THE week belonged to Wonga, and it's a really interesting example of how to play a weak hand for maximum effect, and how to exploit the unexpected.

The start was an interview with Total Politics magazine, in which Archbishop Welby gave a juicy macho quote about "competing Wonga out of existence". This was a thing so uncharacteristic for an archbishop to want to do to anyone that some people missed the story altogether. The Telegraph, for instance, went with a line about the Archbishop's getting tough on volunteers who refuse CRB checks. This was a really striking example of something for an Archbishop not to say: "Go to church and be checked out for a criminal past" is a slogan that will do little to arrest numerical decline.

But the Wonga line was picked up by almost everyone else, with huge enthusiasm. This is partly because the Church's revulsion from payday loans is one of the very few areas where it really does articulate the values of the nation. We want it to be true that the lenders can be "competed out of existence".

So, the small print, which was that the Archbishop was not, in fact, talking about supplying church money, or anything but premises and volunteers, was largely overlooked.

As it happens, I went up last year to look at what the Church was doing in Durham to help the victims of debt. I was struck most by the awful depth of need compared with the inadequacy of the resources available, and by the fact that all the money, and even the premises, were supplied by local government or banks.

None of this detracts from the sincerity, or even the effectiveness, of what the Church was doing there, and the Archbishop is proposing for everywhere. A huge amount of what the Church does on the national stage is theatrical: to complain that the Church isn't doing all that it wants done is a bit like complaining that Hamlet is stabbed with a wooden sword and not properly killed.

THE next turn in the story was also theatrical. The Financial Times went for something that was, in retrospect, almost a sure bet: that somewhere in the Church Commissioners' £5.7-billion portfolio there would be a connection, however small and indirect, with Wonga or something similar.

Sure enough, the story came up as it should: "The Church of England has admitted it invests in one of Wonga's key financial backers, a day after the Archbishop of Canterbury revealed his plans to take on the payday lender he describes as 'morally wrong'."

I don't think it is fair, in this instance, to criticise the Commissioners, who, when they made the investment, could not have known what it would be used for. Nor is it really fair, as some people have done, to blame the comms department for failing to foresee the problem. The problem is inevitable.

What was dazzling was the way the Archbishop played the discovery. Again, this was a matter of tone as much as substance. Instead of adopting the traditional vicarish tone of sounding apologetic even when making assertions ("I happen to believe . . ."), he managed to sound assertive, even while apologising for the FT story.

This paid off in an admiring column from Marina Hyde in The Guardian: "As for the contradictions of the Church's investment, I imagine I'd be laughed out of Sunday school for claiming that the dense theological argument shakes down to whether a little bit of hypocrisy is worse than a lot of what the payday lenders do. For the righteous atheists of the internet commenter circuit, it apparently is.

"The people actually caught up in the desperate, cyclical clutches of such loans probably don't give quite so much of a toss about absolute ethical consistency in the pension fund arrangements of the single major institution that has unveiled any sort of plan for countering them. Still, what do they matter?"

It also won him a leader in, of all places, The Sun: "LET'S keep some perspective on the Church of England's investment in Wonga. Years ago, unknown to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the private equity firms it uses put £75,000 into the payday loan firm. That's £75,000 out of the Church's £7.5billion portfolio - or 0.00001%.

"Mildly embarrassing for Archbishop Justin Welby after his condemnation of Wonga. But that's all. It doesn't blow a hole in his admirable crusade to stop money lenders fleecing desperate families."

I can't tell you how shocked I will be if I discover after this that The Sun, or Sky, or any other News Corporation property carries advertisements for Wonga.