103. Archbishop of Canterbury: Faith, mental health, and the future of the Church

35:00There are groups, Hezbollah, Hamas, who wish to eliminate them, not just push them back to their borders, but to remove them. So you've got a series of groups, none of whom have hope or security for the future, none of whom have populations that can look to the future and expect improvement. I mean, Rory, you know more than me about this because you spent a lot of time there and where the consequences continual renewal of extremely violent and absolutely horrendous conflict and the christians are being crushed between the up and the nether millstone of these two groups, absolutely ground fine, and are disappearing.

35:55I was talking to a patriarch in northern Iraq yesterday. His population has virtually disappeared. It did as a result of the Iraq invasion and the withdrawal and what happened after that. Bethlehem used to be majority Christians, about 5 % if that. The same in East Jerusalem, Hebron, you name it. The Christians are disappearing. And I talk to our wonderful Archbishop in Jerusalem, Hosanna, constantly, or listen to him constantly. And when we're going to do something like this, I talk to the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilus, to the Latin Patriarch Pizbella, and to other experts, and of course, to Assam.

36:44And I take their advice. And they're very cautious. They live in the midst of this. But they say, this cannot go on. These attacks in the West Bank. So you spoke to all of them before you made the statement? Yeah. I'm in constant touch with them. If they were here, what would they want to convey about their experience and the experience of Palestinian Christians, particularly? The experience of Palestinian Christians is of diaspora and exile. In certain places, like Gaza, Hamas, systematically persecuted them since they took over. And we have to be honest about those news, pretending otherwise.

37:24We're down to one church, I think, left in, which is Latin. Might be two, there might be a Greek one as well, in Gaza, which had a church when St. Paul was around. I mean, you know, this isn't imported churches. They're the originals. And they would say they live in communities that are shrinking, that are under enormous, insufferable pressure. And the only way for that to be reversed, and just out of sheer humanity, they long to see a stable, established peace. Enormous pressure from Hamas and Gaza, but also under pressure, they would say, from the occupation. Particularly, yes, from the occupation and particularly from the settlers.

38:12You mentioned Bethlehem. What does it say about faith, God, religion, that that place which is oozing with more religion and religious history than any other part of the world? Apart from Jerusalem, probably. Okay, and that region, the whole region, that is the place that currently has the most division, the most violence, the most hatred. And I guess as his representative here, what's God doing about it all? For me as a Christian, the answer is he's living in them because there's nothing new about this. It was like that when Jesus was strolling around Galilee and Judea at the beginning of the first century.

39:00It was, we find the same levels of violence all the way through the growth of the church. And the answer they always give, and I was reading Peter's first letter this morning where he's talking about this, to people under persecution and violence, is what is God doing about it? He's living in the midst of it. He's sharing it. He's experiencing it. And he is being crucified unjustly. And he overcomes death and gives us what Peter calls an eternal and inextinguishable hope. It's very hard to feel the hope right now. If you limit it to what we're seeing, I couldn't agree more. And I would say that's exactly the same all around the world.

39:49I remember a very formative experience on the borders of Sudan and South Sudan in the Nuba Mountains, where there's been fighting for a very, very long time. A lot of Christians in the Nuba Mountains, but it's in Sudan. There was a very difficult Islamist regime for very many years there. And there'd been particularly heavy fighting from the Sudanese army attacking, this was about six, seven years ago. I remember walking along the road, coming upon a group of refugees with a little boy. And the little boy was seven, and he was sitting by himself. And I said to some of the others, is he one of your children?

40:35They said, no, he's lost his parents. and if you want to look at what war means that is one of half a dozen images in my mind of that little seven-year-old and where does he find hope where did do we find hope when we look to him i i mean alistair you're quite rightly putting your finger on the greatest question that faces all faith. It's how do you explain human suffering? And the intense cruelty, intense cruelty of this world, which instantly, politically, I think we forget. I think we set up political systems on the assumption people are good, rather than on the assumption that they'll go wrong.

41:22And where people have power, they go wrong, including archbishops. That is your kind of general view? I believe in sin, yes, that people are biased towards sin and therefore need forgiveness, renewal, being born again, if you like, in a biblical phrase, finding the love of God and the power of the Holy Spirit to change them. Is that clear? Can you forgive Vladimir Putin right now? It's God's job to do the forgiving. It's mine not to hate and to pray for him. Do you think God forgives him? That's up to him and God. it's above my pay grade. You've done a lot on peace building. Not much successful.

42:02But tell us, as we look from Sudan to Palestine to Russia, Ukraine, what have you learned about what sometimes works? I've written a book about this, about reconciliation. I think there are two or three key lessons. One is it's all about relationships. The biggest task in reconciliation work in peacebuilding is to enable people to see their enemies as human beings whom they hate rather than things. Dr. Martin Luther King said once, I will destroy my enemies by making them my friends. It's quite a famous thing. I'm not sure he was the first one to say it. Desmond Tutu said the same. So the first thing is it's all about relationships.

42:47And people involved in peacebuilding are only catalyst. Peace is built by the people in the war, not by outsiders telling them what to do. It involves key moments like peace treaties or ceasefires, but they are merely a step. It's a process that takes generations. And we can see that in Europe since 1945. It was the genius of the European Union, which from the French and the German point, as Alastair and you know very well, was never about trade fundamentally. It was about young Germans, young French, young English, et cetera, not Brits, not killing each other on the battlefields in Northwest Europe.

43:34That's the point of the European Union. So reconciliation, it starts with careful listening, presence, careful relationship building, relieving need, taking risks in being with people and bringing them together and being willing to be alongside them in bad places spending an awful lot of time in rooms listening to people it's not very glamorous and resourcing them to keep it going now we've been very i think we've been far too soft on you we need to we need to toughen up a bit now i want to go back to so apart from theodicy which means the justification of god in suffering you've got that's your job and illegitimacy you can't have probing mercilessly into my life yeah yeah apart from all that so I want to go back to our interview in 2016 that's a long time ago it is a long time ago but there's a couple of things we discussed which I'd like you to talk about now the first is this is the first one's a bit easier I asked you how you would feel about being in the job if the queen died and you said I hope it doesn't happen on my watch well it did yeah um so I wanted to know what that was like and the coronation yeah and the second question I asked you, which you really struggled with, and you were honest to say you were struggling with it, I asked you whether gay sex was sinful.

44:55And you said, I don't have a good answer. So I wondered if in the intervening seven years, you've got a better answer. Eight years. Eight years. Sorry. We all make mistakes. Very reassuring to think that, you know, he was one of the Prime Minister's main advisors. Can't quite add up. Number's not a strong point. There's a lot of other strong points. Okay, first one. I got the call that the Queen had died when I was in France. We were packing up. It was at the end of the holiday. We drove through the night. And looking back as to how I reacted, which I was just shock, because of course one knew it was going to happen.

45:41But it was completely surreal for all the reasons that you've said and you've both said that none of us can remember. We were all born after the Queen became Queen. There is only, there was only the Queen. And then it was 10 days of very hard work. The funeral was well prepared, but particularly preparing the funeral sermon was, because you have four minutes, which is not a lot of time. and working very closely with the dean at Westminster, who's phenomenal. Westminster Abbey was so brilliant and organized, and so were the army. And the government, you know, everything just happened. That was one experience.

46:28And there were just moments in it. One of the most vivid for me was when the Queen's coffin was brought to Westminster Hall for the lying estate. and I was at the door of Westminster Hall to meet the coffin. And it came and you could hear in the distance the crowd's applause. And then as the coffin reached them, you could hear it went and rose and almost a sigh. And it was led, the cortege was led by the horse guards, dismounted, with their swords reversed over their shoulders, sabres, whatever they carry. And it was afternoon. I could see their shadows before they arrived, these huge shadows.

47:21And then they came past in a slow march with the drum. And I suddenly, it was that moment I realized, this is reality. The second moment was the funeral itself, where there were more heads of state, over 200 heads of state and government, probably the largest gathering, I guess, almost ever. And watching President Biden come in for security reasons, he came in last. And he came in with a British colonel escorting him. Just as the George and Victoria Cross procession came past, and the colonel, he was about four feet from me, The colonel whispered to him what it was, and he immediately straightened up, put his hand across his chest out of respect for them.

48:12And then getting up in the pulpit and just seeing this enormous number of people in the Abbey with all these famous faces. And just before the service started, the BBC said, we think there'll be two billion. so that was it was four actually but it was that was so such a solemn moment i mean solemn i can't find a word for it it was so profound that this was a change of moment in history and the coronation how much did you rehearse for the coronation started in january twice a week in one of the rooms upstairs marked out to the same scale as the uh east end of westmost rabbi uh by the high altar what they call the theater and um twice a week with members of staff coming in and um i was always the archbishop and they'd draw lots and put a picture around their neck and so my wife heard one day she was she was in the office and she had two people saying um how was the rehearsal once it was the rehearsal this morning he said oh yeah they're getting better he's getting better because i mean it was really complicated and um and and then the first person said who were you said i was the king and then in the last couple of weeks rehearsals every day with the king and uh with the with the last week it was with the king right and the queen the whole time.

49:52And then the ceremony, very alert and keyed up, very attentive, very present. But by that time, we'd rehearsed so much that thanks to my chaplain as well, whispering, go down there, do this, do that. Most, apart from two mistakes, I got it right. What were the mistakes? After putting the crown on the king's head, I bent down to make sure it was level. And if you look on the film, you can see me sort of ducking down, which really looks stupid. And the other mistake was I forgot to look at the king to get permission to crown the queen. Did you notice that? I could see you from an angle, but I don't think I got that subtlety on that.

50:40No, it was, you're meant to, before you crown the queen, you're meant to get the king's permission. They feel quite minor. I don't think you should beat yourself up about those. No, it wasn't too bad. And the crown came to me the wrong way round. So if you look, you can just see the... Oh, that would have been bad. Because you would have put it on the wrong way round. I would. Yeah. But you spotted it. Yes, because I knew the shape of the jewel that should face me. And I've been repeating it to myself all week. and you can just see the dean gives me the crown and we both look down and I go and roll my eyes and then we go...

51:18Wow, well done, well done. That was funny. And let's now turn to gay sex. I do all the time, really, in the life of the church. And do you have a better answer yet?

51:33Yes, I do. You want me to give it? I'd love to hear what it is. Yeah, this is, if there was an equivalent question when Tony Blair was in office and he was in an interview, he was asked an equivalent question. You'd be standing in his line of sight going. Well, there's your me over there. He's looking very relaxed. No, he's not. He always looks like that. what the Archbishop of York and I and the bishops by a majority by no means unanimous and the church is deeply split over this where we've come to is to say that all sexual activity should be within a committed relationship and whether it's straight or gay in other words we're not stopping the idea we're not giving up on the idea that sex is within marriage or civil partnership, or whether marriage is civil or religious, and that therefore we've put forward a proposal that where people have been through a civil partnership or a same-sex marriage, equal marriage under the 2014 Act, they should be able to come along to a church and have a service of prayer and blessing for them in their lives together.

53:04So we accept that. There are, as with all things, the Church of England is always a part. And there are some principles we're trying to work on, is that because of conscience, no priest or church should be compelled to have these services. Now, I think, personally, this is a long way from church same-sex marriage. But there is no doubt that the church is deeply, profoundly divided on this. You personally haven't. Are you doing those blessings? I've said I won't out of responsibility for the Anglican communion, where in many parts of the world it's absolutely unacceptable. And that's where you basically have to be a politician.

53:51This is where you have to be a politician. Because you've got very different views and very different churches around the world. You have countries around the world where people, even if they don't have it, want the death penalty for people who, as they say, are gay. Particularly, there's less attention to the G, the B, etc. etc. And you have countries where basically it's legal and the church is involved in taking, in presiding at same-sex marriages. But we're saying no compulsion on anyone. Churches may opt into doing these. If they don't opt in, they don't do it. And it is a simple service of welcome and blessing.

54:40And even that has resulted in an enormous breakdown of relationships in a really sad way, not only across the communion, but in the Church of England. For those who are conservative, we keep, I am absolutely committed to them having a full and undoubted place in the Church of England. We're not a political party. We don't chuck out people who disagree because it's God who brings people to faith. And every Christian is a brother or sister in Christ. Including people who want the death penalty for being gay. Yes. I may disagree with them and say they're wrong, but you might disagree with members of your family and say they're wrong, but they're still your family.

55:27And you might really disagree with them passionately, but they're still your family. And Christians are a family. Church of England is extraordinary because you're holding together a coalition even broader, it seems sometimes, than the Labour Party. I mean, it's in terms of the different views within it. We've talked about - What about the Conservative Party? Is that broader or less? I don't. That's five different parties now. That's not even one party. Because we've talked about gay marriage or gay sex. It's also true, I understand, and I'm sort of navigating my way through this in my own church in London, that you have some very complicated views on people taking different positions on women bishops.

56:12And yet, as you say, what you don't do is say, you know, here's our, I don't know, our clause for a moment or whatever the equivalent is. This is the highway, instead of which you, the tendency of the church in England traditionally has been to hold together a very broad range of beliefs rather than insist on one. It is. I mean, my general rule, to put it in crude terms, is that, for instance, people can become bishops if there's a real sense they're called to be a bishop, and if they can say the creed without crossing their fingers at any point. That's not a very theological way of putting it.

56:46In other words, you're in favor of women bishops. I am strongly. I introduced the legislation that made it possible. Yes. But some of your colleagues are not. Yeah, there's a few bishops who are not. Of the diocesan bishops, there are two at the moment out of 43, and three or four more who are suffocant bishops. And some priests who don't want to have a... Yeah, there's quite a substantial number. And there's not just the high church, but also the evangelicals who are against the authority of women to teach on biblical grounds. And how do you get around? So let's say you're a parish priest and you, for some reason, disagree with women bishops.

57:27How does the Church of England get around that? The Church of England says that if your church agrees through its PCC, you can have oversight from a bishop who agrees with you. How are you going to reverse the falling numbers? Are numbers falling? No, the last couple of years they've gone up. And have they gone up with younger people, older people? Both, all, everywhere and in every part of the church. And what's that? But you're still a lot lower than you were at the height of the church's kind of status. Oh, good heavens, yes. Height of the church is we're around, of church finger, we're around 20 % of the population.

57:59We're now 1.6, 1.8. Wow. But last year we grew 5 % overall and 6 % in young people. Okay. And I guess my final question relates to the other side of the Atlantic. and that is how do you feel that the Donald Trump who doesn't strike me as the most Christian living person how do you feel that the Christian evangelical movement appears to be so supportive of him what has happened there there's a very interesting figure which says that in many parts of particularly the Bible Belt You know, 60, 70 % of people will say they're evangelicals and about 8 % go to church regularly, every week. Now, that may be wrong, but certainly the number I saw recently from a church survey.

58:54I think there is a very deep sense in the States, as there is here with the culture wars, but much more in states, that American exceptionalism remains deeply embedded within evangelicalism. This is the church. This is the country that is called by God. You know, a city set on a hill and the things going back to the Reagan era, which we used to think. I mean, during the days of empire, you'll find plenty of British leaders saying that. You never had Republicans saying that Reagan was kind of Christ reincarnated. Some of these people say that about Trump. They don't quite go there, but they say he is a prophet from God, yes.

59:37But I think that's deep down. It's because they want stability. They want a stable society around them. We see the same here and across Europe. I was talking about this in Paris yesterday at a big gathering. I think one of the most interesting sociological things of the last 40 or 50 years 60 years, is that every major faith has seen a rapid growth of fundamentalist thinking. And you can say that, my own view, that part of that is economic and sociological, which is about resistance to the rapid changes in culture, in technology, in biology, in life, in how the world is organized and feeling a deep sense of threat, which is one of the reasons that at our last gathering of Global Bishops, we set up a science and technology global group to work on ensuring that our tens of thousands of schools around the world, because it's one of the big things we do, and over 110 universities, actually get to grips with modern science and technology.

1:00:55It's not just the big global north economies. But this doesn't become another gap between the poor and the rich. But every country, we're 165 countries, has the opportunity. And we're teaching this stuff, how to engage with it and be a faithful Christian. Now, you know, I've talked about lots of things. One of them is mental health. Indeed. Because I always get the feeling I'm very good at spotting fellow depressives. And of course, you've also got your history of parental alcoholism and your daughter, who's had this amazing, she really tells her story about depression as well. So I just wonder if you could reflect a bit on that.

1:01:34Yeah. I mean, I think we're in a really interesting place on that, and I am. I recognize more and more that it's something like asthma, that you, I'm asthmatic. You live with mental health, mental ill health. Catches you by surprise sometimes. A few weeks, a couple of weeks back, a bit more than that. Just in the middle of the night, an overwhelming sense of, you know, that sort of darkness that one gets into. And so I'm conscious of my ups and downs. I'm very strict about taking a tabula. And they definitely help. And I have, I'm very open with my wife about this, with Caroline about this. I think you're very open in the family about it.

1:02:24You must have people who you can say, this is a bad moment, this is really bad, so that they prevent you harming yourself. I went to a terrible, no it was beautiful, but tragic funeral not that long ago of someone who in his 40s had taken his own life, practicing Christian, and just overwhelmed, I think. Just one of those moments of being absolutely overwhelmed. And you're nodding. I presume you know what that feels like. And, you know, I go through the ups and downs, and certainly if I allowed myself to read my own Twitter feed, that would not help me at all. In fact, it would do a lot of harm.

1:03:16I believe it when people say I'm completely the worst archbishop in history, as someone said. Do you? Oh, yes. But you believe that all the time or just when you're feeling down? No, not all the time. Not all the time, but certainly it's one of the things that, you know, but in a very, I don't know if this makes any sense to you, in a very distant way. It's not me believing it about myself. It's sort of seeing me out there and thinking what a klutzy is. I'm aware that when I'm depressed I get bad-tempered, and so I have to spend time saying sorry to people. And you mentioned self-harm. I've been tempted, but I've never done it.

1:03:59I mean, I don't know how. Does any of that make any sense to you? All of it. and it it but we have to recognize that there are ways of treating it and nobody needs to go through it alone and you need friends you need people who you can be absolutely honest with and say this is really bad and i think one of the best things in the last few years is a number of people, and you were one of the earliest ones, who, by being open about this, enabled it to be less stigmatizing. And the royal family have been very good about this, very open. And it's very frequent. But as I say, I mean, if I get, I woke up the other night with an asthma attack.

1:04:53Well, I didn't lie there thinking, oh dear, this is awful. I reached my inhaler and dealt with it it's there's a parallel there don't just sit there or lie there or whatever it is you're doing thinking about it talk to someone get help and and i've had to learn that and i find it even this conversation i find quite sort of embarrassing in a way do you oh yeah Well, I don't like to weep out myself, so, you know. But there's that. And I just think, I suppose there's a voice within me that says, you're the Archbishop of Canterbury. What reason have you got to be depressed? Ah, but that's stigmatizing, you see.

1:05:35Why shouldn't the Archbishop of Canterbury get depression? Absolutely. I think that's absolutely right. And quite a lot of my colleagues say, you're the Archbishop of Canterbury, so why shouldn't you be depressed? Let me tempt you to talk about what faith, what Christianity can offer the world. That's a really good question. Hope and the resources to live a fully human life, to quote, I think, Irenaeus, a person is never as complete as when they are complete in Christ. that's from the very early centuries um and i've misquoted him slightly but i haven't got my text and um i think in with modernity and post-modernity or ultra-modernity we've lost the sense of the fallenness of human beings which applies to every human being so we over demand and over accept and we are not prepared to forgive standards that do not come up to what we've demanded, which is much more than we could do.

1:06:47I mean, you look at so many things with political leaders. Everyone says, oh, well, they've done this wrong. They've done that wrong. And the paper's then going for tall poppy syndrome and cut them off. And so they're hopeless. You know, they give them a nickname. And it's happening at the moment. It happened with Rishi. it happened with Tony Blair, you go on and on. And there is no sense that everyone gets things wrong and is forgivable, that there is forgiveness. Now that Christianity brings at its best the capacity, Christians bring the capacity from God to see fallenness and to forgive because they are part of that fallen nature.

1:07:33You see it in what Paul writes, St. Paul writes. And, you know, within that, we desperately need that. How on earth do you get reconciliation if, taking a long time over it, you don't have a sense of being able to forgive what's being done to you? My final one is some thoughts on how you relate to politics and power. We've got very striking examples from senior clergy in Russia seeming to endorse Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine. Presumably you have interesting, positive and complicated examples from your predecessors as archbishop. Absolutely. I mean, how do you think about this? I think about this first by looking back at history and see where we got it wrong.

1:08:17The German church in the 30s supporting Hitler, apart from Bonhoeffer and the confessing church, was a small minority. All the bishops in the House of Lords in 1832 voting against the Great Reform Act and against the abolition of slavery. So it's admitting where we've gone wrong. I mean, the slogan at the moment for the vision of the Church of England is simpler, humbler, bolder, and centred on Christ. These three-word slogans, they get everywhere, don't they? Yeah, they get everywhere. it's like education education education that could be yours as well so you have to have a sense of history you have to recognize that in every age the church is unable to see its own faults as it should so there has to be a constant willingness to learn it wasn't only voting against the abolitionists every i was in jamaica in the summer the church actively supported slavery in the Caribbean.

1:09:20So we've put aside 100 million pounds, which is less than we gained from slavery, for impact investment in areas damaged by that, not as reparations, but as for the future. So you repent in technical language by doing the opposite. it you are self-aware of your own fallibility and i have to be intensely self-aware of my infallibility and therefore you consult and listen to all kinds of people inside the church and outside it as for instance we did on our when we intervened around housing uh in 2022 with a very well-received report which included people on the commission who were not part of the church or any church atheists so the way we manage it is by listening thinking going back to the basic principles of hooker in the 17th century one of the great anglican thinkers who said we work on scripture tradition and reason that's the anglican pattern do you think by christmas you might make your first intervention on the labor government over winter fuel payments i have I've already said I thought the two-child limit was a mistake and it should have been abolished.

1:10:41Okay. That didn't directly answer my question. The bishops have spoken out very clearly, a number of them, on the Winterfell payment. Well, thank you for your time. Thank you for yours. Thank you very much for having us. Thank you very much. Thank you.

1:11:01Well, Alistair, what do you think? Well, I like Justin Welby. I think those who say the worst archbishop ever are just sort of trolls. I think he's very interesting. I think he's thoughtful. How did you first come across him? I don't really remember, but I know him sort of quite well and I come here fairly often. But I think he's, I mean, we didn't do this, but sometimes I regularly do when I bump into him, is I'll just say something like, Psalm 48, what's it about? It is a bit, I know you'd think the Archbishop of Canterbury should know the Bible inside out, but he knows the Bible inside out.

1:11:45And I thought he was very reflective about his own, very open about his own life and childhood, very reflective about his own journey, faith, and about his own doubts. I thought that was really interesting because for an older generation, I guess they would have been very wary about the Archbishop talking openly about his mother's alcoholism, her affairs, or his own mental health. And I can imagine a sort of older British generation now in their 90s who'd sort of slightly wince and say, well. Interestingly though, when I did interview him for GQ back in 2016, eight years ago, he didn't really want to talk that much about the mental health side of things.

1:12:32He said he had moments when he felt very low. But they're just sort of saying, I take the pills. You have to get help. You have to talk to people. I think that's great that he does that. much and it's astonishing when he's sort of got there how confidently and gracefully he does it and how straightforwardly. And when you see someone doing it you're like oh of course I mean it's not a problem at all and it's actually very very powerful. I think often those things go wrong don't they because one sounds awkward and doesn't know how to get that but I'd imagine even any critic listening to that would be like, oh, actually, that's pretty good.

1:13:11That's pretty straightforward and helpful. And what do you think about his political stuff? I think it's so difficult, isn't it? So, so difficult. And as he says, I mean, the whole, we didn't get into what's happening with this great Russian patriarch who's basically completely endorsed Putin's regime in the invasion of Ukraine. He reminded us of the church backing and profiting from slavery. And so it's really, really tough for them. And who knows? I mean, you can imagine also how angry the conservative government must have been about the criticism about Rwanda. They will have felt, you know, this is typical.

1:13:52In fact, the conservatives often get very angry. There's a lovely, one of my favorite moments is Willie Whitelaw, who was my predecessor in Penrith and the Border. It's a lovely moment where Robert Runcie was criticizing Mrs. Thatcher. and he was put on television when he was Deputy Prime Minister. What do you think about the Archbishop Chris Isen Prime Minister? And he said, well, I served with him in the Scots guards and the thing you need to understand about him is he's a very, very religious man. Yeah, it must be hard though to work because he could. He could be out talking about politics all the time because he clearly thinks about it a lot, reads about it a lot, cares about it a lot.

1:14:34But when I was just looking through some of the more recent stuff, you know, he's been maybe half a dozen times when he's really spoken out on the last couple of years. But he's got some of the same problems I imagine the Queen had and the King has, which is that they will have very, very strong views on things. And most of the time they can't express them. You know, I'm sure everybody has very strong views on Remain, on Brexit, Scottish independence, on Russia, Ukraine, on Israel, Palestine, and how they navigate their way through that stuff. It's hard. I thought the stuff about the things that might have gone wrong, but these two mistakes, as he called them, at the coronation.

1:15:15I mean, that's a great vision, the crown the wrong way around. That would have been quite a thing with 4 billion people watching. Imagine if it had not gone in the right way. Yeah. Did you notice him fiddling around and rolling his eyes? No, I didn't see that. You were there in your buttons outfit. My buttons outfit, yeah. My buttons outfit, yeah. I never quite got to the bottom of his mother because she was the most charming, outgoing, bubbly, kind, sort of grandmotherly figure. But maybe this is being a little unkind to him, but I maybe detected that maybe she was a more tricky mother to have.

1:15:54Must have been. And maybe one of those people who someone not in the family meets them and it's just like, this is the most saintly wonderful person. But maybe... I wonder if... I mean, look, I don't know, but I mean, if she was an alcoholic whilst in number 10, she said it was a drunken encounter with this guy, Montague Brown. I also wonder whether... I mean, I think I'd be really... I think I would feel my life really turned upside down if I discovered that my dad wasn't used to my dad. Yeah. I think I'd find... I think my kids would feel the same if they suddenly discovered I wasn't their dad.

1:16:26Yeah. Wouldn't you feel that was a bit... And yet he seemed to, I think once he said before about when he, when his upbringing father, as he called him, when he died, he felt there was a lot of relief amid the grief. That story's a bit strange, isn't it? Charles Moore, who's this kind of old fuddy-duddy sort of Christian traditionalist young fogey, turns out to be the person who's gossiping about sex affairs in the 1950s and is sort of getting in touch like some sort of classic son journalist doorstepping the archbishop to be like, well, I heard it. I don't think it was Dorsey. I think he was reporting back the gossip and then persuading him to get this test done.

1:17:11But tell me about that. I mean, you've been a journalist. I mean, in the end, I guess it's just, as a journalist, Charles Moore just had to follow up with that story, didn't he? I guess so, yeah. And then thought about it. He actually said, didn't he? The telegraph was very nice about it. They waited a couple of weeks. But I guess Charles Moore would have, as a newspaper man, would have detected this was one of the biggest stories that he'd ever stumbled across. I think if you discover that the Archbishop of Canterbury is born out of this rather strange non-marital relationship with somebody who worked for Winston Churchill, I think you're struggling to say that you're just going to ignore that one, Rory.

1:17:44Yeah. So you can't be too harsh on Charles on that front. The other thing that I really admire about him, and I think people would have got a glimpse of, I mean, there are many, many things I admire about him, but one of them is he didn't talk that much about the work that he's done in Sudan, the work he's done in Nigeria, just how much he knows about those places, how much he cares about those places, how tough-minded and realistic he is about warlords and men of violence, because it's usually men, and the horror that they create there. But I'm also very, very proud, really proud to have him as an archbishop.

1:18:22I'm really proud. I mean, I also really, really admire Rowan Williams, his predecessor, but I think they're both really good examples of modern Britain. I once said to him, I thought it was really unfair that every time that Rowan is always called Rowan, or is just intends to be called Welby in the headlines. But no, I think we're agreed. He's a very good man, doing very good work on behalf of his maker, in whom you and he believe profoundly. And just to finish for international listeners, also on behalf of the country, I mean, what's so unusual about his position is that he is the head of this established church, which is completely tied into our constitution, which the king is the head of, which, because of the history of the British Empire, stretches all the way around the world and brings, you know, these conflicts he's talking about with archbishops and people protesting, brings them into contact with a lot of the developing world.

1:19:20I mean, he is much more than you would have thought, part of the state, part of the constitution. Yeah, and when he travels and when he's dealing with these issues in different parts of the world, within the church, he has to be a diplomat as well as a church leader. Well, Alistair, I'm really pleased we did that. And I don't know whether we're going to tempt you to do many more people who do God. Oh, I like God. I like doing God. Good. Good, good, good. all right it's just you don't do God when you're doing God in politics but you're happy to do that anyway thank you I thought it was very interesting and I also think it brings out a very interesting side of you yeah well you didn't did you really have to go down the route of the right war or did you have to do that yeah there are so many things going on with him which reveal Alistair I thought that was very thank you thank you Thank you.