26 Tuesday May 24 2022 | the times
Comment
the post office with the manuscript
when there was a huge gust of wind
and it blew into the sea and floated
away. Um, which was when the dog
dived in and swallowed it.
“I wish you could have read it. It
was all ‘intimate and heartfelt’ like
you said when you were setting the
homework, I mean commissioning
the multimillion-dollar book deal. It
was totes written not as the prince I
was born but the man I
have become.
Unfortunately, it turns
out that the man I have
become struggles a bit
with sitting down for long
periods and writing things.
Still, I put in ‘all the highs
and lows’, like it said in
the contract, but after
I’d put about walking
behind the coffin, the
Invicta Games and
meeting Meg at Soho
House, the computer
said I’d still only done
62 words. Which was
when Meghan said to
say the dog ate it.
“I’ll be honest, the
dog didn’t eat it. But
Meghan said if I said
that was ‘my truth’ then
you couldn’t say
anything back because
actually deadlines are
racist. But I wish I’ddone a children’s book about a
bench, like her, with pictures
drawn by someone else and only
about 12 words.
“So, anyway, I was just about to
write it all out again and hand it in
today, when I got the sad news that
my nan had died and we had to go to
the funeral in, like, Scotland or
somewhere. Oh, no, wait, bums, I
can’t use that one, can I? Because
you know perfectly well my granny
hasn’t died. But the point is, sir, look,
it’s nearly finished, and can I please
have till Thursday?”Top Gun: Dork
W
ith the release of
Top Gun: Maverick
this week, I’ve
noticed a number of
pieces by young female
journalists about
what a horrid
sexist film the
original was,
with its
surrendered
women,
grotesque
seduction
sequences and
boneheaded,
rapey male leads.
But they have all
missed the point of the
movie. Maverick wasn’t
supposed to be a role model.T
here has been some
confusion in the book trade
over what has happened to
Prince Harry’s much
vaunted tell-all memoir,
announced last year by Penguin
Random House and scheduled for
publication in late 2022. Onlookers
have pointed to the recent departure
of the Sussexes’ press secretary as
well as worries about the book’s
potential to overshadow the jubilee
celebrations. But it turns out to be
nothing nearly so complicated, as this
letter from Harry, weirdly
misdelivered to The Times yesterday
morning, makes clear:
“Dear Mr Random-House, may I
call you Penguin? It’s about this book.
I’ve totally written it and I was about
to hand it in, but then the dog ate it.
Talk about bad luck! Little bugger
just scoffed it down. All three pages. I
worked really hard on it for hour and
hours. Practically a whole afternoon.
And then I was literally on my way to
Belief in its own sin is subverting the church
Row over the black trainee priest Calvin Robinson shows the C of E is obsessed with racism
wrote that “Calvin’s comments
concern me about denying
institutional racism in this country”.
Meanwhile, the deeply
underwhelming Bishop of London,
the Rt Rev Sarah Mullally,
apparently lectured Robinson about
racism in the church. “As a white
woman I can tell you that the
church is institutionally racist,” she
told him.
Now Robinson has been informed
that he will not be allowed to pursue
his path to ordination. His plans to
serve as a deacon at a parish in
London have also been axed. And in
a way, here is revealed the modern
Church of England’s actual party
political affiliation.
Having shut its doors
throughout the Covid-19 crisis, the
church now seems to be back with a
new faith: an evangelical and
dogmatic belief in its own iniquity
and racism. Fail to go along with that
belief and the church has no place
for you.
So determined is the C of E about
this new gospel that a church
hierarchy of white people is even
willing to bar a young black man
from joining the clergy because he
will not agree with their insistence
that their own church is racist. It is a
farce, certainly, but a tragedy, too —
for a church that has need of talent,
and an era that has need of
institutions that are not principally
intent on blowing themselves up.Douglas Murray is the author of The
War on the West: How to prevail in the
age of unreasonMelanie Phillips is awaygroups (or UKME as the acronym-
laden C of E likes to call them)
are over-represented among
the clergy.
The From Lament to Action report
found that in church recruitment
there should be 30 per cent UKME,
in order “to build up pipeline supply”.
Ah, the mellifluous prosody of the
modern C of E. But the church will
have a tough job getting to such a
figure. Even among those in the
UK aged 24 and below, only 20 per
cent are minority ethnic. So the
church is going to have to do an
awful lot of “pipeline supply”
recruiting if it is going to meet its
target of over-representation.
Enter the strange case of Calvin
Robinson. Robinson began training
for the priesthood in October 2020,
hoping to become a vicar in the
Church of England. Robinson
himself is black. He is also a
conservative — a regular
commentator on GB News and other
channels. He is smart, sincere and
deeply religious. Any church, and
any congregation, should be lucky
to have him.
But Robinson seems to be the
wrong sort of UKME. In a decision
that appears to have gone all the
way up to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Robinson has been
barred from pursuing his vocation in
the Anglican church. His specific
crime is that he will not join the
white bishops and others in
replacing the Christian gospel with
a sort of George Floyd overreach
reaction.
This is a cause of deep concern to
the church hierarchy. The Bishop of
Edmonton, the Rt Rev Rob Wickham,J
okes age, like everything else.
And the old joke about the
Church of England being the
Tory party at prayer has been
out of date for at least a
generation. At some stage the
Anglican church more closely
resembled the Green Party at prayer,
but today it has an even more radical
estimation of itself.
It is two years since Justin Welby,
the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave
a speech to the General Synod in
which he apologised for the
“institutional racism” of the Church
of England. “I am sorry and
ashamed,” the archbishop said. “I’m
ashamed of our history and I’m
ashamed of our failure. There is no
doubt when we look at our own
church that we are still deeply
institutionally racist.”
It was a strange claim to make —
not least because at the time the
next most important bishop in the
church was John Sentamu, the
Archbishop of York.
In any case, this self-view has
persisted. An official report
commissioned by the church into its
own racism came to alarming
conclusions. A draft version leaked
to me last year claimed that “racism
is whispered in our pews”. Where?
When? By its own analysis of itself,
the C of E had become the Ku Klux
Klan at prayer.
Of course nothing could be more
ridiculous, and ordinary congregants
know that. But when an institution is
so determined to find itself guilty of
a crime, there is little you can do to
dissuade it.
In April last year, Lambeth Palace
tried to join in the great
“decolonisation” effort of our day. In
doing so it discovered that it owned
two Benin bronzes. This was at a
time when there was a renewed push
to return any and all bronzes taken
from the slave-running kingdom
of Benin in the late 19th century.
Lambeth Palace decided to return
its bronzes as though it had
been caught handling hot stuff
and wanted the stolen loot off its
hands fastish. Only after theannouncement was made did it
emerge that the bronzes were a gift
from the University of Nigeria when
Robert Runcie was Archbishop of
Canterbury, way back in the bad old
colonial days of 1982.
This fatal combination of
ignorance and present-era preening
seems to have become the tenor of
the established church — and in no
area so much as in the church’s
demands for clergy representation.
As it happens, the Anglican
communion has one of the most
diverse bodies of clergy that any
religious denomination could
wish for. But the church has declared
that it will continue to be racist
until such a day as minority ethnicFail to follow the new
gospel and the church
has no place for you
He was a complete arsehole, and
everyone knew it. As was Iceman.
Top Gun is a satirical film in which
two total knobs compete to be the
biggest knob in history across
various rounds, including “stupidest
haircut”, “dorkiest motto”, “ugliest
gum chew”, “campest flying jacket”,
“yuckiest sweaty torso”, “cringiest bar
singing” and “girliest screaming of
‘wooohoooo’ while riding a speeding
vehicle”, etc., at the end of which the
only half-decent human in the whole
thing gets comically splatted to death
by his ejector seat, to underscore the
futility of decency in the moral
vacuum of the 1980s. Indeed, it was
Top Gun that inspired me, at the age
of 17, to be a speccy writer with no
mates and never sing a cappella or
play volleyball, because of the
terrifying didactic vision it presented
of the alternative.A royal cover-up
H
ave you seen the £5 coin that
will be issued to celebrate
Prince William’s 40th
birthday? It’s fantastic. And most
fantastic at all, the image sports a
glorious, full head of hair. Which
goes to show that with male pattern
baldness, if you know the right
people, there is no need for all
those dodgy transplants and
back-of-the-paper lotions and
potions. You just have a quiet word
with the Royal Mint.Giles Coren Notebook
Harry’s got a
bumper book
of excuses
on the way
Testing owners for
competence would
reduce dog attacks
Angela Epstein
D
og attacks make for
harrowing reading. Yet it’s
often presumed that only
certain supposedly
dangerous breeds are
responsible — that granite jaws,
rippling muscles and a genetic
predisposition to aggression are
necessary to wound or occasionally
cause a fatality.
Analysis of alarming new figures
suggests otherwise. In response to
data from the NHS, which reveals
that dog bite injuries have more than
doubled in the past 15 years, experts
from the RSPCA say that such
incidents are not breed specific.
Rather, they are the result of
impulsive acquisitions — not least
during lockdown — by owners who
have often bought dogs with
underdeveloped social skills from
overseas puppy farms. All of is this
compounded by the ill-preparedness
of the new owner.
That`s why urgent action is needed
to encourage responsible ownership.
We should start by reinstating an
annually renewable dog licence and
with it introduce a test so that
knowledge of animal welfare and
general competence can be assessed
by experts. There should also be
compulsory microchipping (of the
pets, not the owners).
There are precedents for such a
move. In Lower Saxony in Germany,
for example, a mandatory dog
companion test was introduced in
2013 in an attempt to prevent dog
attacks. Six out 16 German states
require owners to have dog liability
insurance, whatever the breed.
Detractors may argue that it`s
hardly cricket to micromanage pet
ownership to such a draconian
degree. But a licensing or
microchipping scheme alone is not
enough. Indeed, the dog licence was
abolished in 1987, largely because it
was ignored by huge numbers of
owners who didn’t think they`d get
caught. A licensing scheme coupled
with a compulsory test would surely
make owners more accountable for
the behaviour of their dogs.
I should at this point declare my
hand. I’m not a dog owner, although
I have seen first hand how a well-
looked after pet brings wonderful,
life-enhancing benefits; not least in
terms of loving companionship and a
reason to take regular exercise. But I
have also been jumped on by dogs in
the park (the owner’s reflexive
mantra is always that the dog was
“only playing”).
Responsible dog owners would
inevitably complain about having
their good practice assessed.
They shouldn’t. They should see
it as a proud validation of what
they do. After all, if such a scheme
were to stop just one child being
bitten, the small humiliation of
having to take an exam would
surely be worth it.Angela Epstein is a freelance writersng
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it’s nearly finished, and
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