FOR an example of How Journalism Works, you would be hard put to beat the saga of the beard of the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Richard Chartres.

It started right here, in last week’s Church Times, in which Bishop Chartres produced a characteristically learned ramble through the thickets of pogonophilia: “The discovery that two of the most energetic priests in east London had recently grown beards of an opulence that would not have disgraced a Victorian sage prompted me to look again at the barbate debate throughout church history. The two priests work in parishes in Tower Hamlets. Most of the residents are Bangladeshi-Sylheti, for whom the wearing of a beard is one of the marks of a holy man. . . [This] desire to reach out to the culture of the majority of their parishioners can only be applauded.”

In the hands of the Telegraph headline-writers, this became: “Vicars should grow beards to reach out to Muslims, bishop suggests”.

On the website of the American hate-blogger Robert Spencer, who is barred from this country, the story was as you would expect: “Great idea, Richard. Maybe also Muslim clergymen could start wearing crosses to reach out to Christians. But of course that will never happen.

“The ‘outreach’ always and in every case goes one way, and one way only. Richard Chartres here quotes St. Paul: ‘I become all things to all men that by all possible means I might save some.’ But he doesn’t really want to save Muslims, i.e., challenge them with the truth, much less call them to Christianity. He just wants to welcome and ‘affirm’ them, to show what a diverse, multiculti fellow he is.”

This is worth quoting at length, partly because it is so typically misleading about the situation, but mostly because it is so hilariously mistaken about the character of the Bishop of London, a man so resolutely monocultural that he has said that he wears earplugs against the worship songs of HTB.

The Mail at least managed to get his wonderful use of “barbate” into the story.

THE SUN, followed by the Mail, had a really old-fashioned and excellent crooked-vicar scoop. The man in question, Gilbert Deya, is not, of course, a real vicar: he’s a Kenyan Pentecostalist who has been fighting deportation from the country for the past five years after an earlier scandal.

He was caught this time flogging “miracle oil”, supposed to cure cancer, AIDS, and infertility. An assistant pastor explained: “The oil is not any oil, as the Bishop normally prays with it.

“‘So this oil heals thousands of people here. Thousands of people . . . minimum thousand people been healed of every kind of diseases.’ He described how one who used the oil to treat HIV was ‘cured completely’. Our couple were also taken into a room where a pastor performed a disturbing ritual to ‘cure’ our investigator.

“Rubbing ‘anointed’ cooking oil into her chest, the minister assured her: ‘This is the start of your miracle. You could be here now and tomorrow you go to the doctor and when the doctor checks you find that that cancer is gone.’

“During the lengthy ceremony, the pastor pushed our girl to the ground while shouting: ‘Yes you snake that have put cancer in her blood. Every tainted witchcraft has to go. Yes, go out of her now.’”

What made The Sun especially excited about the story was that the special oil had not even been decanted from the bottles in which it was purchased from Aldi for £1.99. The “Bishop” charges £5 a bottle, which seems a rather low figure for a cure for cancer.

On the other hand, he did demand £700 to cure the apparently cancer-stricken woman’s infertility. It was the discovery that his wife had been buying babies in Kenya as a “cure” for the infertility of women in London which led to the deportation order against him.

ON YET another hand, the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Revd Paul Butler — a real Bishop, this time — got himself a name-check in The Guardian for leading a revolt in the House of Lords which has at least delayed the Government’s attempts to abolish an inconvenient measure of child poverty. Probably more worth while, he got top billing in the local paper’s version of the story.

FINALLY, The Guardian also carried a report on the use of Twitter by American sympathisers of Islamic State, or Daesh, which showed some of the difficulties faced by the authorities when they try to suppress such propaganda. Since Twitter is a public forum, the expressions of sympathy used are coded, and one of them is to use an avatar that is recognised by fellow sympathisers.

The colours green and black are popular here, and so is the use of lions as quasi-heraldic symbols, from their association with jihadis.

As a result, one account has used the symbol of an American football team, the Detroit Lions, neatly reversing the iconography of patriotism. Beards were much simpler.