Who should replace Mark Thompson? Sentamu, or Harry Redknapp?

Three jobs only a madman would covet, and all of them up for grabs this spring: manager of the England football team, Archbishop of Canterbury and director general of the BBC. Wouldn’t the world be a much happier place if, by May, something weird happened to all the applications and we ended up with John Sentamu running the BBC, Helen Boaden managing England at Euro 2012 and, best of all, Harry Redknapp as Archbishop of Canterbury? It would certainly increase the gaiety of the nation. ‘I think my lads have got it in them for a top four finish, behind the Muslims, the left-footers and the Hindus. And I think that’s a great achievement, Gary, when you consider that only a year or so ago we were fighting it out in mid-table with yer bleedin’ Sikhs and yer Jains and what have you.’

What these three jobs have in common, aside from a decentish salary (or ‘chicken-feed’, as the Conservative mayoral candidate might refer to it), is the chance to be universally loathed and derided, on a daily basis, by everyone. There is pretty much nothing you can do to dispel the contumely; they are jobs where the expectations of the public can only ever be horribly thwarted. You will be held in comparison with Lord Reith, Sir Alf and Thomas Cranmer — regardless of the fact that since those happier days, the goalposts have been moved several miles from their original position and indeed may no longer even exist. A fairly large minority of people favour the disestablishment of at least two of the jobs. All of them end, one way or another, in failure and ignominy and are in truth only ever about managed, or unmanaged, decline. Your honeymoon period with the press will last for 11 days or until you are a) beaten at home by São Tomé and Principe or b) suggest you’ve never had much time for either sodomites or Africans, to be honest or c) commission Sheikh Abu Hamza al Masri to present a groundbreaking documentary series on the history of Israel.