‘Sarah, by Divine Providence Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England, Member of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, and Dean of His Majesty’s Chapels Royal.’ You might think with that kind of job title there would be someone, somewhere in the corridors of prelatical power, who might, like Sergeant Wilson to Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army, lean out from behind a tapestry occasionally and whisper: ‘do you think that’s wise, Your Grace?’
Given the sensitivities around the 9/11 anniversary perhaps someone at Lambeth Palace might have done a bit of due-diligence on the person whom the Archbishop was about to honour
Lambeth Palace is home to serried ranks of professional advisors – not that you’d know it from their website. Their job, obviously, is to advise the Archbishop of Canterbury on the hundreds of matters that pertain to her high office, both at home and overseas. Of course, the senior bishop of the Church of England and the nominal leader of the Anglican Communion needs a staff to help her manage a workload that no one could possibly shoulder alone. After this latest fiasco, however, one might be forgiven for wondering what some of them do.
The Archbishop’s first set of Lambeth Awards should have been a good-news story about how well things are going after the unhappy ending of the previous regime. Instead, Dame Sarah somehow managed to give a prize for ‘his outstanding work as an ambassador of interfaith harmony in Pakistan’ to Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi: an hirsute and avuncular-looking gentleman in flowing robes who, despite being lauded for ‘his commitment to promoting religious tolerance’, turned out to be an enormous fan of Osama bin Laden and a blasphemy-law enthusiast with robust views on Sir Salman Rushdie.
Mr Ashrafi has protested that his comments were taken out of context, but it was doubly unfortunate that the ceremony took place on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Dame Sarah’s predecessor but one, Rowan Williams, was in New York as the atrocity unfolded. Williams was visiting Trinity Church on Wall Street, four blocks away; he was in the thick of the chaos in real time and later spoke powerfully and movingly about his experiences. You’d think that the date might at least have jogged some kind of institutional memory.
Even if Lord Williams hadn’t been there on the day, given the sensitivities around the anniversary perhaps someone at Lambeth Palace might have done a bit of due-diligence on the person whom the Archbishop was about to honour. Considering the lightning speed at which the world’s media was able to expose some of Mr Ashrafi’s fruitier public statements, I don’t think that it would have been beyond the wit of a staffer to do a quick Google search. I’m willing to bet, however, that no one bothered.
The now seemingly-endless smorgasbord of awards that the Archbishop of Canterbury is expected to dole out has its origins in her predecessor’s disdain for the historic Lambeth degrees, which had been awarded by successive primates since they usurped the privilege from their days as papal legates. They were substantive, not honorary, and awarded to men and women with a lifetime of tried and tested service in their respective fields: Doctors of Divinity, music, civil law, and the like.
Justin Welby instead brought in a suite of medals in grey boxes, to be distributed like chocolate coins to grateful children, with bespoke engravings: a correspondent of mine asked why her husband’s award looked like a Yugoslav figure-skating trophy. The hubris reached its zenith in 2022, when Archbishop Welby awarded a ‘Cross of Canterbury’ to Elizabeth II ‘for services to the Church of England’: including, presumably, being its Supreme Governor and his boss. All I’ll say is this: I never saw her wear it.
Dame Sarah, a former chief nurse, has received something of a hospital pass; the photographs of her with Mr Ashrafi and his heavily-veiled wife will haunt her primacy for here on in. Perhaps the most generous interpretation of the current state of affairs is that she is being very badly advised. If that is the case, then it is presumably easily remedied. We might also muse on what other poor advice she has felt obliged to accept.
I once met one of Archbishop Welby’s political advisors at an establishment on Pall Mall. Forgetting myself for a moment, I said I was stunned to discover he had any political advisors at all. With considerable good humour, she shot back: ‘Imagine how bad it would be if he didn’t.’
Dame Sarah has had the steel to revoke Mr Ashrafi’s award now his true colours have come to light. She should apply the same resolve elsewhere, too: stopping the madness of the £100 million slavery-reparations fund, relieving the plight of the overworked parish clergy, and restoring the venerable Lambeth degrees. I quite fancy being a Doctor of Letters, if anyone listens.
Comments