Did Sandi Toksvig think she could change Justin Welby’s views on gay sex?

An urgent ecumenical update: the conclave has taken place. The great community leader has descended from the summit of Sinai, bearing, not tablets of law, but sorrowful tidings. Yes: the Archbishop of Canterbury has ‘grabbed a coffee’ with Sandi Toksvig, following her twee plea for an audience a few months ago on the subject of the Church of England’s attitude to gay sex. 

The good news is that the ‘long-promised coffee’ was ‘calm and considered,’ according to Toksvig. The bad news is that Sandi is sad: Justin Welby had to report, unsurprisingly to anyone paying the slightest attention, that any change in the Anglican Communion’s stance on same-sex relations is likely to be – in Sandi’s words – ‘glacial’. A chinwag with the affable host of QI over a couple of flat whites at Costa were, it seems, not enough to overturn millennia of Judeo-Christian teaching.  

Does anything better demonstrate the turnabouts in the status of institutions in Britain – the diminishing of the Church, the upraising of TV celebrities – over the last half-a-century than this meeting? For the Archbishop of Canterbury to come running when summoned into the presence of an atheist BBC2 quiz show host to receive a moral ticking-off? If Robert ‘Call My Bluff’ Robinson had tried on something of this kind in 1973 I strongly suspect he would’ve got a bash on the nut from Michael Ramsey’s crozier. 

Toksvig has reported her disappointment to the world via Twitter (naturally) in a slightly uncomfortable-looking – especially for a seasoned televisualist – to-camera address, seemingly delivered from the corner of a Center Parcs cabin.