In praise of Rupert Murdoch

In March last year, when the bosses of Jesus College, Cambridge, lost their legal battle for a ‘faculty’ to take down the 17th-century memorial of the college’s benefactor, Tobias Rustat, because of slavery connections, from their college chapel, they did not appeal against the verdict of the ecclesiastical court. They knew they would not have won. But, as I mentioned at the time (26 March 2022), the Church of England high-ups, angry at their own heritage law, are not giving up. The latest biannual report of the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice backs attempts to change the church’s faculty jurisdiction rules and promotes the 47 recommendations of From Lament to Action, by the commission’s anti-racism taskforce. It inveighs against ‘our faith’s monocultural capture’, as if a religion centred on what happened among Jews, Romans and many others 2,000 years ago and 3,000 miles away has not been bursting with multi-cultures ever since.

The biannual report also carries approvingly a long appendix, ‘Revisiting the Rustat case’, by Professor Mike Higton. The story of the fiasco would be well entitled ‘From Action to Lament’, but Prof. Higton is having none of it. The court judgment was ‘imbalanced’, he says. Not fully acknowledging that the faculty system’s purpose is to protect heritage, he complains that the case for chucking out Rustat had ‘little of the well-oiled, well-funded, well-recognised machinery’ of those protecting his memorial. Yet it was the well-oiled college authorities who lavished a six-figure sum of college (charitable) money on going to law, whereas it was college alumni, spending their own money, who fought back. What should prevail, he says, is ‘personal testimony’. By this he means only ‘the experience of Black people’ who say they are upset by the Rustat memorial, not those (black or white) who feel otherwise. He does not acknowledge that before this row was confected, Jesus chapel had managed to worship as a Christian community with Rustat on the wall for more than 300 years: what matters, in Prof.