Peter Rhodes on merging councils, sacking archbishops and the case for bouncers at carol services
So which process is the more brutal? Is it the denunciation of Thomas Cromwell, as seen in Wolf Hall (BBC1) or the denunciation of our own Archbishop of Canterbury, possibly to be followed by the Archbishop of York?
No-one in the current fracas will literally lose their head but the steely-eyed determination of the denouncers, and their relentless unearthing of past sins of omission, has a whiff of the medieval - with the obvious difference that while Cromwell's enemies were all male, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have come under fire from female colleagues.
I don't know what the “old boys' club” of the Synod expected all those years ago when they voted for female ordination, but I bet it wasn't this. The good old boys seem not to have grasped the fact that, when safeguarding is at stake, women tend not to look the other way.
