At next week’s General Synod, the plotters-in-chief will be out in force, but this gossiping and manoeuvring is not just a sign of the archbishop’s demise. Throughout his time in office, Rowan Williams has been isolated and undermined — not by the media, but by his own clergy.
The case for him stepping down early was made privately by the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, to a few friends at last summer’s York Synod. This almost scandalous suggestion quickly spread across the bars on the university campus where the Church holds its parliament each year, and only after it had been much discussed did word reach the archbishop himself. That he was the last to know of his own putative resignation is pretty telling.
But then, throughout his time at the top, Williams has always been the last to know what’s going on. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI made a historic offer to disillusioned Anglicans. Dr Williams only learned of the provocative move a fortnight before it was announced by the Vatican, yet the Pope had begun drawing up plans years earlier.
The politicking around this move was so chaotic and the characters involved so indiscreet that they would not have been out of place in a Shakespearean farce. When three of the bishops pivotal to implementing the Pope’s deal made what they had hoped was a secret visit to Rome, news of their trip was widely known before they had even returned home. (In their defence, their journey was made exceptionally long because the Bishop of Ebbsfleet’s fear of flying meant they had to take the train across Europe.) As undercover missions go, it was more Dad’s Army than SAS. It looks even more ridiculous in the light of a letter written by the bishop in which he describes the talks as feeling ‘a little bit like Elizabethan espionage’.
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