I HAVE never seen a more overt campaign for the job of Archbishop of Canterbury than that of the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley. In a long plug interview in The Times on Saturday, she appeared to position herself quite unblushingly: “The institution is working hard to shut the story and the narrative down, and the sad thing is that it’s undermining the safeguarding work of parish clergy and people at the local level.

“The next archbishop has to have steel to drive that through by whatever means necessary and deal with some of the systemic issues of dysfunction both in the institution and its central capacity, but also in the House of Bishops in terms of cultures around power, privilege and entitlement that persist.

“The right person is going to have to be emotionally intelligent enough, resilient enough and get the support they need to drive that change, because it is significant change that is needed. That means you want somebody who’s going to come in and break up that old boys’ club and signal that from day one.”

Whom can she possibly have in mind?

However well this stuff goes down with the readers of The Times, if Dr Hartley were a football manager, we’d say that she’d lost the robing room.

BESIDES the blackly comic aspects of her campaign, there is something serious to note about the coverage of all these stories.

The other day, I found myself talking to a Roman Catholic journalist. She said that she disliked Archbishop Welby because he was “woke”; so I asked what she meant. Well, she said, there was the dreadful helter-skelter in Norwich Cathedral (News, 16 August 2019). She took for granted that he was in some sense responsible and could have stopped it if he’d wanted to. When I explained that cathedrals were more or less self-governing, and not subject even to the diocesan bishop, let alone the Archbishop, she was confused. It didn’t really make her think better of the Archbishop: his character was already established in her mind. But it seemed to her an extraordinary way to run an organisation.

So it is, but the Church of England is not an organisation. It suits people to pretend that it is one: those who work in it can feel important (unless they are the parish clergy); journalists get to pretend that the decisions that they write about matter and will have effects in the real world. Keith Makin gets to write as if there were a coherent corporate body that could be said to know things or to cover them up. Dr Hartley gets to pretend that, if she were Archbishop, everything would be different.

An uncharitable part of me now wants her to get the job so that she can be criticised repeatedly for the next ten years and blamed for everything that goes wrong. But anyone who takes the Church of England seriously knows already that it’s not an organisation.

NONE the less, all the separate parts of this disorganisation are bound by law, which is why, as I write, Dr Hartley is calling for another Archbishop to resign. The story of David Tudor in Chelmsford (for which she blames the Archbishop of York) has an echo of the story of Canon Andrew Hindley in Blackburn (News, 16 August, Press, 23 August).

The canon had survived five separate police investigations into his behaviour with children and young people. It is fair to say that no one in the diocese was happy with that result. When the Bishop finally sacked him — despite his freehold — he brought a claim in the High Court for a judicial review and was paid a six-figure sum in a settlement. Presumably the diocese was landed with hefty legal fees as well. And yet this was described at the time by the BBC as a “payoff” — and is still being described that way in its coverage of the Tudor case.

Perhaps there are some bishops — I think Archbishop Welby is one — who would simply bulldoze through the rules, powered by rage and force of personality, and try to drive out anyone they thought guilty of abuse. But even that might not work against a sociopath such as John Smyth or Brandon Jackson.

There are, I think, two problems here, and one is insoluble. The one that cannot be fixed is the attitude of the BBC, and most of the secular press, for whom all stories involving abuse must conform to the simple pattern of a bad man sheltered by a bad Church. There is no place for any other actors. That is not a story over which the Church has any control.

What might be fixed, and must be, is the useless Clergy Discipline Measure, which at present neither protects the innocent nor allows for the prompt punishment of the guilty. But that’s another story.

This column is taking a break now until the New Year, and I wish you all a refreshing as well as a merry Christmas. The coming weeks may be stressful, but almost all of you can take comfort in the thought that you are not, nor have ever been, an archbishop. Give thanks.