I MIGHT as well start with a little frivolity: a study of how to bake a runny mess of egg and sugar into a puffed-up meringue, all shiny with malice. There are many cooks involved in this enterprise, but the person with her name on the recipe is Gabriella Swerling, who found — or was sent a “social media post” — from an assistant priest at the Revd Marcus Walker’s church, St Bartholomew the Great, in London. I’ve asked where the original post came from, but I am without an answer as I write. In any case, this person demanded that the Archbishop of Canterbury resign because he had — according to a BBC report — backed the Revd Paula Vennells to become Bishop of London in 2017 (News, 12 January).
What made it a story were the magic words “Chaplain to the Queen”. There are 35 of them, the job is part-time and unpaid, and I’ve never found out what, if anything, they do. It is certainly not the kind of personal and intimate relationship that is implied by the term. But the title is catnip to a news desk. All you need to do is cut the boring words like “a” and “former” and the Telegraph has its lead: “Queen Elizabeth II’s former chaplain has called for [the Archbishop of Canterbury] to stand down amid suggestions that he endorsed the disgraced former Post Office boss to be Bishop of London. . .
“The late Queen’s former chaplain, the Rev Canon Jeremy Haselock, an associate priest at Great St Bartholomew’s in the City of London, criticised the alleged endorsement, writing on social media: ‘Surely this is the point at which Welby must go. Another demonstration of his complete lack of sound judgment.’”
Of course, the Mail followed this up, only in its version there were now “calls”, plural, though no others appeared, and the whole story was just a hasty rewrite of the original Swerling scoopette.
Then, the Telegraph picked up a slightly different Mail story: “Paula Vennells has been described as ‘dim’ by a former colleague who likened her to a ‘mosquito’, it has been claimed. The source told the Daily Mail they found her to be ‘over-promoted’, ‘dim’ and working with her was ‘like dealing with a mosquito’.”
Picture, if you can, the shock, the horror, of a journalist on the Daily Mail when first they discover that people will slag off their colleagues anonymously. No wonder they thought that this story must be news. No wonder the Telegraph agreed.
If you wanted a substantial criticism of the central part played by Archbishop Welby in the Post Office scandal (have I got this right?), you’d have to go to UnHerd, where Giles Fraser wrote about how very wrong Giles Fraser had been in 2016, when he wrote a Guardian piece advocating exactly the managerialism that we all now condemn. This was graceful of him, and just as powerfully argued the second time round.
THE American East Coast papers carried long explainers of how it is that white Evangelical Christians are now devoted to Donald Trump. Benjamin Wallace Wells, in The New Yorker, had talked to many of the small rural pastors who seem to be the backbone of his movement there. Here is one of them: “‘We are sending our sons and fathers to fight and die for what?’ the pastor said. ‘Somebody in a three-letter agency to take control of an oil field?’
“He felt at least as strongly about the COVID vaccines. The pastor and his family had taken ivermectin, the antiparasitic drug that the media had denounced as a ‘horse dewormer’. It had been on the shelf for decades, he said, ‘but it’s not a moneymaker’, so the medical establishment had urged people to forgo it in favour of profitable vaccines.”
It is a bitter reflection that, if Mr Trump wins the election, and hands over Ukraine to President Putin, this will happen, in part, because of the American horror of “socialised medicine”.
ONE reason for their confusion is that the elderly poor in the US watch Fox News, which is owned and controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Just how far he has in the past been prepared to go in search of power is revealed by a blog for the website of the campaign group Hacked Off, by the former Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne, who has accepted a substantial payoff to drop his claim for damages against News Corp. He writes that he had to settle; for, if the jury awarded him a lesser sum, he’d have been liable for the immense legal costs of both sides in the case, and bankrupt.
He now writes, however, that his voicemail messages were hacked on behalf of the Murdoch press 222 times, and his colleague, Vince Cable, then the Business Secretary, was hacked 380 times in the early 2010s, because both men were in a position to obstruct Mr Murdoch’s bid for the 60 per cent of BSkyB that he did not then own.
Cabinet ministers hacked 380 times by a newspaper? Not a story. To make it one, you’d have to show that Paula Vennells was responsible — or, better, Archbishop Welby.