At next week’s General Synod, the plotters-in-chief will be out in force, but this gossiping and manoeuvring is not just a sign of the archbishop’s demise. Throughout his time in office, Rowan Williams has been isolated and undermined — not by the media, but by his own clergy.
The case for him stepping down early was made privately by the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, to a few friends at last summer’s York Synod. This almost scandalous suggestion quickly spread across the bars on the university campus where the Church holds its parliament each year, and only after it had been much discussed did word reach the archbishop himself. That he was the last to know of his own putative resignation is pretty telling.
But then, throughout his time at the top, Williams has always been the last to know what’s going on. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI made a historic offer to disillusioned Anglicans. Dr Williams only learned of the provocative move a fortnight before it was announced by the Vatican, yet the Pope had begun drawing up plans years earlier.
The politicking around this move was so chaotic and the characters involved so indiscreet that they would not have been out of place in a Shakespearean farce. When three of the bishops pivotal to implementing the Pope’s deal made what they had hoped was a secret visit to Rome, news of their trip was widely known before they had even returned home. (In their defence, their journey was made exceptionally long because the Bishop of Ebbsfleet’s fear of flying meant they had to take the train across Europe.) As undercover missions go, it was more Dad’s Army than SAS. It looks even more ridiculous in the light of a letter written by the bishop in which he describes the talks as feeling ‘a little bit like Elizabethan espionage’.
Other, more senior bishops had been more successful at keeping mum about the Pope’s plans. I confronted one of them at the York Synod in 2008. He looked stunned and urged me to go somewhere we could talk out of earshot. He confirmed that Anglican bishops were indeed preparing the ground for an exodus of traditionalist churchgoers. We began to make our way back to the main hall, still chatting sotto voce, but ran almost immediately into Dr Williams. The archbishop paused suspiciously. We looked shifty. Then he walked on, knowing there was a plot afoot, but finding it easier to turn a blind eye.
For particularly sensitive discussions at the Synod, rebel bishops would book a dining room in a nearby hotel. I know this to be the case because, unfortunately for them, I happened one year to be staying in this same hotel. Conservative bishops were expressing their dismay at the archbishop’s failure to restrain liberals within the Anglican Communion.
Apart from when a journalist happens to be, um, eavesdropping, discussions behind closed doors normally remain that way — unless of course it suits a faction’s tactics to advance an agenda through the media. The last people to know tend to be the archbishop’s press office, which goes some way to explaining why he is often blindsided by events and blames the media.
In 2010 Dr Williams was warned by his staff that I planned to run a story revealing that Jeffrey John, the gay dean of St Albans, was a frontrunner to become the Bishop of Southwark. Few leaks have angered him more. Having been forced to prevent his old friend from becoming a bishop once before, he no doubt suspected the information had been passed to me by liberals who hoped the publicity would make it harder for him to block Dr John’s promotion again. If this had been the intention, it had the opposite effect. Members of the Crown Nominations Commission entered the room to find the archbishop sitting in ‘silent anger’, furious that the oath of confidentiality they swear before each meeting had been broken. While the Southwark members of the commission were keen for Dr John to be chosen, Dr Williams now appeared to be looking for reasons to block the appointment. More bizarrely, at a critical point in the meeting, John Sentamu and three other members left to go to the lavatories at the same time and, when they returned, the voting patterns are understood to have changed.
Tensions are bound to boil over again later this year when the Church publishes its report on clergy in civil partnerships and another on its approach to same-sex relationships. It would be more than understandable if Rowan Williams felt like leaving the fray before the fight begins once more.