Next for Canterbury

John Sentamu
2 - 1

James Jones
13 - 2

Dr Barry Morgan
9 - 1

Richard Chartres
3 - 1

Michael Nazir-Ali
8 - 1

Michael Scott-Joynt
14 - 1

Kenneth Stevenson
5 - 1

Nicholas Thomas Wright
8 - 1

Peter Forster
25 - 1

Peter Bryan Price
6 - 1

Place your bets on Sentamu
Posted by Damian Thompson on 22 Feb 2008 at 15:05

Thanks to his fatuous remarks on Sharia law, you can now place a bet on who will succeed Dr Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury. And the favourite, unsurprisingly, is Dr John Sentamu, the Ugandan-born Archbishop of York.

Will Dr John Sentamu succeed Dr Rowan Williams?

Paddy Power, the Irish bookmaker, has opened a book on who will succeed the hapless bard, whose departure soon after this year’s Lambeth Conference is looking increasingly likely.
At the time of writing, Sentamu was at 2-1 and Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, at 3-1. Michael Nazir-Ali, the Pakistani-born Bishop of Rochester, was at 8-1. All three men are fearsomely ambitious.

I’d have to put my money on Sentamu. There is a long tradition of Primates being promoted from York to Canterbury. Imagine how awkward it would be if the first black Archbishop – a man who clearly wants the job, just as Rowan did – were passed over. Sentamu has many allies in the race relations industry; the charge of racism would be difficult to deflect.

Moreover, the Archbishop of York has developed a knack of talking common sense that goes down well in the country. For example, he once accused the BBC of being biased against Christianity and frightened of attacking Islam. “They can do to us what they dare not do to the Muslims,” he said. Can you imagine the bearded one having the nerve – or the bad taste, as he would see it - to speak so bluntly?

And yet Sentamu is not wildly popular in the General Synod; self-publicists rarely are. Recently I applauded him for cutting up his dog collar on national TV in protest at Mugabe; but there is no getting round the fact that it was a stunt, and the Archbishop is a bit of a stuntmeister. Remember that time he camped out in York Minster with his head shaved in order to “encourage peace in the Middle East”? I rather doubt that future historians will ascribe the cessation of a centuries-old conflict to the Archbishop’s cringe-making gesture.

Dr Sentamu can do soundbites, but his talent for blunt speaking is often obscured by waffle every bit as annoying as Rowan’s, only not nearly so elegantly constructed.

I’m sorry to be rude, but when I was religious affairs correspondent of this newspaper in the early 1990s, there would be a rush for the doors as soon as he rose to his feet in the Synod chamber. He would bang on and on and on in a near-incomprehensible stream of consciousness and – we might as well be honest about this – because he was black no one dared interrupt him. If you had said at the time, “This man could one day be Archbishop of Canterbury”, people would have though you were joking.

As I say, Sentamu is a more effective communicator these days; he will never compromise on the crucial subject of radical Islam; and he would be far more acceptable to the Anglican Communion than the evasive Williams. On the other hand, although he does not have as many enemies inside the Synod as the Bishops of London and Rochester, his self-promotion means that he is not universally trusted.

We shall see. As things stand at the moment, both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales suffer from the same problem: a desperate and embarrassing shortage of leadership material.