You may have gathered from last week’s column that I’ve been cruising the Med in search of fresh subject matter. It’s the sort of cruise that includes a programme of lectures, and the star turn on that front has been the Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, enjoying a change of pulpit after his much-praised sermon at Lady Thatcher’s funeral.
I had been struck by a passage in that address about the ‘prior dispositions’ required for a healthy market economy: ‘the habits of truth-telling, mutual -sympathy and the capacity to co-operate’. So as we steamed across the Ionian Sea I sent a note to the bishop’s cabin asking whether he’d care to elaborate, and he agreed to meet me in the library for tea (this really is a posh boat).
‘Here I am, in the springtime of my senility,’ he began his first lecture, ‘too old to be Archbishop of Canterbury, too young to be Pope.’ Sonorous voice, towering height and evident depth of scholarship mark him out as a high priest even if you don’t know what his day job is. The droll sense of humour comes as more of a surprise.
He’s a City resident — ‘between Strada and Yo! Sushi’ in the Old Deanery of St Paul’s — but has never really been noted for his scrutiny of what the City does. I put it to him that the church has only now found a coherent voice for the financial crisis in the person of Justin Welby, and that the Occupy protest on his doorstep two winters ago merely revealed muddled thinking and yet another split in the clergy, with several high-profile resignations from St Paul’s. Chartres himself was accused by the left of being a puppet of City interests and by our own James Delingpole of being a ‘surrender monkey’ for taking chocolates to the campers at Christmas.
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