John Sentamu will likely be Rowan Williams's successor – but the campaign to get him there has employed unpleasant tacticsJohn Sentamu, the archbishop of York, is expected to announce his candidature for Canterbury this week, by the opaquely Anglican manoeuvre of declining a place on the committee that will choose the next archbishop of Canterbury to succeed Rowan Williams.
Already his allies are suggesting that only racism could keep him from the job.
The Rev Arun Arora, who used to be his spin doctor at York, was quoted over the weekend as saying that:
"At its best the besmirching of John Sentamu has revealed that strand of snobbery which views outsiders as lacking class, diplomacy or civility – in other words 'not one of us'. At worst it has elicited the naked racism which still bubbles under the surface in our society, and which is exposed when a black man is in line to break the chains of history."
Since Arora has just been appointed as head of all the Church of England's communications, this is a fairly heavy accusation. If Sentamu does not now get the job, it will hang over the successful candidate in a rather nasty way. And if he does, it will be open to his opponents to say, or at least to think, that he did so because it would have looked terribly racist not to give it him, and not because of his merits.
These are considerable. He has ambition, courage, and a gift for theatre. He works hard. He says unpopular things often, and popular things as often as he can. But it is absurd to pretend that his status as an outsider, who came here as an asylum seeker, is not central to his presentation of himself.
Imagine if David Cameron were to write in the Sun:
"Last year I stood in York city centre with over a hundred other people singing patriotic songs like Land of Hope and Glory, I Vow To Thee My Country and Rule Britannia, while York Minster's carillon bells played along. It was absolutely fantastic, and we also raised a bit of money for Help for Heroes.
"We shouldn't be shy about saying how great our country is. We should be proud. England is known the world over for her universal language, her sense of fair play and decency, the virtue of hope and her sense of hospitality."
When Sentamu does so (and this was a quote from his latest column) the resonances are entirely different. No other bishop could possibly say those things. If any other bishop did, he would not be considered for Canterbury. For some conservatives this is a clinching argument for Sentamu's candidacy. An anti-racist national pride may be exactly what the Church of England, indeed the country of England, needs to learn to express.
In some ways, he's God's gift to the Daily Mail: a black asylum seeker who doesn't find English patriotism shameful or vulgar and who regards gay marriage as akin to something imposed by dictatorships. At the same time, his consistent support for Guardian-ish causes such as the humane treatment of asylum seekers, the spread of fair trade products, and action to end youth unemployment means that he can't be written off as a creature of power.
He has been poor. He has worked among poor people. He really cares about injustice.
None the less, when clergy who have worked with him criticise him for "African" style, they are making a point which is not racist. The slow schism in the Anglican communion has exposed many people to a style of church leadership which they find repugnant.
The style that people object to is autocratic, and prelatical. The idea that God blesses success, and that might therefore shows forth righteousness, is embedded in a lot of African religious culture. Sentamu's younger brother, for example, is a hugely successful "Prosperity gospel" preacher in Kampala, with a mansion, a Mercedes, and a church where journalists are searched on entry.
Authority, in such a church, is fawned on sooner than questioned.
There's nothing essentially African about this. For one thing it is the opposite of Desmond Tutu's manner; for another, it was the natural behaviour of archbishops of Canterbury up until about the retirement of Geoffrey Fisher, in 1961. But it hasn't worked in England since then. It suited all the instincts of George Carey, but without an audience prepared to suspend its disbelief, he just looked pompous and absurd. The Church of England has never suffered from a lack of leadership. What it has quite run out of now is followership.
Carey has now emerged as one of Sentamu's backers. Orotund to the last, he told the Times that "I am quite appalled. If there is a besmirching campaign then it is abhorrent and I, for one, will challenge this".
Carey's memoirs revealed his angry hurt at the sneers of metropolitan smoothies who couldn't understand the obstacles that he had overcome or admire him for doing so. Sentamu and Arora both in their different ways share this sense of exclusion and hostile distrust of the establishment.
I still think Sentamu will get the job – if only on the principle that in the last decades it has always gone to the candidate whose predecessor would least want him to get it. Ramsay thought little of Coggan; Coggan did not want Runcie; Runcie had scarcely heard of George Carey; he in his turn did all he could to block Williams.
But as a journalist I dislike people who cannot decently conceal their ambition to manipulate the press. When "sources close to the archbishop" told the Telegraph that "he has only stepped down [from the committee choosing the archbishop of Canterbury] as he did not want to be seen to be influencing the appointment", I wonder what kind of idiots the "sources" takes us for.