Newsletter #56: Keir Starmer shores up his position at Labour Conference

PLUS: Woman appointed as new Archbishop of Canterbury

Good morning.

Aside from Labour Conference, it has been a slow week — not very convenient for the first newsletter of the new Pimlico Journal! Discussion of the ongoing Tory conference is coming next week. But first, we take an unexpected turn: towards God.

Our special offer, which grants 10% off the old price of £8 per month for one year, is still on. Get in now to save even more before the price goes up to a (still very reasonable) £10 per month for all new subscribers in November:

This newsletter’s agenda: Woman appointed as new Archbishop of Canterbury (free); Keir Starmer shores up his position at Labour Conference (paid).

Woman appointed as new Archbishop of Canterbury

The Crown Nominations Commission (CNC), which is responsible for nominating the Archbishop of Canterbury and headed by ex-MI5 Director General (Lord) Jonathan Evans, have ignored 1,428 of years of illustrious history and broken yet another ‘glass ceiling’ by choosing a woman: namely, the current Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally. It should be noted that Lord Evans only converted to Anglicanism very recently, becoming a member of the Church of England in 2024, suspiciously close to the date when the CNC would have had to meet regardless of the scandal that forced Welby’s early resignation, as he was to reach his mandatory retirement age in 2026. It was for this reason that Welby’s early resignation was not actually that disruptive, despite leaving the post empty for a staggering (and unprecedented in modern times) ten months, as everyone inside and around the Church of England knew that the replacement process was just around the corner anyway.

Since Lord Evans is so new to the Church, it can perhaps be forgiven that he has not managed to flick through his Bible to 1 Timothy 2:11-12, which states the following: ‘A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.’ But even aside from the decision to appoint a woman, another question that concerned Anglicans from across the Commonwealth may have is why, exactly, someone from the security services who is not very Anglican at all was drafted in to manage the selection of the head of our Church.

Dear readers, I must confess that I was genuinely surprised by the choice that the CNC made (you can read my previous column, written when Welby resigned, here). I was told by a source close to the outgoing Archbishop over the summer that the Bishop of London had firmly ruled herself out in front of a large crowd of Church of England officials at the very beginning of the CNC process. Whilst he brought domestic and foreign female bishops into the shortlist predictive conversation, something that I thought was eyebrow-raising in itself, every name mentioned with sufficient experience for the job appeared to have already ruled themselves out, much like Mullally. It was therefore my belief that this was one of the last firewalls that the revolutionaries in our church were not quite ready to breach — at least not yet.

Mullally’s appointment is a very bad one indeed for a number of reasons. Even putting the fact that she is a woman aside — something that is controversial in the Anglican Church at home, and even more so overseas — her record as Bishop of London is awful. London is home to a healthy and bustling Christian scene, but this scene has had less and less to do with her with each passing year, as more people and churches left her oversight or worse, the Church of England (or went from unbelieving to being evangelised by a different church) altogether.

The Diocese of London is home to the highest proportion of churches and worshippers of any diocese in England which have passed resolutions seeking alternative episcopal oversight. What this means is that they reject the ministry of women bishops, and instead receive oversight from what is called a ‘flying bishop’ — a bishop who is responsible for all the churches like this, and works cross-diocese because of their lower density. The most up-to-date source I could find states that 62 of the 398 parishes in the Diocese of London have passed a resolution requesting alternative episcopal oversight to the Bishop of London, that being the woman who is soon to become the Archbishop of Canterbury. This represents 16% of all parishes, as compared to a national average of around 5%. This suggests that Mullally has a proven track record of causing serious division in the church, yet she, and presumably the CNC, do not care.

This is track record of division is particularly bad in the current context of the Church, which is about five years deep into a journey which has been christened ‘Living in Love and Faith’. This concerns the Church’s position on same-sex marriage, gender identity, and the nature of love and Christian unity. The Church has not been able to reach a consensus on this topic for the basic reason that it is impossible to unite liberal revolutionaries and evangelical fundamentalists on the issue of gay marriage. If the priority is the unity of the Church, then the next Archbishop should ideally have been someone who avoided further controversy on this topic, making advancing the word of God and the Christian mission their sole priority. Sarah Mullally is evidently not this person: both because of what she believes, as well as the fact that she is a total creature of the outgoing Welby Establishment responsible for setting this process in motion. After all, after the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York, she was the third most senior figure in the Church during Welby’s time in office.

On a similar note, given the growing disunity in the Church, it is also a strange appointment for an even more basic reason: how can it be that Welby’s part of the Church get yet another Archbishop? In order to foster unity, it is something of a tradition that different wings of the Church take it in turns to be custodians. Why has the CNC simply ignored this?

Despite all I have said above, there does not seem to any imminent threat of schism, though we will see what the future holds. The statement published by the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the most senior of the aforementioned flying bishops, was actually very measured. For now, it seems that everyone, up to and including the most conservative evangelicals, will be sticking around to see how she turns out.

—Christopher Danby Lloyd Contributor, Pimlico Journal

Keir Starmer shores up his position at Labour Conference

Despite the awful polling, the mood at Labour Conference was surprisingly upbeat. The media response, especially to Starmer’s speech, and to a lesser extent Mahmood’s, was generally positive. Labour members, reported as very downbeat at the start of the conference, appear somewhat energised by Starmer’s head-on attacks on Farage. There is every reason to believe, however, that this surge of positive feeling is entirely ephemeral given the big challenges, above all the budget, that will be coming in the next few months.

This was, at least in part, probably a response to Andy Burnham’s increasingly unsubtle — and clearly premature — challenge for the leadership. The great majority of Labour MPs, previously almost mutinous, seem to have rallied around their leader in a reaction to this and mostly kept whatever criticisms they may have of him to themselves — for now. This mirrored the responses obtained by the BBC from Labour MPs, of which (including Starmer’s critics) ‘…few suggested that Burnham would improve their fortunes.’ This stood in stark contrast to polling of Labour members, which showed big margins for Burnham over Starmer, but ultimately, they are not the ones who choose when Starmer goes. Cue endless recitations of the quote involving the words ‘…he who wields the knife…’

We can conclude, then, that there seems to be relatively little appetite for getting rid of Starmer prior to next May’s Local Elections, which should presumably be the real test (much as many have claimed of Badenoch, although anti-Starmer Labour MPs may already be worrying that, much like Jenrick, they might end up making their move too late to save the party for the next General Election). For his part, Burnham has not shown himself to have a good political antenna, which is surely somewhat disqualifying in itself for the Labour leadership.

Burnham’s main appearance at conference was with The Guardian. Here, he continued to criticise the leadership, implying that Starmer was running the party in a ‘factional’ manner, arguing that the fiscal rules should be more ‘flexible’, and stating (probably unhelpfully from the perspective of a future election campaign) that he wanted to rejoin the European Union ‘in his lifetime’.