The fact that Jeffrey John has been nominated as Bishop of Southwark is intriguing.That it has been leaked reveals a great deal about the civil war within the church of England.
Seven years ago Rowan Williams' attempt to get his old friend into the much less important job of Bishop of Reading led to his first – and, it seemed, decisive – defeat at the hands of hardline evangelicals.
He cracked after two months of pressure and asked John to withdraw his name, establishing his reputation as a man who could be bullied. If he is beaten again, he is finished.
If he wins, he will have shot the rapids and the Church of England will finally emerge from the turbulence of the last 30 years with a fairly clear and fairly coherent doctrine about sex.
This isn't just about gay clergy.
It is also about women bishops, whom the synod will discuss at the weekend; about the church's international relationships; and about the strength of the hardline calvinist faction known as Reform, a more serious threat to the Archbishop's authority than the noisier and more colourful Anglo-Catholics.
A few hundred of those will go to Rome under the terms of the Pope's offer, and the rest of the church won't miss them.
Reform is another matter. It has no interest in joining another church. It has been working for 30 years to set up a church within the church that would adhere to pure calvinist teaching, with its own bishops, money and theological colleges.
It is opposed to women bishops and priests on straightforward patriarchal grounds: the Bible says that women should not have authority over men. Similarly, it opposes gay people and Roman Catholics, or anything that smacks of Catholic theology.
Reform congregations tend to be large, urban, and in dispute with their bishops. Over the years the movement has captured two theological colleges (Oak Hill and Wycliffe Hall) and threatened repeatedly to withhold money from the central authorities.
Its bishops did not attend the 2008 Lambeth Conference, in protest against the presence of liberal Americans, and have aligned themselves clearly with the homophobic strands of the communion.
Canon Chris Sugden, the Reform leader who organised the protests in 2003, told the BBC yesterday that Reform parishes in Southwark would look for support from bishops overseas if John were nominated.
In the US, African bishops have already captured disaffected congregations from the legitimate church, leading to huge lawsuits and bitterness. The question is whether this would make any practical difference in London.
In 2003, African bishops threatened to break up the Anglican Communion if John's nomination went ahead. Now they have done all they can to do so. Hardly anyone here has noticed.
Meanwhile, the evangelical movement is split on the important point of John's celibacy.
The CofE's official position is that it is perfectly OK for priests to be gay, provided they are celibate.
John, who is in a civil partnership with another priest, disagrees with this rule, but obeys it. For most evangelicals, that is enough.
What Reform really wants is for disagreement with the rule to be enough in itself to disqualify a man from office. Since this would also disqualify Williams from Canterbury, he really can't afford to concede this point. Nor has he.
So: a church in which gays are all right if they are celibate, and women are accepted if they tolerate the people who can't stand them.
Will that be the settlement of the fuss of the last 20 years? Perhaps not. Whoever leaked John's name made his appointment almost inevitable.
But my sources suggest that the leak came from Evangelicals, not from the liberals.
Someone is spoiling for a fight.
SIC: TGUK