The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie is Assistant Curate at Liverpool Parish Church and the author of A Field Guide to the English Clergy.
44 min listen
This week: Peerless – the purge of the hereditary peers For this week’s cover, Charles Moore declares that the hereditary principle in Parliament is dead. Even though he lacks ‘a New Model Army’ to enforce the chamber’s full abolition, Keir Starmer is removing the hereditary peers. In doing so, he creates more room, reduces the
On 21 July 1828, the urbane aristocrat Charles Manners-Sutton, 89th Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Just two and a half weeks later, on 8 August, the mild-mannered linguistic scholar William Howley was elected as his successor. The efficiency of this process is in marked contrast to the current search to find the next successor to Manners-Sutton
My memory is that October is cold in Sutherland in the Highlands of Scotland. Come to think of it, my memory is that June can be cold too. Nature might well abhor a vacuum, but whether anything can convincingly fill the one left by the Kirk’s role in Scottish life remains to be seen As
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This week: should the assisted dying bill be killed off? Six months after Kim Leadbeater MP launched the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, a group of Labour MPs have pronounced it ‘irredeemably flawed and not fit to become law’. They say the most basic aspects of the bill – having gone through its
Lent did not, I confess, start well. Cheltenham fell in its first week, and the Gold Cup is hardly the place for the rigours of Lenten discipline to begin. Some might say it is hardly the place for a clergyman at all. Peter Hitchens once commented on my clerical collar – stiff, crisp, linen –
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The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is back in the news following his interview this week with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. The interview – his first since he resigned last November – was clearly Welby’s attempt to draw a line under the abuse scandal that cost him his job. The 2024 Makin report concluded
The Church of England is flogging off Dick Whittington. No, this isn’t an innuendo or a twist from a pantomime, but reality. The burial place of the mayor and cat enthusiast, St Michael Paternoster Royal, is being sold off as an office. The people behind this act are the Diocese of London, who bought you
Received wisdom suggests that you would not expect a vicar to disrupt Divine Worship. Now, anybody who’s worked with the clergy up close will know that in this case, as in so many areas, received wisdom is wrong. Still, there was shock in news outlets and on social media this week when a gaggle of
Uzeste contains 387 people and a dead pope. The tiny French village is one of the less glamorous papal resting places, where the earthly remnants of the unfortunate Clement V await the General Resurrection. How much of Clement is left is hard to tell. As his body lay in state after he died in 1314,
I remember the ephemera at the back of St Barnabas. The church stands in Oxford’s suburb of Jericho, near the University Press. It had proper church clutter: stumps of candles, dogeared pamphlets and reminders of long gone diocesan initiatives. St Barnabas – a beautiful Italianate monstrosity, plonked by the high Victorians, with their classic tact,
It was exceptionally cold, that strange Armistice day. I was used to spending the two minutes silence squinting into the winter brightness at college memorials or in English country church yards. Mid November is rarely freezing cold in the UK: it is often cold and crisp, the temperature is just enough time to stand outside
They say that shopping centres are the cathedrals of late capitalism. It is amusing sometimes to think of future generations shuffling reverently around the monumental structures of glass, faux marble and strangely treated wood as if they were structures worthy of awe or wonder, perhaps pausing to peer at the tracery of a former Burger
There’s a particularly amusing picture from the 1997 Tory leadership contest of Ken Clarke and John Redwood awkwardly paired up under a blue sign with the words ‘Uniting to Win’ on it. Though their campaign for power was forgettable, uniting to lose against William Hague of all people, they can take solace in being an
The British constitution is best understood as a dinner party. Imagine the key institutions of national life personified and sat around a table debating the issues of the day. True, as you and I picture this scene it is now a little late in the evening, the surroundings are worn and some hitherto unheard voices
44 min listen
Governments around the world have adopted extraordinary powers to deal with coronavirus – but could they end up doing more damage than good? (01:00) Next, is the best way to deal with the threat of Scottish secession to negotiate a hypothetical Scottish exit deal? (16:04) And finally, are Britain’s graveyards suffering a spate of indecent
