Matthew Bell

Guns, gays and the Queen – a former bishop reminisces

An interview the Rt Revd John Bickersteth, the oldest living former bishop of Bath and Wells

The bishopric of Bath and Wells comes with more bear-traps than most. For one thing, there’s the baby-eating. Ever since Blackadder told Baldrick he was being chased for a debt by the ‘baby–eating Bishop of Bath and Wells’, the image has stuck. When the last incumbent, Peter Price, made his first visit to the House of Lords, accompanied by his five-week-old granddaughter, the Bishop of Southwark remarked: ‘I see the bishop has brought his own lunch.’

The present incumbent, who was elected in March, and will be formally enthroned in June, has suffered a worse indignity. Peter Hancock is to become the first appointee not to live in the Bishop’s Palace, home to each of his predecessors since Jocelin of Wells laid the first stone in 1206. In the opinion of the church commissioners, chief among them the Independent’s founder Andreas Whittam Smith and the Tory MP Tony Baldry, it makes more sense to buy a new rectory two miles away, at a cost of £900,000, so that the bishop ‘should not be encumbered’ by the 60,000 tourists who visit the palace each year. Moving him to a different parish will, they say, enable him to ‘carry out his ministry and mission in a more sustainable way’.

Not many people agree. Certainly the Rt Revd John Bickersteth, 92, the oldest living former Bishop of Bath and Wells, doesn’t. He held the post from 1975 to 1988, and was succeeded by George Carey. Bickersteth was an immensely popular bishop, not least with the Queen, but he retired aged 66 to dedicate more time to wildlife conservation. Now he has emerged from retirement to voice his opposition to the proposals.

‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ he says. ‘The poor fellow shouldn’t be made to live two miles away when there’s a perfectly serviceable flat next door.’

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