12/02/2008

It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. Thomas a Becket’s reign as Archbishop of Canterbury lasted eight years before his brains were kicked all over the quire of his cathedral. William Laud was beheaded at Tower Hill. Thomas Cranmer burned at the stake in Oxford.

Rowan Williams is unlikely to come to such a sticky end, but his trial in the last few days by media has been every bit as humiliating and condemnatory as any courtroom appearance by his predecessors.

Like Sir Thomas More, Dr Williams is both a man of singular virtue and in large measure the architect of his own destruction. His comments on sharia law last week, suggesting its imposition had a place in British society, created a verbal firestorm which has caused genuine affront, brought both Anglicanism and Christianity to the point of ridicule, opened the floodgates of racism and handed a gift to the secularists.

‘What a burkha’, screamed The Sun’s front page over the comments. The BBC, after breaking the story on The World At One, invited comments on its website. It received more than 17,000, the vast majority hostile. Lambeth Palace’s switchboard was locked up with complaints. Not exactly a glittering PR triumph, then.

Yet it is, in away, unfair to blame the Archbishop for this. If there is a lamentable failure, it is surely on the part of the media advisers who surround him. I’m not suggesting that, like Pontius Pilate, they washed their hands of him, but it seems they were certainly caught wringing them.

Sadly, the mainstream British churches have never really learned how to deal with the media. I remember when, a decade ago, Bishop Roddy Wright left his Oban diocese to run off with a woman parishioner, the Roman Catholic church’s method of dealing with the press was to switch on an answering machine and leave it until the tape ran out.

Things may have got a little better since then, but not much. Most churches are terrified of the media and run a mile if they think they’re being asked to involve themselves in anything controversial or to feed comment into a story they can’t completely control. They’d rather issue vacuous press releases about fairtrade conferences or gifts of minibuses to Malawi than become involved in a debate which actually challenges society.

Dr Williams, to his credit, was at least prepared to stoke media controversy. In last week’s speech about the nature of Islam in the British legal system, he raised radical ideas in full expectation of hostility and public ridicule. In that, he mirrored both the actions of Jesus and the early church. The lesson of the gospels, particularly apposite during this season of Lent, is that if you mount a high profile challenge to established wisdom, you can fully expect to get your fingers burned.

The Archbishop knew this. His media advisors knew it too. They e-mailed the speech to other Anglican bishops hours before it was delivered, noting alongside the text: “This may be of some media interest.”

By then, though, the charcoal was well and truly out of the thurible. Williams had given his interview to The World at One, claiming that the introduction of elements of sharia law into Britain was unavoidable.

The Archbishop is a wise, brilliant and deeply committed man. He is a distinguished theologian, which means he is much more a natural academic than a gifted communicator.  His argument, as always, was complex, multi-faceted and challenging. His thinking is abstract, but the media – and I don’t blame it for this – doesn’t want abstraction. It wants headlines. Immediately, then, there is a dichotomy.

I heard The World At One lead off with the Williams story on Thursday. As both a practising Anglican and a journalist with more than 30 years’ experience of newsgathering, I jerked up in my chair. As soon as I had listened to the opening headlines, I knew exactly how inflammatory the outcome would be.

Why were Dr Williams’ media advisers not astute enough to see this too? They know that the media will, inevitably and not unreasonably, cherry pick the most interesting and newsworthy pieces of any text and then simplify them to create both easy public consumption and stridency of opinion. That, after all, is the press’s job.

David Jenkins, when Bishop of Durham, was accused in colourful headlines some years ago of dismissing the Virgin Birth. He had actually initiated a complex debate during which he very carefully evaluated both sides of the argument. Only last year, The Pope set the Muslim world alight when quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor’s derogatory view of Mohammed during an intellectually stellar - and as a result virtually unfathomable - address at the University of Regensburg. When it comes to the press having fun with pontificating clerics, it’s had a history  of rich pickings.

The Church of England should have learned from past experience and got to grips with this one from the beginning. A full PR grid should have been drawn up. Religious affairs correspondents should have been briefed, privately and thoroughly, on the whole message Dr Williams was trying to convey.

The speech and message should have been amended to encourage debate rather than stir outrage. The intervention of the soapbox bigots who have used the speech to attack all religions and used it as a ‘Trojan horse’ for a new assault on Islam should have been foreseen and headed off at the pass.

I saw no evidence of any of this happening. Why were other clerics and senior figures not lined up to immediately and publicly support the Archbishop? Why were editors not phoned and jostled into providing a more sympathetic interpretation of his comments? Why did the Archbishop’s media team not realise that every dissenting voice from George Carey to Gregory Venables was going to be cranked up into a frenzy of predictable bleating? Why didn’t they meet fire with fire?

Dr Williams is an erudite and genuinely holy man, surrounded by well meaning people. Few if any of them have much real, tough experience at the coalface of the media. Lambeth Palace would benefit hugely from employing a horny handed, rough-and-tumble journalist or PR with a congenital understanding of exactly how the press will react to a given situation and with the authority to act as he or she sees fit.

The thought of an Anglican Max Clifford or Jack Irvine may sound utterly appalling, but it’s exactly what Rowan needs. And quickly. Otherwise, like Jesus in the Gospel reading from last Sunday’s lectionary, he’s going to be spending a tough and unpleasant time in the wilderness.


Andrew Collier is director of the Scottish media consultancy, Written Words. A journalist for more than 30 years, he is a regular commentator on religious affairs.


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