What is the truth about Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor and ‘Team Bergoglio’?

A couple of days ago John Bingham, the excellent religious affairs editor of the Telegraph, broke a story that is only now filtering out. I hope he’ll forgive me if I wonder whether he realised just what a big story it was. Bingham wrote:

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the former leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, helped to orchestrate a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign which led to the election of Pope Francis, a new biography claims … [The book] to be published next month, discloses that there had been a discreet, but highly organised, campaign by a small group of European cardinals in support of Cardinal Bergoglio.

The Great Reformer, by the British Catholic writer Austen Ivereigh, nicknames the group ‘Team Bergoglio’ and says members toured private dinners and other gatherings of cardinals in the days before the conclave, quietly putting their case.

‘Spotting their moment, the initiative was now seized by the European reformers who in 2005 had pushed for Bergoglio,’ Mr Ivereigh, who once served as Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor’s press secretary, explains in the book.