but impossible. After all, the Archbishop has to be in more than one place at the same time — as both head of the Church of England and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion — and also because it necessitates the ability to say totally opposite things to the very different and warring tribes of the church. It is a job where much is expected, but with very little power to achieve it. The Church of England is mired in layers of deadening bureaucracy. Many clergy feel unloved and overworked. Morale is low. A report on the issue of trust within the Church has recently been canned because to investigate it might “do more harm than good”, the Bishop of Peterborough explained recently.

Which is why no one wants the job. To be the Archbishop of Canterbury is to put yourself into the meat grinder. You are asked to speak Christian truths to a nation that largely couldn’t care less what you say, unless you say something silly or too political. Then the press will chew you up. You are asked to take royal funerals and make speeches in the House of Lords, yet also to have the common touch, appealing to everyone. “All things to all people,” as Saint Paul described it.

No wonder anyone with the slightest shred of self-preservation would run a mile from the job — leaving only a bunch of deeply unexciting candidates. Many would love to see the current Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Dehqani, as Archbishop. Born in Isfahan, her father was the first ethnic Persian to be Bishop of Iran since the 7th century. In 1980, her brother was murdered by Iranian government agents. She is Church of England through and through, but with a global perspective. Her maiden speech was described as “a powerful and very personal debut from Chelmsford that had several pees wiping away tears and saying it was the finest they had heard.” This is exactly what the Church needs. But perhaps she may not have the Teflon skin required to survive the nastiness of the Church and the press. Bishop Guli took time off work to bring up her children, and she is not one of those hard-bitten career clerics who would do anything for the top job, even to the detriment of their families. 

One way of proceeding would be to split the job in two, with Canterbury doing England and another Archbishop looking after the rest of the world. Pretty much everyone agrees this would be a good idea. But separating these Siamese twins will take time, perhaps years. And having someone in to steady the ship whilst the necessary surgery is performed is not a bad idea. And there is probably no better candidate here than the current Bishop of London, Sarah Mullaly. She is 63, so couldn’t do it for ages. As a former chief nursing officer, she has an interesting hinterland. But who knows if she would be prepared to do it.

I am not singling out two women for ideological reasons. The reality is just that when it comes to men, the cupboard is bare. The Bishop of Norwich, Graham Usher, would have been great, but he has cleverly dodged the bullet by getting himself on the CNC appointing committee, and so is ineligible. There are some Welby continuity candidates out there, like Martyn Snow, the evangelical Bishop of Leicester, who is the one person who looks like he wants it. But the Welby era proved to be so disastrous that it’s hard to imagine anyone would want to risk a repeat of that. Safeguarding issues — real or imagined — are now kryptonite to any potential candidate, and it’s hard to think of many senior bishops for whom this is not a problem, however unfair that might be.

The Church of England is at a fork in the road. Those who see the long arc of history as pointing inevitably towards a more secular society predict only more decline. But the evidence of history suggests that the Church often goes through periods of greater and lesser popularity. And we need someone who doesn’t panic about the challenge of secularity. A steady faithful presence in Lambeth Palace, someone who isn’t constantly firing off nervous new initiatives, redirecting the church’s resources to glitzy new evangelistic movements, is essential. We have had enough of breathlessly conceived boom-and-bust initiatives. We need the calm of someone who has spent proper time with the sea and the sky, with the kind of demeanour that has been formatted by eternity, rather than the frenetic pace of meetings at Lambeth Palace. When they go fast, he or she must go slow.  

Back on Iona, with a group of pilgrims from my church in London, we wander the island and feel our body clocks adjusting to a different rhythm. And here amid the rocks and spray another thought comes to mind. What if we don’t want another company man, but someone from the edge of things? More Columba than Augustine. Columba’s Gaelic tradition was less hierarchical, more decentralized. In the end, this gentler more contemplative tradition lost out at the Synod of Whitby, 664 AD, where on-the-make career clerics like Saint Wilfred persuaded the wider church to follow Augustine’s European centralized Christianity rather than Columba’s Irish version. 

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However tricky it looks to find the right candidate from amongst the present house of Bishops, there are a great many faithful and compelling clerics out there who would be a breath of fresh air. Pope Urban V wasn’t a bishop when he was elected Pope. Pope Gregory X wasn’t even a priest. Could the Church of England summon the courage to do something similar, to reach beyond the obvious and find someone sitting in a croft on the Farne Islands, praying and watching the birdlife? Someone whose soul has not been deadened by committees and spreadsheets. Or even somewhere in Africa or South America, where the Church is bursting with life? The super spy chair of the CNC is right: no more male, pale, establishment and stale.

Oh, I know, it’s a fantasy. Not least because the next Archbishop of Canterbury must hold a British passport in order to sit in the House of Lords. Institutional decluttering is essential but unimaginable. But we can dream. What we really need in an Archbishop is someone who will pray for his or her clergy and stop flying around the world and sitting in meetings. Perhaps they could even abolish that terrible old talking shop, General Synod, about to meet up in York. The Church is at its worst when it tries to act like it’s important.

On the ground, many churches are flourishing despite the fact that Augustine’s throne feels as cursed at the Chelsea number nine shirt. But there’s a huge incentive to find a steady leader while momentum in the Church is hot. In the UK, Bible sales have grown from 2.7 million in 2019 to 5 million in 2024, and especially among the young. Something is stirring. The secular age may be bottoming out. And we need someone to surf this new mood. What we are looking for is another — doubtless very different — St Columba.

So into that one word a whole pile of very deep stuff collapses — our relationship to the ultimate nature of things, our relationship to religion, our relationship with our own fathers. You don’t have to be Freud to find it unsurprising that Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, touched a highly sensitive nerve when he worried out loud that there might be a problem with “Our father”.

Many commentators inwardly groaned, spotting another depressing bout of Church of England wokery. And yes, the Archbishop did inevitably rehearse the idea that God is the apex predator of the patriarchy. But actually, what he said was worse than that. Much worse.

This is exactly what he said: “Yes, I know the word ‘Father’ is problematic for those whose experience of earthly Fathers has been destructive and abusive.” And he is clearly right that if your father beat or molested you as a child, then the word “father” will have disturbing connotations. But what the press did not pick up on was the fact that “Father” is also how many of the clergy style themselves. And if Father so-and-so abused you as a choirboy, then yes: “Our Father” may well be a problem.

In truth, things were already difficult for the Archbishop and the church he leads. For the current meeting of the General Synod in York has witnessed a crisis for the Church of England on an almost unimaginable scale — a full descent into acrimony and chaos, which will take a generation to recover from. “The Church often does the work of Satan,” one Priest wrote, after witnessing events unfold on Sunday.

He was referring to the Archbishops’ Council having decided to disband the church’s Independent Safeguarding Board, and sack its members. This is the body tasked with, among other things, looking into clerical abuse and supporting those who are victims of it. It is supposed to be independent because the Church of England has a long history of covering up its own mess. But it turns out that when its members say things that the Archbishops’ Council do not like, they can be fired and the board closed down.

As the Bishop of Birkenhead, the Church’s own deputy lead for safeguarding, put it: “Today the church is less accountable. To remove, at short notice, the strongest independent voices holding the CofE to account for its safeguarding failings makes us look resistant to robust scrutiny and challenge — which, of course, we are.” When the sacked Safeguarding officials were eventually able to speak — after much wrangling over whether they should be allowed to — they told the Synod that they had indeed been “silenced”. This is extraordinary. If the Church can silence its own Safeguarding body, what hope do survivors have?

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Even under the full glare of synodical scrutiny, it was hard to get a straight answer. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was asked directly if he had personally voted to disband the Independent Safeguarding Body. His reply indicated he has clearly been spending a lot of time around politicians (fellow Old Etonians, perhaps). “Both Archbishops wished to wait a bit,” he said, which gives the very strong impression that he and the Archbishop of York had voted against the move to disband. Later, under more pressure, the church admitted that they had both voted for it. Had it been made in the House of Commons, Welby might have faced accusations of misleading the House.

With all this in mind, let us return to Cottrell’s little aside on “Our Father”. As it happens, both of us get called Father by people to whom we have no relationship of biological kinship. It has taken me many years to adjust to this. Sunday-school children, at one of my early parishes in the Black Country, used to think it sounded hilariously like Farmer Giles. I didn’t.

But the main reason it sits uncomfortably with me is that it smacks too much of perhaps the deepest sin of the church: clericalism. Father knows best. At the time of the Reformation, clergy were known as “Sir”. In this country, it was only towards the end of the 19th century that Father became a widespread form of address for the Catholic clergy. It’s a kind of modern affectation. For the likes of Cardinal Manning, who promoted it, Father indicated some kind of exulted spiritual status, a special alignment with the ultimate Father, God.

This is odd when you come to think about it. Being celibates, Catholic clergy do not themselves father children — at least, they are not supposed to. Instead, Father indicates a spiritual kind of responsibility, akin to fatherhood, but not the same as it. Still, in some contexts, being called Father became, too easily, a mark of membership to a club — a club to which many lonely men without families would turn, for company, whiskey and good gossip. Personally, I love my membership of this club. But there is a shadow side to its exclusivity, which, to be clear, is nothing to do with its campery. One for all and all for one can ingrain a certain omertà, a sense that we look after each other through thick and thin, even when the clergy fail.

Of course, it is not just Catholics and Anglo-Catholics who abuse those in their care. Alleged perpetrators of abuse include 242 clergy, 53 church officers, and 41 volunteers who work with children. Creepy, charismatic pastors having secret “wrestling matches” with young men, or authoritarian evangelicals giving naked beatings to vulnerable adults – many of these were extremely well-connected people, with friendships at the highest level.

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What was so depressing about the “Our Father” aside was not that it was woke, but that it was absolutely true. Those who are victims of abuse cannot trust the church. And what has been the official response to all of this? Yet another report has been called for. “Mistakes have been made,” the Archbishop of York admitted, “and we need to review that and learn from them”. As he was speaking, survivors were placing ribbons and posters on the fence outside, to remember victims. The next day, this little protest had disappeared.

The church is in total crisis, defeated by defensive managerialism and a clerical circling of wagons. On Sunday evening, many had had enough. The Director of Communications for the Anglican Communion, Gavin Drake, resigned from the Synod. “I joined the Synod to make the Church of England a safer place. I have failed, because the central machinery of the Church of England will use all its power to block the Synod from doing what it exists to do.” Many in the church are fast losing trust in our leadership. Because it is our spiritual fathers that are the problem — not our heavenly one.

The Anglican Communion is the product of empire. As the map of the world came to be covered in red, missionaries from the Church of England piggybacked upon the whole imperial project to convert indigenous peoples to the joys of the Book of Common Prayer. And they were remarkably successful at it: Cranmer proved surprisingly popular in Kigali. Not only that, but the worldwide Anglican Church — especially in Africa — continues to grow at an incredible rate. As churchgoing collapses in the UK, and in the West more generally, in other places it is rapidly expanding. In 1970, there were 7.7 million Anglicans in Africa. By 2015, that figure had risen to 57 million and continues to grow. In numerical terms, Anglicanism is thriving — it is currently the third largest group of Christians in the world. Never before have there been so many people in the pews. Mostly, they are in their thirties, female, black, and conservative.

It may be no surprise, therefore, that the Archbishop of Canterbury has proposed that the worldwide Anglican Communion ought to have a greater say in choosing his successor. It used to be that the global communion supplied just one of the 17-member group that passed a name to the Queen. Last month, it was agreed that it should be five — with local representation from Canterbury being halved. The Church of England was formed on the basis that “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England”. Yet in the years to come, the Bishops of Nigeria will play a decisive role in choosing the most senior member of the British establishment outside the royal family, and ex officio member of the House of Lords. Which is why it is likely that the next Archbishop will be even more conservative on matters of sexuality than his — and yes, it will inevitably be a him — predecessor. The fabric of the Communion will continue to tear, with the shrinking liberal West at continual ideological war with the burgeoning Global South, the hot button issue remaining that of homosexuality.

The organisers of this year’s Lambeth Conference were especially keen that the world’s bishops would not get derailed by more endless arguments over gay sex. But however hard they tried, the question could not be managed away. Somehow, a text that claimed “it is the mind of the Anglican Communion as a whole that same-gender marriage is not permissible” found its way into the official papers. Given that a number of the bishops are themselves in same-sex marriages (their spouses were not invited), this was slightly tricky. Late on Monday night, just hours before all the purple shirts were due to gather, Justin Welby intervened to allow liberal bishops to express their disagreement with this statement. But the damage was already done. The Conference was preceded with lots of talk of reconciliation. Planners had been “cooing in our ears about fellowship”, said the Bishop of Los Angeles. But all that feels a very long way away now. The Anglican Communion has long been a recipe for perpetual rancour. And the only way to take all the acrimony from the debate is to stop Canterbury being the focus of the global Church.

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How a small and rather uneventful town in Kent became the centre of a worldwide religious community is a story that develops from the earliest conversion of England, through its popularity as a pilgrimage site because of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, to the rapid expansion of the British Empire. These days there is no reason for Canterbury, or its Bishop, to be so important. But bishops don’t vote to make themselves less important. And the inclusion of worldwide representation for choosing the next Archbishop, while ushered in under the banner of greater inclusion, is actually a way of making the Archbishop into a kind of Anglican Pope. Motions at the Lambeth Conference that speak of the “mind of the Communion” only reinforce the deeply un-Anglican but increasingly common idea that the Church is some top-down structure where people are told what to believe by a gathering of (mostly) men in pointy hats. Parishes are bleeding their power to dioceses; local national churches are being told what to think by meetings in Canterbury. Power is centripetal.

Unfortunately, Christianity has this thing about centralisation. Perhaps it’s the whole “one God” thing that creates a desire for “may they all be one as your heavenly father is one”. This thirst for oneness is an excellent thing when understood spiritually as the universal coming together of human beings, our fundamental solidarity under God; but organisationally it is a recipe for domination and bitterness. The idea that the latter can force the former is a terrible idea. The more power that gets located at the centre, the more there is to fight over.

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The Church bangs on about decolonisation when it comes to things like statues. But when it comes to power, the central Church keeps on accruing more to itself. It would not be constantly derailed by pointless arguments over gay sex if there wasn’t any theological or administrative power to claim. I would be perfectly happy for the world’s bishops to have a jolly to Kent every ten years: they could meet for lunch, go to the pub, worship in the Cathedral. They could meet other bishops, share a bit of gentle ecclesiastical gossip, sometimes have difficult chats about their differences. But they absolutely shouldn’t sit in meetings and pass motions. And there mustn’t be some chief wizard whose favour they are all seeking to curry.

The Anglican Community needs to become a much looser federation of churches where theological difference is not able to derail a sense of common endeavour. Only a powerless centre can become a focus of unity.

Spiritually it is extremely bad for you; people are either too nice or too horrible. Expectations are unrealistic: you are a fantasy of projection and a lightning-rod for disappointment. And every day having to put up with jokes about actresses and only being able to move diagonally… The golden rule is: if you really want to be a bishop, you almost certainly shouldn’t be one.

Things are about to get a whole lot worse. Bishops are the latest part of the church now slated for reinvention — part of the twaddle-riven Welby-era revolution that is totally transforming church structures.

Traditionally, the role of the bishop is to be a vicar to the vicars, to support the frontline pastorally, and to maintain sound doctrine within the church. They are pastors who know what good theology looks like. They carry a shepherd’s crook to indicate that they have authority over their flock, to direct the wayward sheep. But for the most part, the sheep still do as they please. And for those on the more catholic end of the spectrum, they exist to maintain an unbroken link of continuity with the early church – one bishop passing on the faith to another through the laying on of hands. They have lots of symbolic responsibility and little executive authority. These days, we would call it soft power.

They have a significant role in recruitment. But when a vicar gets handed the keys to his or her church, the bishop has less power to direct what goes on there than most people imagine. Subsidiarity in the Church of England — pushing control down to the parishes — was established to maintain the balance of power within that unique ecclesiological experiment that is the Church of England: a church that is both Catholic and Protestant at the same time. Subsidiarity, and the legal freehold for vicars that has been put place to protect it, exists to make sure a catholic-minded bishop won’t go round sacking evangelical clergy, or the other way round. It’s the same basic structure that exists to guarantee freedom of thought for academics who have tenure.

But, of course, the more you protect the freedom of the parish clergy, the less authority the bishop has over them. So, whereas a Roman Catholic Bishop could ring up one of his priests and ask him — require him — to move to a new parish, a Church of England bishop could do no such thing. Which is why the CofE is a good place to be a vicar and a bad place to be a bishop. And you can understand the frustration of the bishops. They get the blame for all the bad stuff and don’t have enough authority to change it. Even more so, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Little wonder, over the past few years, the steady stream of bishops going over to Rome now seems more like a Biblical flood. They have proper bishops over there, so goes the thought, and with enough authority to resist all the things that a retired Church of England bishop hasn’t been able to put a stop to.

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The higher-ups in the Welby era have a different plan, and it is clever. Instead of seeing the administrative burden being imposed on the church as some sort of dead weight, they see it as an opportunity, as a route to power. These people no longer talk of bishops as being pastors or of the job being about ministry, they talk of “leadership” and “mission”. How my heart sinks when I hear those words.

They will absolutely deny this, of course, but the current travails of the Church of England, and the source of its internal acrimony, is that bishops – now recast as leaders — who have often only spent five minutes as parish priests, think that they know far better how to do the job. They are using the whole apparatus of the administrative church to find ways round the historic and legal protections that exist to defend the central model of a priest in their parish. In effect, they have decided to let the old model wither on the vine — by amalgamating parishes, cutting clergy posts when they become vacant — and redirecting funds to a whole new structure based on modern and secular lines of responsibility. The old church is too well protected legally, so they want to build a para church beside it, much better funded, but without the old legal protections. And one that is far more responsive to the “leadership”.

The cover for this transformation is the “let many flowers bloom” line. New ways can flourish alongside the old, they say. It’s a mixed economy. In some Dioceses — mine, in fact — this is how it is being played out. I’m lucky. But in others, the bishop has come to be seen as the enemy of traditional church structures i.e. the parish. That is what happened recently in Winchester, for example, where the bishop was forced to quit after an unprecedented rebellion by the parish clergy against his authoritarian manner and hostility to the old ways of doing church. And as bishops seek to use different channels to express their authority, parish clergy are joining unions — generally Unite — as never before. The old pastoral relationship between clergy and their bishop is being transformed into a business model, with more than a whiff of the acrimony that can exist between the boss class and the workers. “Save the Parish” is the fastest growing organisation in the church, and the mood is becoming more and more that of the awkward squad.

This is the context into which the Church of England now announces that it is considering a cabinet of senior bishops, with responsibility built around roles – Brexit bishop, Covid bishop and so on. The more Right-wing press thinks this is a foray into politics and that, as they are constantly saying, the church should stay out of it. But the church is intrinsically political because the Bible is. And there is no way a good Christian can stay out politics any more than they can stay out of pastoral care or worship. But the way the church approaches the political must be distinctive and grow out of its core convictions. Neither Right nor Left, the church isn’t party political. What is so utterly ridiculous about the idea of a Brexit bishop is that it gives the impression that the church tracks the secular way of politics, following it issue by issue. It is of a piece with the whole secularisation of the church that is now in full swing.

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Yes, the secularisation of the church. It’s almost as if our bishops have been to a half-day management seminar at McKinsey and have suddenly seen the light as to how the church should be more efficiently run. Every day there is a new flowchart, a new initiative from head office. Most of the clergy I know inwardly grown and — because of their legal protections — just get on doing the stuff they have been called to do. We tend to ignore many of the smiley management-clergy who sit behind their Macs and offer structural and paper-based solutions to the tide going out on the sea of faith.

It is understandable that organisations that are under pressure – not least financially – can turn in on themselves, and think reorganisation is the answer to wider cultural changes. But for the Church of England to abandon its traditional shape, thinking that some corporate model will serve the preaching of the good news better, is for the church to commit a kind of suicide. The legal checks and balances within the CofE have been build up for a good reason: to hold us together, to make sure no one part of the Anglican compromise can hold sway over another. The cynic in me now contends that we are increasing becoming a church held together by a pension fund — that’s why so many bishops go to Rome as soon as they retire.

The fear is that this new non-parish-based para-church structure will grow rapidly, but will not be able to survive the forces that have always threatened to tear us apart, and that bishops (not leaders) have long kept together. The para church will be like the wheat thrown on stony ground, that rises up rapidly because the soil is shallow — which will look impressive on all those spreadsheets — but that ultimately cannot survive the heat of the midday sun because it has no roots.

Bishops root the church in history and in place. They hold it together as the focus of unity. When their job description starts getting played about with, the end feels close for the church that I dearly love.

But I wasn’t there to gossip, plot and gripe with my mates; I was on a mission. Would I be able to work out what the Prime Minister really thought about religion? I have long found this a puzzle, not knowing what to make of the multitude of signals that he gives out. Earlier this year he described himself as a “very, very bad Christian”. Asked by Robert Peston whether he was now a Roman Catholic, after his marriage in a Roman Catholic cathedral, he declined to answer. “I don’t discuss these deep issues,” he blustered. Then, spotting an opportunity to have a swipe at the openly atheist Keir Starmer, he added a quote from Psalm 14: “the foolish man has said in his heart there is no God.” Peston played along and simply chuckled.

There was lots of chuckling going on at No.10. Introduced by fellow Etonian, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Boris stood up and threw out some amusing anecdotes. He and Justin Welby go running together round Lambeth Palace gardens. Sometimes they run in the same direction, sometimes in opposite directions. It was a metaphor for the relationship between church and state. He then thanked the Church for its Covid response, which delivered on “the clear teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ to ‘be a good neighbour’”. Oh, I thought. Now there is a phrase: “our Lord Jesus Christ”. “Our” is such a strong word of belonging. The evangelicals smiled. It is an “I am one of you” word. Or maybe it was just something he said — something people say.

The problem I have with Boris is that all that Etonian bluster and bullshit is so wall-to-wall you never get the feeling you are seeing the real thing, whatever that is. I long for a flicker of sincerity — something Mrs May did in spades at her Christmas parties — some sense of what he really thinks about things. Yes, what he really believes. But there is a kind of dandyish public-school raconteur for whom the admission of sincerity is some sort of failure, a sign that the great game has broken down, a depressing admission that charm can only go so far. So everything is deflection and misdirection, smiling and ducking, making other people laugh as a strategy of tactical evasion. And as with Peston, it works. Our laughter gives him time to make for the exit. Only then do you feel just a little short-changed.

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Now this sort of dandyish bullshitter has to be very careful with religion. Because at some point religion demands precisely the kind of moral seriousness — sincerity of heart — that Boris despises, or is at a loss to know what to do with. Yes, I too avoid the man who will come up to me on Oxford Street, look me straight in the eye and ask me if I believe in Jesus. Everything inside me screams “none of your bloody business”. But this sort of evangelical directness has no time for the social conventions which we often hide behind, and which allow Boris Johnson to be the master of illusion.

But there is a story about Boris being put on the spot like this. And it is quite extraordinary.

Back in 2019, at the time of the September Equinox, a group of new-age religious pilgrims — Extinction Rebellion supporters — were walking the Ridgeway, part of an ancient trail from Salisbury Plain to East Anglia, a route well-known for its springs and holy places. Their plan was to travel barefoot and sing to the Great Spirit Mother as they went. They wanted their prayers to “open the hearts and minds of those in power”.

As they passed Chequers, the weekend retreat of the Prime Minister, they stopped off to visit a nearby farm shop. And — how extraordinary — there he was: Boris Johnson getting his groceries. Just Boris and the cashier in this tiny, enclosed space. And not knowing what to say, this group of women decided to stand around and just sing: “Listen to your heart, listen to your heart. Let love guide you.”

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Now I find what happened next really hard to square with what I know of the Prime Minister. The way Tori Lewis, one of the women, describes the scene, Boris Johnson was strangely moved by the experience. “His mouth is just open, he has his hand on his heart, he has tears in his eyes.” Of course, Boris had no idea how to react to this cringey intrusion into his personal space. “I, err, don’t know what…” he apparently blurted out.

Tori goes on: “Annabel intuitively — she’s a beautiful mother — puts her hand on his shoulder and sees him like a little boy that he is and we keep singing.” Regaining his composure, Boris asks the group where they are from, makes polite conversation, and looks for the exit. “We are healing the world one heart at a time” they sing as he leaves.

If this wasn’t strange enough, one of the group then overheard him talking to his then-girlfriend, Carrie, who was waiting outside: “Where have they come from, it’s like they have emerged from the Earth?” he asked. “Yes” she replied, “and they have a message for you.” And he said, “listen to your heart”.

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This, by the way, is the reason evangelical Christians used to get such good results in posh public schools. Here is a group of emotionally damaged children, who have suffered a kind of privileged abandonment, who have learnt to manage the absence of necessary motherly love — though this management is inevitably unstable and difficult to maintain. Suddenly, they are offered a kind of love — a “hand on the shoulder” — that is as emotionally direct and all-embracing as they might imagine motherly love to be. It is a religion of the heart, so to speak, for those whose hearts are a source of pain. Some retreat from this offer, appalled. Others embrace it with huge transformative joy, and it marks them for the rest of their lives. “Why do you need a God if you have a good mother?” my friend, the psychotherapist Adam Phillips, asked me the other day. It’s a very challenging question.

Justin Welby didn’t get converted at Eton. His conversion was at Cambridge, on the evening of 12 October 1975. There is often a single date, for evangelicals, because what happens is a kind of immediate breakthrough. A friend invited Welby to his rooms at Trinity College. Nearing midnight, Nicky Hills pressed Welby, “Jesus died on the cross for you, Justin”. At that moment, Welby says that the penny dropped and, as he later put it, “I asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life”. Were Welby on Adam Phillips’ couch, this experience would no doubt be brought into some sort of conversation about his highly dysfunctional parents — both alcoholics, his father turning out not to have been his father after all.

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Boris had a dysfunctional home life, too. His mother and father divorced when he was 15. There are stories that his father was abusive towards her. But where Welby embraced the emotional hyper-sincerity of evangelical Christianity, Boris rejects it with every fibre of his being, terrified that it is the one thing that can bring down the “pyramid of piffle” on which the whole Boris act is founded.

In effect, Boris is a polytheist: he worships a great many gods. That’s what allows him to be all things to all people. Yes, he refers to “our Lord Jesus Christ” in front of the Christians, but he’d flirt in the same way with other gods too — as promiscuous with divinity as he is elsewhere in his life.

Boris has a lot in common with his schoolmate, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I can see why they got on. They have similar demons. But they react to them in totally opposite ways, running in different directions.

“The current trajectory of our church is a huge mistake and the leadership is out of touch with ordinary churchgoers,” George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote yesterday. “It is time to rally the troops.”

He was writing in support of the newly formed Save the Parish movement — a group I have been plotting with from its creation. And yes, that is a staggering thing for a former Archbishop to say about the current leadership.

However, it is not former Archbishops that are at the core of this new movement, but ordinary parishioners and parish priests who believe that the church itself has turned against them. They have witnessed how the centre of gravity in church affairs — as well as the funding — has shifted from the local parish towards an increasingly bureaucratic and centralised church structure.

It is ordinary churchgoers and faithful church wardens who have looked after their churches for years, as well as clergy padding about in their parish, visiting the sick, burying the dead and administering the sacraments, who are most angry about this betrayal. It feels like we are in the middle of an aggressive corporate takeover.

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The Church is abandoning its flock

By Giles Fraser

If you flick through the jobs section of the Church Times, you can see this effect almost straight away. It used to be full of jobs for the Rector of This and the Vicar of That. But such vacancies have increasingly been replaced by people with unrecognisable and convoluted job descriptions. Now they advertise areas of responsibility that have little to do with parish ministry, answerable directly to a line manager somewhere in Church House.

Jobs that began as a way of supporting the mission of the parish are now being regarded as its cheaper replacement. The parish clergy are “limiting factors” and the people in the pews merely “passengers”, as one senior Anglican clergyman put it last month.

No need for priests, or expensive theological education and the like. 10,000 new churches are imagined, led by lay people, not clergy. Many will not have a building, just a website. Many will meet on Zoom. It’s not really what most of us would call a church. But if “the church is the people not the building”, as goes the oft-heard mantra, then why not? There is certainly no need to worry about a leaky roof when you’re only online.

Of course, there have been times when I have fantasised about my job not involving the maintenance of a crumbing church tower. Even ten years ago, at St Paul’s, when the Occupy movement gathered around the Cathedral, I felt the building had become more important to some than the message it was built to proclaim.

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St Paul was a tentmaker, after all. And few parish clergy who have done the job as long as I have can be unfamiliar with the frustration that comes with looking after a large building. But the idea that we would be more entrepreneurial and light of foot if we were to hand the keys over to the National Trust is an absolute fantasy.

“Pioneers” is what the Church’s Head of Evangelism, Canon Dave Male, wants more of. Pioneers must be “freed up”, he says. But the problem here is that the weight of parish commitments, even the building, is what keeps us from floating off into some abstract theological space. The parish is grounded, rooted in place and time.

Yes, the pandemic has left the church feeling the pinch financially — and there is much need for belt-tightening. But we have far too many Bishops for the number of churchgoers that we now have. Probably far too many Dioceses as well, each with its own set of managers and advisors. Save the Parish believes that in times when finances are hard, it is the front-line parishes that should be supported as a priority rather than directing funds away towards another new top-down initiative.

It used to be the case that the parish owned its own vicarages and paid its own clergy. It was almost the very definition of an anti-fragile, localised organisational structure. But those who proclaim subsidiarity as a principle — and it was originally a theological idea — are often the first to betray it.

In 1976, the central Church decided that the parish was an inefficient way of running things and brought the ownership of parish assets under the control of the Diocese, introducing a whole new layer of management to look after the parish’s assets. From here on in, the Diocese began to have its own ideas about how best to spend a parish’s assets. Vicarages were sold off. The clergy were paid from a central pot. And power shifted from the parishes to the Diocesan structures.

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By Giles Udy

Last week, we gathered as Save the Parish for the first time in the ancient St Bartholomew’s church in Smithfield. Alison Millbank, Canon Theologian from Southwell Cathedral, put the matter plainly: “the Church of England has totally capitulated to market values and managerialism… There has been a tendency to view the parish like some inherited embarrassing knick-knack from a great-aunt that you wish were in the attic.”

The fightback, it’s safe to say, has started. At the end of the event, Fr Marcus Walker, the Rector of St Bartholomew’s, described Save the Parish as “the last chance to save the system that has defined Christianity in this country for 1000 years”. He may not have been exaggerating.

These days, our senior clergy do MBAs and spend their lives in committees, devising desk-generated grand plans for the revitalisation of the Church. On the receiving end of these continual initiatives are the poor bloody infantry, the clergy and people of the parishes, slagged off as an impediment to growth and rubbished as some antique hangover from a bygone age.

The senior clergy say they value the parish. And some do. But many on the ground are just not feeling the love.

There are some forms of Christianity that exist only in order to reproduce. Christians are here to make new Christians who, in turn, are called to go out there and make even more new ones. The purpose of church life is to beget more church life. Randy for converts, these good shepherds admire the sheep in the pews principally for their reproductive qualities. And you can tell it’s these sorts of Christians that are now running the show in the Church of England, because those of us who are deemed to be infertile or firing evangelistic blanks are being slated for the knacker’s yard. The latest group to be targeted for a cull are the clergy themselves. In more senses than one, we are being directed to Genesis chapter nine, verse seven: “Go forth and multiply!”

The new growth strategy from head office is code named Myriad, Greek for ten thousand. The idea is to have 10,000 new churches by 2030, creating a million new disciples. Don’t worry about the figures too much, they are nothing more than fantasy numbers plucked from the sky. As a general rule, church growth is inversely proportional to the big talk coming from head office. Of course, we are all supposed to nod along, as if this is some fabulous, exciting initiative. As Martyn Percy, the Dean of the Cathedral in Oxford, explained, it’s becoming a bit like one of those Stalinist 10-year plans, something we are all obliged to cheer, yet one that is totally disconnected to reality.

The latest Great Leap Forward for the C of E looks like this. Get rid of all those crumbling churches. Get rid of the clergy. Do away with all that expensive theological education. These are all “limiting factors”. Instead, focus relentlessly on young people. Growth, Young People, Forwards. Purge the church of all those clapped-out clergy pottering about in their parishes. Forget the Eucharist, or at least, put those who administer it on some sort of zero hours contract. Sell their vicarages. This is what our new shepherds want in their prize sheep: to be young, dumb, and full of evangelistic… zeal.

You think I am over-stating the matter? This is how Canon John McGinley recently explained the thinking behind Myriad:

“Lay-led churches release the church from key limiting factors. When you don’t need a building and a stipend and long, costly college-based training for every leader of the church … then we can release new people to lead and new churches to form. It also releases the discipleship of people. In church planting, there are no passengers.”

Project Myriad, or something like it, has been in the wings for several decades. When I was first a priest it was called The Decade of Evangelism. It was an embarrassing disaster. And throughout my time, there is always another tiresomely new initiative on the go with some enthusiastic sounding name like Springboard. Most of my clergy friends inwardly groan when they hear of yet another exciting new strategy.

But Covid has finally given its proponents the opportunity they need. When the Archbishop of Canterbury decided to celebrate and broadcast the Eucharist on Easter Day 2020 from his kitchen, rather than popping down a few stairs to Lambeth Palace’s fine 13^th-century chapel, he was clearly making a point: all those old stones are holding us back, they are unnecessary. It’s called “a new way of being church”. Our new churches will meet in people’s homes, not in churches. Around 20-30 will gather in the living rooms of the wealthiest people in the parish — who else has a living room that can sit this many people?

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Of course, the shepherds know that many of the sheep don’t like the direction in which they are being led. The recent revolt of the Diocese of Winchester against their Bishop is a case in point. They threatened a vote of no confidence and he has stepped back from ministry. As Jeremy Clarkson has recently discovered, sheep can be remarkably bolshy creatures with a mind of their own. So, inevitably, the shepherds are trying to calm their flock with soothing words. We want a mixed economy church, they say. We are not seeking to send unreproductive clergy to the knacker’s yard. We are not wanting to sell off your medieval church to be converted into yuppie flats. This isn’t about replacing the organ with the overhead projector or clearing out the books from the Vicar’s Study and replacing them with office equipment. Let many flowers bloom, they say.

But that is not how it works in practice. Follow the money. Parish churches are being stripped of their clergy. The Diocese of Chelmsford is culling 61 posts by 2021 with a further 49 under threat by 2026. Others are following suit. But as these “limiting factor” clergy are being culled, central funds are being directed towards new evangelistic initiatives through what is called Strategic Development Funding from the £9 billion piggy bank held by the fabulously wealthy Church Commissioners. Dioceses can now apply for money from a £45-million pot set aside to support this new look C of E. And many of the new jobs that are being funded are not for parish-based clergy, but for a whole new level of managers with new-fangled titles like assistant archdeacon and mission enablers. This is the mechanism by which the church is being transformed. Even those Bishops that want to resist this dismantling of traditional structures are being out manoeuvred.

Perhaps the most sinister phrase in Canon McGinley’s lecture is the disparagement of “passengers”. If you go to church to sit at the back, say your prayers, listen to the sermon and receive the Eucharist, or if you are bruised and just looking for a place of healing, that means you. If you are not a part of the great push forward, you are just so much baggage. Little wonder there is now a white-hot anger within the rank and file of the priesthood. Consider this from the former Dear of Exeter Cathedral, Jonathan Draper.

“It is ironic, of course, that these proposals are being pushed by those who have both presided over the church’s decline and had the long and expensive theological education which they would jettison. There is nothing from the leadership of the church that reflects on their own part in decline, their own ineptitude, bullying, sense of entitlement, and in the failure to connect with the very people they would like to see fill the houses of the sufficiently wealthy in this brave new ecclesial world.”

I have never seen this level of fury from within the church during my 25 years as a priest.

So, what is the answer? After all, the proponents of evangelism first do have a point – the Church of England is dying fast. First, I would say that all efforts to put evangelism first are self-defeating. The Church feels like a gauche teenage boy going out to the pub deliberately to find a girlfriend, covering himself with cheap aftershave and rehearsing his unconvincing chat-up lines. It’s all so cringeworthy and needy. The way you make yourself attractive to others is by being fully yourself, and having confidence in what you are – even if that is a little strange and different. It’s when you stop obsessing about attracting others that you become more attractive to them.

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But also, the church is not called to be successful. It is called to be faithful. I would prefer for us to die with dignity, being faithful to our calling, rather than to turn ourselves inside out trying to be superficially attractive, thus abandoning the faith as we have understood it. Indeed, the Bible is full of stores of the faithful remnant. In Biblical theology, the remnant are those faithful people that survive some catastrophe. Today, these are the people who come to church, faithfully to say their prayers — people of devotion and not necessarily of evangelistic vim and vigour. They are the beating heart of the parish. Eleanor Rigby, Father McKenzie: these are my heroes. And long term, these are our most effective evangelists. I am deeply offended that they are now called passengers.

Secularisation is indeed a catastrophe for the churches. But we won’t outlast this period of history by being more business-like or by adopting slicker models of evangelistic marketing. We won’t be saved by panicky spread-sheet evangelists, Indeed, we must be more of what we have been called to be – more thoughtful, more prayerful, less fearful, more obedient to God’s call. We are resurrection people after all. Institutional death should hold out no terror for the faithful. And it will only be this lack of fear that can make us attractive once again.

For centuries, right up until the time of the Stuarts, the “Norman yoke” became a byword for the heteronomous imposition of power, the earliest expression of what we might now call Euroscepticism. For both radicals and conservatives alike, the “Harrying of the North” and the ousting of bishops amounted to a destruction of the established order. So Boris beware — history may not repeat, but it rhymes. And a conservative ought to be more alert to the dangers of the present moment.

I discovered relatively late in life that I am a natural conservative. As someone who grew up under Margaret Thatcher, I now forgive my younger self for never having spotted that. Thatcher wasn’t a conservative at all, she was a free market liberal who would shove aside all that stood in the way of market forces. No wonder I was confused.

I suppose natural conservatives gave her a break because, in the age of the Cold War, anyone who resisted communism with her vim and vigour was requisitioned to the cause. But nonetheless, she sailed under false colours. And so, growing up under Thatcher, I thought conservatism meant a kind of fundamentalist commitment to market forces; that the market was right, come what may. And I hated it. I hated the way Conservatives seemed to believe that humanity existed to serve the market, not the market to service the needs of humanity. I hated the destruction of traditional communities — mining communities, especially — that was taken to be the inevitable by-product of economic progress. I hated the reduction of every moral issue to the question of money, as if that were the only significant unit of moral exchange.

But Thatcher was as much a (small-c) conservative as Labour is now the party of working people. These titles are a relic of the past, just as a company called the Carphone Warehouse continues to sell mobile phones to people who not only have no idea what a car phone looks like, but have also never even considered it odd that the company name was so ill-matched to its product.

Conservatives are supposed to conserve. And this because it is at the heart of conservative belief that the cheap and wanton destruction of the established order is both easy to achieve and often impossible to recover from (see 1069). Progressives believe that things getting better is somehow built into the nature of things, that human existence is on an ever upward curve towards the sunny uplands of justice and social harmony.

I have a much darker view of human nature and a more fearful view of what social progress means — the “slaughter bench of history at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised”, as Hegel put it. That’s why I am prepared to put up with what works, even if it is a bit clunky, even if it is not how one would design things if one was starting with a blank slate: the monarchy, the establishment of the Church of England, our system of common law. The idea of the blank slate, starting afresh, year zero, these are all ideas more suited to the French Revolution than the oldest functioning democracy in the world: 1789, another date that is written on the conservative heart in ignominy.

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That’s why I don’t expect Conservatives like Steve Baker MP to be touting the disestablishment of the Church of England whenever an archbishop says something that irritates them. Like Mr Baker, I passionately believe in Brexit and, unlike most of the bishops, believe that domestic law, established at the ballot box, should trump international law — a law not directly answerable to people ticking their little boxes.

But the whole purpose of having bishops in the legislature is that they say what they believe, and their anxiety that the way Brexit is being pursued places peace in Northern Ireland at risk is hardly something on which they should be expected to remain silent.

I have changed my mind on the establishment of the Church of England. My worry was never so much that it was an unacceptable privilege, but rather that it encouraged the Church to become the courtiers of the political order, grovelling at the feet of real secular power as the Church so often has over the centuries. And so I used to believe that, released from the shackles of establishment, the Church would be free to preach the good news of the gospel without fear or favour.

It was the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, who changed my mind on all of this. He argues, passionately, that it is all of Britain’s faith communities that benefit from the Church of England hosting all believers at the heart of our national life. This presence enables the introduction of a quite different register of concerns directly into the public square, the presence of those who think in terms of the eternal, the numinous and the transcendent. At times, this register of concerns jars with the more day-to-day management of our national life, and so it should. It is a reminder that there exists, for many of us at least, and for the greater part of our history, a story of what human life is all about that raises its head above the utilitarian and the pragmatic.

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This also is why the bishops in the House of Lords have to be extra careful not to channel their personal views about party politics. Jonathan Sacks believes there is a sacrificial aspect to the Church of England’s presence within the establishment: that it is obliged to express itself with greater care, even to the point of holding back when it comes to expressing private convictions on matters of public policy.

And here there may be something of a problem, for the bishops of the Church of England have gained for themselves a reputation that they are implacably opposed to Brexit on the grounds that it offends their liberal — as distinct from Christian — consciences. My own view is that the Archbishop, in addressing the very specific concern about how the present Brexit Bill will impact peace in Northern Ireland, is expressing a perfectly legitimate concern. Since when, Mr Baker, has peace been beyond the remit of the Church?

The accusation that bishops should stay out of politics is frankly ridiculous. Christianity is not just a narrow little hobby for the soul, but a vision of the whole world, every part of it, transformed by the love and presence of God. But that said, it is nonetheless also still true that the present Church seems to find it ever easier to present itself in wholly secular terms. A report out last week calculated the value of our Church communities as contributing £12 billion to the economy.

I groaned aloud when I read that. To believers, the value of the Church is literally priceless, both without price and of more value that money could ever describe. The reduction of what we do to pounds sterling is to collapse all value into a single register — and that is precisely what the Church must stand to resist. Human beings are of infinite value because they are made in the image and likeness of God.

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By Tom Holland

Mrs Thatcher, of course, was a Methodist. Yet despite having had to listen to many of her father’s sermons in Grantham chapel, she was astonishing ignorant of Catholic Christianity (in the wider Roman Catholic and Anglican sense). Thatcher’s biographer, Charles Moore — himself a super-fan — told me in his Confessions chat that she didn’t even know that you needed water for a Baptism.

For her, Christianity was a kind of Samuel Smiles self-help philosophy of personal responsibility. That’s why she too thought it could be relegated to the private sphere, why she hated, for instance, the famous 1985 Faith in the City report. And politicians like Steve Baker are made squarely in that mould.

Mrs Thatcher’s funeral was held at St Paul’s Cathedral a couple of years after I resigned from my position there. They sang her favorite hymn, the same one they had sung at Churchill’s funeral on the same spot in 1965: “I Vow to Thee, My Country”, a hymn of two verses. The first expresses a love of place, the second the love of “another country I heard of long ago”, a country without borders or armies.

Some in the Church have regarded the first verse as heretical, expressing too unquestioningly a love of country. For me it is an expression of collective solidarity, a one-nation, all-in-it-together kind of philosophy that values all its subjects — yes, north and south. Others have a problem with the second verse, expressing the belief that even as a nation we sit under the ultimate authority of Almighty God. True conservatives find something to admire in both verses. And on this one at least, Mrs Thatcher and I are as one.

The programme, part of Sue MacGregor’s Reunion series, brought home how much like a wedding the whole thing was. The Coronation ring, placed on the fourth finger of her right hand, is also known as “The wedding ring of England”. It is a union of sorts, being struck between the Queen and her subjects. And back in 1952, both sides enthusiastically consented. The Pathé newsreel of the time spoke of “The happy heartbeat of the cockney crowd. London is royal and gay.”

It’s not just our language that has radically changed since then. The aristocracy is no longer treated with deference, the Church of England has been substantially abandoned, Coronation is a street in Manchester, and Coronation Chicken has becomer retro at best, and an embarrassing empire hangover at worst. Which raises the question: are the British people ready to get married again, and to get married like this?

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By Helen Thompson

This is not an academic question. The Queen was 94 this week. And the presence of Covid-19 within the palace walls was a reminder of her mortality. The Queen retains the love and admiration of her people — but what on earth would 21st-century Britain make of the Coronation service itself. It’s a ceremony that exposes in liturgical form the nature of the British state, and, in particular, its intimate relationship to God?

At the beginning of the service, the archbishop asks the people present of they are “willing” to “do homage and service”? As Archbishop Charles Le Grice preached in 1821 on the day of George VI’s coronation:

“The solemn ceremony of this day is not the pageant of a Monarch receiving the homage of his vassals; it is not the triumph of despotic power …. The poorest subject is a party to the covenant which the King now makes.”

In other words, consent is vital to the delicate constitution balance as played out in the coronation. Indeed, it is even there in the National Anthem itself: “May she defend our laws, and ever give us cause, to sing with heart and voice, God save the Queen.” (Not that everybody knows that verse.) But here we sing of the hope that the monarch will always give us a good reason to defend her; subtly suggesting, of course, that if she doesn’t, we won’t.

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How will the congregation react to the next coronation? Not so much the hand-picked thousands in Westminster Abbey, but the wider congregation at home. I doubt they will dress up in their Sunday best, as they did last time, and hang on every detail of a three-hour church service. But will they even understand what is going on? Will the deliberately Christian nature of the service be alienating in a post-religious and multi-cultural society? Will the plummy accents of the lords and ladies in waiting feel like the sound of another age, as if we are being secretly governed by some occupying power?

Understanding the symbolism of the service itself — the emphasis on anointing, for instance, and its origins in the Hebrew scriptures — requires a level of theological literacy that has been largely lost. Will the puzzled onlookers be like awkward guests at a wedding who feel uncomfortable in church, itchy in their hired suits, who don’t know the hymns, stumble over the words, and who snigger during the prayers?

That sort of thing might not matter so much at the wedding of someone else. But at the coronation, “the People” themselves have to say “I do”. And it’s been so long since the last coronation, I wonder if we will understand that we too have a part to play in the ceremony.

I ask these questions nervously. The coronation may only be an ‘ornamental’ aspect of our constitution. But I do worry that any interference in the complex dynamic of informed consent that the monarch and the people are believed to express to each other through the coronation could have unknown consequences for our historic constitutional arrangements. Brexit challenged us with a number of constitutional questions that we were not expecting. Helen Thompson, Professor of politics at Cambridge, thinks that the death of the Queen could well do the same. It could precipitate a constitutional crisis for which we are ill prepared.

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Republicanism is not especially strong on these islands — but when the leader of a major political party (Nicola Sturgeon) reacts to the Prince Andrew/Jeffrey Epstein scandal with the comment “I think there is a debate to be had about the longer term future of the monarch”, you just know that the death of the Queen is going to be a moment of opportunity for those who want radically to reshape our constitution. Especially with brand Archwell — more Beckingham than Buckingham — continuing to chip away at the mystique that royalty requires to successfully operate.

Part of the problem in answering the Republican challenge is that it’s not straightforward to say what the monarchy achieves for the British constitution. Even the Queen herself has described it as “a puzzle” and “always will be”. There were times, before dreary things like evidence based policy, when you could have got away with this sort of answer. To this extent, royalty and divinity do have something important common: they don’t readily give up their advantages to empirical scrutiny.

Perhaps I am fussing unnecessarily. Patriotism in these islands is on the up, and affection for the Queen herself, and indeed for the Prince of Wales, is probably as high as ever. Her Majesty has had an especially good Covid crisis — her broadcast on Palm Sunday was well received a home and across the globe. At a time of crisis like this, where death has come amongst us so visibly, our connection as a nation to our past, our continuity over time and symbolic links to each other, feels especially important.

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In this midst of this, William and Kate are quietly getting on with the business of working out how to preserve the best of the Queen’s legacy. Even the relationship of England with Scotland — currently the weakest link in our constitutional settlement — hasn’t seen anything like the stresses and strains that other political unions, the European Union and the United States, have experienced in response to this virus.

But nonetheless, as we approach the end of the Queen’s reign, a moment of nervousness is not inappropriate — us getting ever closer to a moment where one wrong move could give us “President Blair” or some other similar indignity.

Over in the United States, they now have an elected official who behaves like the worst sort of dominating monarch. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total”, Trump recently boasted. By contrast, here in the United Kingdom we have a monarchy that, for those who can see past the pomp and the diamonds, goes in for quiet dignity and servant leadership. And long may that continue.

Happy St George’s day. And Vivat Regina.