Theo Hobson

Crypto whizzkid Sam Bankman-Fried has come a cropper. His $16 billion (£13 billion) fortune vanished overnight last week after FTX, the crypto exchange he founded, collapsed. What makes the tale of his rise and fall fascinating is that Bankman-Fried wasn’t in it for the money. Well, not in the normal way. Bankman-Fried is (or was) the poster boy of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement: a group of rational philanthropists who use their time and money in the most efficient possible way. That might involve becoming a banker, or crypto king, in order to earn millions, or in this case billions, so that they can give it away.

The Bishop of Oxford, Steven Croft, has come out in favour of gay marriage – the first senior bishop to do so. He has apologised to gay Christians that the Church has dragged its feet, and that his own views have been slow to change.  He is right to call for change. But I don’t think he needs to apologise that the change has taken, or rather is still taking, a long time to come. I think that the Church has been right to approach the issue super-cautiously. Gradualism is sometimes good. The orthodoxy says otherwise: ‘justice delayed is justice denied’. But in this case, such rhetoric is impatient and counter-productive. For many centuries it was firmly assumed that marriage should involve people of different sexes.

My first Spectator article, 21 years ago, was a rebuke to the religious attitude of certain public intellectuals whom I dubbed ‘devout sceptics’. They gave the impression, I said, of being drawn to the depth of religion, unlike shallow atheists, but also of being too intellectually honest to believe in it. To my delight, one of my targets, Clive James, wrote a self-defending letter. I had been noticed by a big beast! A.N. Wilson was another of my targets. Of him, I said that a foppish antiquarian interest in religion was just a water-muddying distraction; we could do with some intellectuals who get off the fence and set out the case for religion. I met him soon after that article and he was very nice about it. He is a charming and friendly chap.

Our new king is not, by normal standards, an important intellectual. But it would be churlish to dismiss his thinking as insignificant. Normal standards do not apply to a man who has spent his life earnestly preparing for a grand mythical role. Some princes have little trouble ignoring the religious aspects of monarchy, instead getting on with hunting, polo, or charity work. But young Charles was a sensitive soul, the sort who struggles to forge an identity. He had intellectual curiosity and a high idea of himself. Charles has shown a real capacity for melancholic detachment, self-scrutiny, angst. That’s not the whole story: as his leaky-pen petulance reminds us, he also has traits of the spoiled boy.

A couple of years ago I taught The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin to some A-level students. In the last class they summed up their feelings about his poetry. ‘It’s bare depressing, innit’, said someone (this wasn’t Eton), and someone else agreed: ‘I guess it’s good poetry but I can’t lie, it’s way too gloomy for me.’ Then one young man piped up: ‘But that’s how life is for a lot of people – you know, really bleak.’ Yes, I quietly thought, and you might discover that acquaintance with bleakness awaits you, too. But hang on, aren’t today’s teenagers meant to be depressed and anxious?

Was Oliver Cromwell a religious fanatic who loved banning stuff, or a pioneer of liberal values? Sunday’s Observer reported that a group of historians have dredged up some documents that suggest that he was seriously committed to religious freedom.  Despite his reputation for brutally suppressing Irish Catholics, it emerges that Cromwell was open to them practicing their faith, so long as they no longer posed a political threat by supporting royalists. Another document confirms his enthusiasm for readmitting Jews to England and his willingness to offer them religious freedom.

Two years ago the Church of England decided to delay any public discussion of its deepest division, over homosexuality, until 2022. So this might be the year in which an already troubled institution has a dramatic public meltdown. Or it might be the year in which the Church of England sorts itself out a bit. Yes, really. Stranger miracles have happened. There are grounds for hope, and not just on the gay issue. The Church has a core strength that it could draw on, and a core identity that could stand it in good stead, though one it is weirdly shy to assert. First let’s admit that things haven’t been going so well, even while the gay issue has been kicked into the long grass.