Welby’s impossible task is to lead the opposition to gay marriage

The new Archbishop of Canterbury has the cleanest-shaven chin I think I have ever seen on an adult male human. It is as if, in an attempt to rid himself of even the vestigial suspicion of facial growth, he has shaved twice with a Gillette Mach 3 Turbo™ razor, and then applied those molten wax strips that women use these days on their front bottoms — for reasons of hygiene and personal comfort, we are assured. I am not saying that Justin Welby actually does this, or has it done to him by some attendant vicar, merely that it looks that way. Exfoliating wax strips are certainly not something one would associate with the evangelical wing of the Church of England, although it would not surprise me if they were utilised now and again for slightly odd purposes at the higher end of the church.

Welby has also been at pains to assert that he is something which most new appointees to big important jobs — such as -director-general of the BBC, for example — are usually determined to suggest that they are not — i.e., in his words, ‘thick’. One assumes that both the impeccably smooth chin and his avowal of thickness are designed to position him as far as is humanly possible from his predecessor, who was considered an ‘intellectual’ and possessed the finest beard in Christendom. I suspect he will be heard in the coming weeks to put still further distance between himself and Rowan Williams by expressing a fervent dislike of Muslims and Dostoyevsky.

His first real task, however, is to lead the opposition to the government’s plans to impose gay marriage ceremonies upon religious institutions which almost unanimously (except for the bloody Quakers, as usual) oppose this.