THE Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, is keeping illustrious media company these days. Edward Stourton spoke to her for the World Service’s twice-weekly The Interview, broadcast on Wednesday. The previous episode was with Chancellor Merz of Germany; the one before that was with President Trump!
Although Stourton, clearly at her insistence, said, “Bishop Guli is keen not to add to any media speculation,” the BBC’s interest was clearly in a front-runner for Canterbury.
She did a good job of explaining, without technical language, what the Archbishop of Canterbury actually does and why the Archbishop is much less powerful than most people think; and she was particularly impressive in a handling a difficult set of questions about the American and Israeli bombing of Iran.
Stourton is usually a gentle interviewer, anyway, but he was being extra-helpful in this piece. If Dr Francis-Dehqani is whom the Crown Nominations Commission ultimately opts for, I suspect that she’ll get some glowing coverage from at least the domestic media for a spell. It will inevitably end once she does something to annoy them — it is easy to forget that Archbishop Welby had an early spell as a darling of the Mail and the Telegraph — but her media honeymoon might be much longer.
It is also striking that the media are clearly — and understandably — fascinated by her Persian identity, but little interested in the English side of her background. But her mother was the daughter of a Monkton Combe- and Cambridge-educated CMS bishop. Photos of her Muslim-born but Ridley-trained father also show someone who had learned to be the perfect English gentleman. The Establishment side of her background is potentially as useful to her future ministry, whatever that may be, as the unique side.
Speaking of Establishment figures, Matthew Syed’s engagingly quirky Sideways has become something of a Radio 4 institution. A Peace That Lasts (Wednesday) was the second of a three-part mini-series on “Chasing Peace”. Crucial to this episode was the story of Betty Bigombe, a Ugandan government official who attempted to negotiate in the mid-1990s with the notorious warlord Joseph Kony, only to be undone by President Museveni just as she was making progress.
This led into a discussion of preventative diplomacy, as championed by an Oxford-based mediator, Gabrielle Rikfind, which seeks to direct disputes away from expressing themselves violently.
Nobody could disagree with preventing wars. Yet I was not totally convinced by an approach that demanded that conflict parties be “emotionally mature”: good luck with that! I was also taken aback at Syed’s taking it as read that the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles led directly to the Second World War; that is now a seriously contested view academically. I was more persuaded by the developing movement for transitional justice, which takes accountability and reparation for past wrongs as seriously as the absence of violence.