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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 2nd July 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

As the new Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans challenges the current running of the Church of England, where does this leave Gordon Brown? I ask because one of Mr Brown’s first acts as Prime Minister was to get rid of his office’s traditional role in the appointment of bishops. In that distant period a year ago when he announced ‘the work of change’, Mr Brown decided unilaterally to hand over all power of appointment to the Church itself. Very modern, very correct, you might think, to separate Church and state. But in fact he created an anomaly. So long as we have an Established Church, it has privileged legal status and parliamentary oversight. The Queen formally appoints bishops, deans etc, and she must do so only on the advice of ministers: now that advice is absent. By letting the C of E appoint whomever it likes, Mr Brown was actually doing something very unmodern — he was allowing an ancient estate of the realm the untrammelled opportunity to choose 26 legislators (that is the number of Anglican bishops in the House of Lords) for the whole nation. Most of the time, perhaps, this does not matter since people do not much mind. But if the Church of England is to be thrown into dispute and even schism, its appointments will become controversial. The rows will reach back to Downing Street, and there will be no one there to know what to do about them.

There was tremendous excitement when it was reported that Nelson Mandela had condemned Robert Mugabe. All that the living saint actually said was that there had been a ‘failure of leadership’ in Zimbabwe; he did not name Mugabe. For euphemism, it was almost in the class of the Emperor Hirohito’s surrender broadcast (‘The situation has developed, not necessarily to our advantage’). If Gordon Brown had used the same words, we should all have attacked him for mealy-mouthedness. Some might argue that Mr Mandela was following the wise principle of the elder statesman that less is more, but his words were very different from the extremely direct ones of Archbishop Desmond Tutu on the same subject. The truth is that Mr Mandela has never been at all brave in condemning other African leaders. With his moral authority, he could probably have spared the people of Zimbabwe much suffering by speaking out against Mugabe’s abuse of power years ago. It is interesting — as shown again this week in Sharm el Sheikh — that the club of African leaders regards membership as being lifelong and indissoluble.

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David Short

July 3rd, 2008 1:07pm

Nothing wrong, I always thought, in smoking in a pub.

But chain-smoking?

That's a different matter.

Especially if the person is blind, has no idea of the direction of the interminable smoke, and holds sway by seniority and patronage of his fellow drinkers!

George

July 9th, 2008 9:10pm

Of course the living saint refused to criticise any African politicians by name. The tragic failure of leadership to which he refers is Mbeki's stubborn refusal to deal effectively with an old friend who has now become a considerable embarrassment. To criticise Mbeki would implicitly be to criticise the process by which he was nominated as heir apparent, and then effortlessly inherited the presidency. One cannot expect saints to don hair shirts after they have been canonised.

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