Express & Star

Peter Rhodes on a glut of bishops, a box of wine and forecasting the death of the Conservative Party

Read today's column from Peter Rhodes.

Published
No shortage of bishops

A memory is a great gift in politics. For example, while today's politicians and pundits rejoice or despair over the election humiliation of Labour and predict years of unbroken Tory rule, many of us recall that after Tony Blair's landslide in 1997, some experts predicted many decades of New Labour and the death of the Conservative Party. What goes around, etc....

“Unconscious bias training” for Church of England clergy is hoped to produce more female Church leaders by the end of this decade. Some have already dubbed the 2020s “the decade of women bishops.” A cynic might suggest it's merely a case of replacing overmanning with overwomenning.

Creating new bishops is a CofE growth industry. Fifty years ago 88 bishops were in charge of 13,500 clergy. Today the number of clergy has fallen to 9,000 and barely five per cent of British adults attend church. Yet the number of bishops has soared to 114, costing about £20 million a year. The Church is beginning to resemble the Royal Navy which is now so overburdened with top brass that it has 34 admirals but only 19 operational warships. In one online exchange about the number of bishops, an aggrieved vicar said: “The only people who are rejoicing are the clerical outfitters!”

Meanwhile, the Church's handful of women bishops continue to make their mark, including Rose Hudson-Wilkin, Bishop of Dover, whose attempt to link the nastier language of Brexit to the murder of Jo Cox MP frankly passeth my understanding. The bishop told the Beeb: “The discourse we've had over the last three years has been pretty damaging.” Maybe so. But it's hard to see how anything said or done over the past three years could have had any influence on the appalling murder of Jo Cox, which happened more than three-and-a-half years ago.

Full employment is a noble political aim and must be a good thing. And yet don't you get the impression that some people get promoted above their talents? Like the people responsible for putting the New Year Honours List online who managed – shock, horror – to include the private addresses of the recipients, including politicians, celebrities and MI5 spooks. Someone has blundered in a land where everybody is working but not everything seems to work.

For the first time in many years, I did not risk a hernia carrying out the empty bottles of yuletide wine. I have a pal in the wine trade who recommended a couple of boxes of French red. Over here, some folk get snobby about wine in boxes but this was excellent plonk and the only leftover was a couple of empty boxes and none of that ear-splitting clatter that goes with glass bottles the morning after the night before. How do they make them so noisy?