Sarah mullally

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.

Something amazing happened as I was walking my 91-year-old mother through Ledbury: we saw a bobby on the beat. He was even in a helmet, not a baseball cap. ‘A real policeman!’ squealed various people, reacting as they might to a steam train or an Austin-Healey, reminders of more distinctive days. The same surprise may soon be evident when we see dog collars. A new scheme, oversight ministry, adopted by some Church of England dioceses, is taking vicars off the streets. Instead of being front-line clergy they will become ‘oversight ministers’ and ‘area deans’, managers of lay, unpaid ‘focal ministers’.

Labour MPs first tried to ban me from the Commons press gallery two decades ago, after I ridiculed Speaker ‘Gorbals Mick’ Martin. Jim Sheridan MP said I was ‘abusing the facilities’. Only later did we discover big Jim was the one abusing the facilities, sticking a £1,000 white leather bed on expenses. Now Derbyshire South’s Samantha Niblett wants my parliamentary pass revoked because I reported that a woman at Andy Burnham’s social-care speech was wearing a snortingly short skirt. She sat in front of Eyelashes Andy and crossed those pins Kenny Everett-style. I wondered if that might be why our new PM kept losing his philosophical thread. Cue a social-media hoo-hah. My comment was viewed more than a million times on X. This passed me by because I do not read X.

What do Nigel Farage, gender-critical feminism, masculinity, generalised homophobia and GB News have in common? All have been blamed in the past week or so for the pair of terror attacks in Berlin and Paris which left one dead and dozens wounded. Labour MPs (including the cabinet minister Chris Bryant), left-wing commentators and journalists have rushed to point the finger at a variety of bizarre targets. It must be hard being an Islamist. Imagine, you’ve gone to a great deal of planning and effort to commit an atrocity and make clear to the world that your motivations for doing so are your murderous religio-political creed.

When Sarah Mullally started her pilgrimage this week, travelling from London to Canterbury, she wasn’t just embracing a tradition in England that once stretched back thousands of years, but speaking to a wider trend: the resurgent popularity of pilgrimage. The Archbishop of Canterbury, due to be enthroned next week, joins an estimated 250,000 Britons who will take part in a pilgrimage this year. British experiences with pilgrimage have tended to focus on trips abroad: to holy sites like Lourdes or on treks such as the Camino de Santiago – which stretches from southern France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Trips aren’t confined to Christians either – until the Covid pandemic, 25,000 British Muslims took part in the annual Hajj to Mecca.

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.