Post Offices and Pointy Hats

At the time, the time being early 2018, Paula Vennells’s personal involvement in the case of our Swanvale Halt subpostmaster’s suspension, and the transfer of the license (or whatever it is technically) to a relative so the post office could reopen, seemed like an act of generous flexibility. Having written to her more than once to complain about what was happening, I felt it was only fair to write again to thank her for finding some way for the service to resume, without the subpostmaster being prosecuted. Even then, only about 18 months before Mr Justice Fraser’s excoriating judgement on the Post Office’s behaviour since introducing the Horizon accounting system in 1999, Ms Vennells maintained to me that ‘I can’t go into the circumstances in this case, but we never suspend a post office without good reason’, and to others that there was no problem with the system at all.

A long while later, when things were clearer, the redoubtable Estelle had discovered that Ms Vennells was also the Revd Vennells, holding a license to officiate in the diocese of St Albans. Estelle wanted to write to the Bishop there to protest, and asked for copies of my correspondence. As I had, indeed, written, I felt I couldn’t say no, but I warned our Bishop that I was agreeing just in case the Bishop of St Albans might corner him in a corridor at the House of Lords waving my letters at him and shouting ‘What’s this?! What’s this?!’ I can’t recall how our Bishop replied to me – I think it must have been in person at a rare moment we were in the same place at the same time – but I do remember he said something to the effect that he’d ‘always found Paula Vennells very impressive’, which he may have done, but it was an entirely otiose thing to say. And what were the circumstances in which he came to any conclusions at all about an NSM working in an obscure parish in another diocese?

We now know exactly how impressive the hierarchy of the Church of England found her – enough to shortlist her for Bishop of London when that position was being filled in 2017, and for the Archbishop of Canterbury to support her candidacy personally. When the BBC reports that Ms Vennells is ‘an ordained Anglican priest but does not hold a senior position in the Church of England’ this is a bit of an understatement. She’s never been anything other than a Non Stipendiary Minister, part of a team in a group of rural parishes. To catapult such a person into the Church’s third most senior bishopric would be the most gobsmacking promotion since Thomas Becket. That it could even be thought of, let alone that it could reach the point of her being interviewed, is quite stunning. Thankfully there may have been angels making sure it didn’t happen.

For quite some time, the Church of England has been in an episode of bewitchment by the world of business and management: I hesitate to say it’s now passing out of it. Of course having a variety of backgrounds and experiences in your leadership to bring other viewpoints to the table is not a bad thing, and I wouldn’t want the Church to be composed entirely of Oxbridge arts graduates like me. Assuming that this equally narrow band of expertise is exactly the one which is going to save your organisation is quite a different matter, but that seems to be what the current cohort in control of the Church of England has thought. The Archbishop of Canterbury supports one individual businessperson-turned-priest’s promotion; another bishop thinks they’re ‘very impressive’; a third speaks up in their support, while carefully and typically not saying anything actually untrue.

You see what’s going on here. The first instinct of the hierarchy of the Church is to support the powerful, because that’s who they mix with. A priest made bishop can be ever so good and upright, but from the moment of their consecration they enter a world of MPs, Lords Lieutenant, CEOs and Chief Constables. They talk to them and get to know them. They can see their good points. Eventually they can see nothing but their good points, because they have become like them. The last sentence of Animal Farm comes to mind.

And here I am, a small and lowly counterpart, bathed in the beguiling warmth of the Establishment in this one place. It is a great privilege to be invited to schools, to turn on Christmas lights, to sit on committees, to bless this and that – to have an established and settled role in a community. A privilege, but a temptation. It is a great mercy that I would never, ever be a bishop, because I know what would happen. I’m exactly the same as them. I would kid myself that I could resist, and a year or two later would be as rusted and corroded as anyone else.