Justin welby

One of the things people don’t tell you about grief is the humorous side of it. Many will warn that grief can erupt at strange times and that memories of those who have died spring upon you in unusual places. But few mention the fact that loss can put you in situations where the only real solution is to laugh. My father died at the end of last month. He was much loved and is much missed. He was also a great raconteur and, as we have been sorting through photographs to display at the wake, I realise too that he was a great laugher. I’ve lost count of how many images we’ve seen of him with his head thrown back at a party, laughing. Consequently, it seems almost appropriate that there have been moments of laughter since his death.

The Church of England can always be relied upon to walk into a room just as everybody else is leaving. The question of whether we have reached ‘peak woke’ – the high watermark of Americanised racial politics dictating every aspect of public life – remains open. However, those post-Black Lives Matter efforts, which saw mass demonstrations and acts of self-abasement by companies and institutions, are undeniably more muted and more disputed than they were in 2020. It seems unlikely that, for example, Andy Burnham would ‘take the knee’, as Keir Starmer did so unthinkingly.

Between 1999 and 2004, Sarah Mullally, the current Bishop of London, was director of patient experience for NHS England. One complaint dominated the feedback she received from inpatients: everyone hated the undignified hospital gowns that gaped open at the back. Mullally identified this as an issue that could be addressed easily and cheaply. Later on, the designer Ben de Lisi even worked with the Design Council to develop a better gown with side fastenings. Yet if you are unfortunate enough to have to stay in hospital today, you will almost certainly find that you are offered the old draughty gown.

How important do you think it is to know what the Church of England thought about that ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in London two weeks ago? There is a very good argument for saying it is about as meaningful and relevant as finding out what Bonnie Blue, that young lady touring the country flat on her back and welcoming anyone who fancies a bit of frictionless poking, thinks about the fractious border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia. There are many institutions in this country that are irrelevant to the great mass of citizens, but few more resolutely so than our established Church.

On 21 July 1828, the urbane aristocrat Charles Manners-Sutton, 89th Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Just two and a half weeks later, on 8 August, the mild-mannered linguistic scholar William Howley was elected as his successor. The efficiency of this process is in marked contrast to the current search to find the next successor to Manners-Sutton and Howley. Justin Welby announced he was vacating the throne of St Augustine on 12 November last year; it took until 28 May even to assemble the committee who will discuss the names of his potential successor. It will be a miracle if we know the name of the new Primate of All England by the autumn.

Life support Sir: If the Terminally Ill (End of Life) Bill is passed into law we will have crossed the Rubicon. As the second reading vote on 29 November approaches, it is astonishing that we are hearing less debate than on the loss of the winter fuel payment. There should be the mother of all debates. The issues surrounding assisted dying are immensely complicated and the arguments for and against are powerful. On the one hand it may shorten and ease a dreadful death and on the other it may put pressure on the dying and be deficient in its application. However, the trite adage that hard cases make bad law has great weight, especially if the law is made too quickly and without the fullest informed consideration.

Jane Portal, as she was when she worked for Winston Churchill, died last week, aged 93. Lady Williams of Elvel, as she much later became, had an extraordinary life. I encountered her story by chance. In 2015, near us in Sussex, I was told that ‘of course’ (people love saying that when telling you a surprise) Jane Williams’s son, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was not the offspring of Gavin Welby, as the Archbishop believed, but of Sir Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s last private secretary. Of course he wasn’t, I said. I made further inquiries, however, and saw letters and heard testimony which began to persuade me. I also noticed that, when the Archbishop took off his spectacles, he did look remarkably like Montague Browne.