THE Daily Telegraph really pulled out all the stops against gay marriage. I don't know whether this was a return to its atavistic hatred of the Tory Party - which the paper did so much to render unelectable in the early years of this century - or whether there was just a narrow determination to damage David Cameron.

What is more interesting is that the Most Revd Justin Welby did not play along with this. Monday morning's splash was very strong: "New Archbishop of Canterbury challenges David Cameron on gay marriage: In his first official day as leader of the Church of England, the Rt Rev Justin Welby is expected to say that marriage should remain 'between a man and a woman'.

"'He will say that marriage is between a man and a woman, and always has been', a source close to Bishop Welby said last night, adding that the Archbishop was expecting to be asked for his views and had prepared his response."

I talked to the same source, who did not remember saying this at all. Sure enough, when you looked at Tuesday's Telegraph, on the morning of the vote itself, the Archbishop's challenge to Mr Cameron had shrunk to two paragraphs on page two, at the very end of a splash whose headline was "Tory big guns back gay marriage".

Here is what the Archbishop's challenge came down to: "Speaking on his first day in office, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, underlined his oposition to the Government's plans, and said the Church 'had made its views clear'. The Archbishop insisted he was not on a 'collision course' with the Government, but said there were 'issues with the way it's going forward'."

This is so anticlimactic that I feel the Archbishop should change his name at once to something Private Eye-ish like Strargs. But, of course, he is not a fool, and seems determined to pick his battles carefully.

This one is lost. The clearest sign of that was the Philip Blond/Roger Scruton pamphlet published by ResPublica, and in a shortened from on the excellent abc.com.au website, and a still more shortened form on the Spectator blogs.

This concluded, quite rightly, with the observation that, if marriage is to be preserved as a distinctively heterosexual institution, then the Churches must offer something back: "If there ever is to be proper Christian care of homosexual people, it must craft a good life for them also - so as to make for them a place of permanent stability and reciprocal love and genuine recognition. We say then to the churches: offer more than a civil partnership - offer a civil union celebrated in church as a distinctive form of social and theological realisation for gay people that all Christians would want to see."

When thoughtful, intelligent conservatives come up with ideas quite so monumentally silly, you know the cause is lost. Although I think their solution has much to commend it, the time to come up with that was 15 years ago, or ten at the latest. And that was when the conservatives in the Church were doing their utter damnedest to ensure that it would never bless civil partnerships.

I cannot resist quoting from the very wonderful English Churchman, whose editor has apparently written to his MP as follows: "One can only be thankful that, if this wretched proposal is passed, at least men who come to their sense will be able to get divorced and put an end to their miserable lifestyle. One doubts whether any would dare enter a sodomite 'marriage' if marriage had remained indissoluble as Christ taught."

The Telegraph's editor tweeted that letters to his office were running nine to one against the Bill. I wonder whether that was one of them.

EVERY once in a while there comes a moment in a sub-editor's life when her colleagues should really build a pyre for her so that she could ascend directly to heaven in a state of perfected bliss. Nothing that comes afterwards will ever match the perfection of the moment's headline.

Such a fate should have been granted to the sports sub on the Scottish Sun who wrote the football headline: "Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious". And now he will be joined in Nirvana by the Mail on Sunday sub who produced this one: "Goodbye Gwen, the chicken with cancer who stole my heart: Nothing prepared Liz Jones for the loss of her beloved battery hen to post-menopausal breast cancer."

If that had been the Telegraph, the Archbishop would doubtless have been quoted saying that this was a portent of God's displeasure over same-sex marriage.