Vladimir Putin suffered a difficulty of his own making in his big anniversary speech on Tuesday. He was calling for something not far short of total war – a cluster of schemes to house, improve, offer therapy to and reconfigure the command of the armed services, to withdraw Russia and Russians from the global economy and to direct economic activity into areas most likely to defeat western technology. Yet he has always maintained that his country is not at war, and it does not sound very ringing to call (in the phrase which he first used a year ago and repeats today) for a total ‘special military operation’. He therefore likes to maximise the number of enemies and threats Russians must consider. Not satisfied with his traditional ones, such as Ukrainian ‘neo-Nazis’ and the imperialist United States, he also fastened on what he called ‘the Anglican Church’. It was planning, he said, ‘to explore the idea of a gender-neutral God’. Appropriating Christ’s words on the cross, he said: ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ It must have been exciting for the Bishop of Lichfield, the Right Revd Michael Ipgrave, spokesman and vice-chairman of the Church of England liturgical commission that is considering such questions, to find his work up there with other foes Putin mentioned, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ‘the long centuries’ of western ‘colonialism, diktat and hegemony’ and the Death’s Head division of the SS. I suspect that Putin takes as his ecclesiastical model the Russian Orthodox Church, and therefore imagines that the British government is issuing orders to the C of E. We must not disillusion him.
Not but what one mightn’t feel a smidgeon of sympathy for Putin’s complaint. Until our age, the Almighty’s gender self-ID as male has always been recognised without challenge. It must be distressing for Him to have this denied by the General Synod of the Church of England. If I were He, however, I think I would be more outraged by Putin’s pose as a latter-day Emperor Constantine at the battle of the Milvian Bridge than by anything the Bishop of Lichfield could throw at me.
I am pleased to learn that President Zelensky is not a perfect speaker of Ukrainian. As with a substantial minority of his fellow-people, his native language is Russian and even now, after addressing the nation pretty much every day for a year, he still resorts to Russian in private conversation when trying to say exactly what he means. It is not unique in a great national leader to have difficulty with the main national tongue. Cavour had much better French than Italian. Napoleon knew Corsican more securely than French. Queen Victoria spoke German before she spoke English. In some odd way, this difficulty adds to their stature.
I always enjoy reading William Hague on current events, because of his lucidity, his experience and his careful fidelity to the line of the ‘Remainer elite’ in its least unacceptable form. This week, he explained in the Times why Unionists and Brexiteers should accept whatever deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol Rishi Sunak’s government may shortly choose to offer them. ‘Intransigence… is not going to be a successful strategy forever,’ he writes. The Unionists would be blamed for continuing to freeze devolved government in Northern Ireland and preventing a new era of cooperation with the EU, including exciting projects like Horizon, Erasmus and ‘Youth Mobility schemes of the kind recently agreed with Australia and New Zealand’, he argues. Why do Lord Hague and those who think like him never look at the issue the other way round? The greater intransigence is that of the EU, which believes its court must have ultimate jurisdiction over a part of a kingdom which is no longer an EU member. Surely the greatest minds in British politics should be urging Brussels to acknowledge this constitutional nonsense, rather than bullying the poor little DUP.
Now that the word ‘liberal’ often means much the same as ‘woke’, I would like to rescue it. I am thinking about this because of the death of an old friend, Bob Reiss, who was given a deservedly full obituary in last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph. I first met him in October 1975, when I arrived at Trinity, Cambridge, and he was the chaplain. After an evangelical adolescence, Bob had moved sharply towards the liberal Anglicanism of John ‘Honest to God’ Robinson (who was Trinity’s dean of chapel at that time). Unlike so many church liberals, however, Bob never had that pursed-lipped air of disapproval which many of them (it is apparent in the Catholic Church too) show towards traditionalists. Liturgically, he was unfussily respectful of tradition. Pastorally, he was absolutely without prejudice, never preferring one group or sect or type to another, except for slight, humorous protests about too much zeal. Indeed, humour was essential to him: I remember him laughing at the wild enthusiasm felt by his left-wing Anglican friends at the time for Robert Mugabe, then the main terrorist leader in Rhodesia and later Zimbabwe’s mass murdering president. The essential quality Bob Reiss brought to all his ministry – at Cambridge, as rector of Grantham, archdeacon of Surrey and canon treasurer of Westminster Abbey – and to all his many friendships was an openness to everyone. This quality is often hailed but rarely found. It meant he inspired absolute trust. If he had died in the 18th century, his tombstone would have said that he was ‘a man of liberal sentiments’, meaning not his political views but his generosity of heart.
Modern definitions: ‘Deep dive’: an inquiry into anything which takes more than five minutes.
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