Justin welby

We at 22 Old Queen Street have never been great fans of Rowan Williams. At a time when strong ecclesiastical leadership was needs he served up abstract, pew-emptying waffle. But as this week's leading article in the magazine argues, his successor Justin Welby has taken a more subtle, serious and successful approach — which bears fruit, as we saw last week with the government's crackdown on the most sharkish of the payday lenders. 'Welby’s intelligence on financial matters stands in direct contrast with that of his predecessor, Rowan Williams, whose pronouncements on current affairs so often came across as those of a lofty professor who had found himself in the wrong lecture hall.

For decades, interventions of the Archbishop of Canterbury in national debate were like a sporadic bombardment of small pebbles against the door of Downing Street. Justin Welby has changed all that. This week, payday loan companies are facing reform (or in some cases oblivion) as new caps on interest payments come into effect. That the industry finds itself in this position is thanks, in no small part, to it having been hooked around the neck by the Archbishop’s crosier. Welby has inspired reform of the industry not by trying to set himself up as the leader of the opposition in a cassock, but by acting as an effective leader of the Church of England.

When Justin Welby spoke to the Parliamentary press gallery today, he took great care to emphasise a number of points. One was about the influence the Church of England has in public debate, and the other was about the church's influence in local communities and the strength of its connections in those communities. He didn't give the impression initially that he didn't want to intervene in the public debate about immigration when asked about it, but then couldn't resist commenting anyway. He told journalists that he was worried about the language in the debate, and that local churches were seeing a rise in racism, which he seemed to think was linked: 'Yes I think with some people we have a duty of care.

October is always a turbulent month, and I’m feeling uneasy about this one. The FTSE100 index, which looked set to break through 7,000 in September, has lost more than 500 points since then — and would have lost more but for manoeuvres in the mining sector. Pessimism stalks the bond markets, and even a falling oil price is read more as a harbinger of faltering growth than a stimulus for further recovery. Ebola is the new volcanic ash cloud, and attention is focused on the apparently incorrigible weakness of the eurozone — where the biggest problem is what was long seen as the most potent solution, namely the German economy. Fiscal discipline, strict wage control and relentless pursuit of export success made Germany the locomotive of Europe for the single-currency era; but a 0.

How amazing to have two former Anglican archbishops, George Carey of Canterbury and Desmond Tutu of South Africa, supporting Lord Falconer’s bill to legalise assisted suicide! It has always been, and remains, a firm doctrine of the Church of England that it is wrong to take a life. Yet here are two Church leaders agreeing with a majority of Britons — more than 80 per cent, according to the polls — that it should be legal for a doctor to supply a suffering, terminally ill patient with a lethal dose of poison if he wants it. Lord Carey said that in changing his mind on this issue he had been deeply influenced by the case of Tony Nicklinson, who suffered from locked-in syndrome after a stroke, which meant that he could only move his eyes and head.

There was something poignant about the decision of L’Wren Scott, Mick Jagger’s American girlfriend, who committed suicide in New York last month, to leave everything she had to him in her will. Maybe it was out of gratitude for his help in keeping her foundering fashion business afloat; or maybe it was just a mark of her devotion to the man she referred to in the will as ‘my Michael Philip Jagger’. But whatever her motive, it was a decision very much against the spirit of the times, one that will further widen the gap between rich and poor by adding property worth £5.5 million to Jagger’s already estimated personal fortune of around £200 million. He is hardly the most needy recipient of such largesse.

Thirty years ago this Saturday, I became editor of this magazine. In the same month, the miners’ strike began, Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as the right-wing press still insisted on calling him) won the Chesterfield by-election, the FT index rose above 900 for the first time and the mortgage rate fell to 10.5 per cent. Mark Thatcher was reported to be leaving the country to sell Lotus cars in America for £45,000 a year. Although she now tells me she has no memory of it, Wendy Cope wrote a poem entitled ‘The Editor of The Spectator is 27 Years Old’. Because I was young, the events are vivid in my mind, but in fact a greater gap separates then and now than separated then from the Suez crisis.

Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone behaved much as you behave? If everyone expressed themselves similarly? Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. Take the case of Torz Reynolds. You are almost certainly not called Torz and I would guess, too, that you count few people within your circle of friends who abide under that name. I don’t know where it comes from, Torz. A shortening of Victoria, I would guess, although it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that she was actually christened Torz, much as people these days are christened Jayden. Anyway, that’s not the point.

Does Christmas have to start with a payday loan? No, according to the Church of England. The Church has unveiled its annual advertising campaign this morning, posing this very question to the residents of Manchester. As usual, the CofE is worried Britons are becoming ignorant about the origins of Christmas. As one of the adverts (pictured above) from Christmas starts with Christ shows, the aim is to remind Britain of the religious nature of the festive season as well as urging people not to go into debt to finance Christmas. But are the payday loan companies the only companies the Church should be worried about? In a recent Barometer column, we compared the cost of borrowing of £200 from Wonga to the high street banks.

After spilling the communion wine down his cassock in an attempt to wade into the ongoing Wonga-row, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been rather quiet of late. Justin Welby faced acute embarrassment when he tried to throw the pay-day loan lenders out of the temple, only for it to be revealed that the Church of England’s investment portfolio include a significant stakes in such grubby money-lenders.

The Church of England has had some surprisingly good press recently. Who knows how these things happen, but the media seems to have decided to stop attacking its homophobia, and to start praising its social vision. The change at Lambeth Palace seems to have prompted this shift, which is a bit ironic, as Justin Welby is far more involved in the sexually illiberal side of Anglicanism than Rowan Williams was, but never mind. It has also been prompted by persistently hard economic times: the Church’s involvement in deprived communities gradually wins it more attention. Maybe it has insights that normal political bodies lack. Would you believe it?

I’ve been in the pulpit again, this time to salute the centenary of the death of Charles Norris Gray, a formidable Victorian vicar of my Yorkshire town of Helmsley. Gray was a social activist with strong opinions on everything from sanitation to election candidates, and he did a great deal of good for his parish — so I’m not averse to the idea of churchmen intervening in worldly affairs, and I think Archbishop Justin Welby was right to highlight the parasitical nature of ‘payday lenders’ such as Wonga, even if he was subsequently embarrassed to discover that the Church of England was an indirect investor in it.

Justin Welby is a clever man. His comments about payday loan companies in Total Politics have managed to please both the left and right, which is no mean feat on such a controversial issue. How has he managed to do it? Well, the Archbishop has identified a social problem, of people accessing high-cost credit that they can't always afford to repay, and offered an intelligent solution, rather than that offered by politicians suffering from dosomethingitis, which is normally to ban stuff they don't like. Welby clearly doesn't like payday loan companies. They do charge high rates of APR, but only on short-term loans, which makes Wonga's 5,853 per cent APR look a lot worse than it is because the loan isn't taken out for the year.