The Wardman Wire

This is Simon Sarmiento’s third Guest Column on the Wardman Wire, while David Keen is on holiday from the blog. This week Simon looks back at how the press was managed at the Lambeth Conference, and reflects on the difficulty of undermining press stereotypes when reporters are kept at a distance.

Never Said it So Good

I finally got to see the National Theatre’s production of Howard Brenton’s new play about Harold Macmillan on the last day of its run. Discussing it here may therefore irritate those who missed the chance to see it. But it is a splendid piece of theatre and I hope it is revived soon, either in London, or elsewhere. The title stems of course from Macmillan’s famous speech to conservative party supporters in Bedford in 1957:

…let us be frank about it - most of our people have never had it so good.

The programme booklet contains a host of quotations from Macmillan, some of which are used in the play. Like several other plays at the National this year, one of its themes is that many of our current political issues are not new.

For example, Macmillan, who was sent by Churchill to be Minister Resident in North Africa and the Mediterranean in 1942, had this to say to British military officers there about dealing with the Americans:

Remember that we are Greeks in their Roman Empire; it is our job to change their minds without their realising it

Good advice still, for our current Prime Minister, not to mention the current Foreign Secretary. Perhaps David Miliband would recognise himself in Macmillan’s description of a Foreign Secretary:

Forever poised between a cliché and an indiscretion.

This was not a description of US Secretary of State Dr Condoleeza Rice this week. I had watched her on TV the evening before I went to the theatre, holding a press conference about Georgia. BBC News had carried it all live. Rice was even more adept at handling press conference questions than the American Presiding Bishop, as I mentioned two weeks ago.

Can I imagine the current British Foreign Secretary persuading Dr Rice to change her mind on anything? Frankly no, and certainly not without her realising it.

History on Repeat

Another example, which was most apposite in a week that has seen Russian “peace keepers” misbehaving outrageously in Georgia, was the portrayal in Act 3 of the unfolding Suez crisis of 1957. The play highlights how the British government at that time also used the term “peace keeping” to mis-describe their intended actions.

In reality, there was a joint French-Israeli-British secret plot to make an “regime-changing” attack against the Egyptian government of Colonel Nasser. Of course the difference was that on that occasion, the Americans were the Good Guys and refused to join in.

Patronage - Old Style

Harold Macmillan also said that he rather enjoyed ecclesiastical patronage and took a lot of trouble over it. “At least it makes all those years of reading Trollope worthwhile”, he said. It was of course Harold Macmillan who selected Michael Ramsey to be Archbishop of Canterbury despite the opposition of Archbishop Fisher, who famously said:

Dr Ramsey is a theologian, a scholar and a man of prayer. Therefore, he is entirely unsuitable as Archbishop of Canterbury.

One more Macmillan quote about archbishops:

If people want a sense of purpose they should get it from their archbishop. They should certainly not get it from their politicians.

What would Harold Macmillan and George Carey have said to each other about Rowan Williams, if the old system of appointments had persisted? And more profoundly, I wondered what sense of purpose does the non-churchgoing British public get today from either of our archbishops?

Dealing with the Press

It was another politician, Tony Benn, who said about the press:

Once you alienate journalists, they won’t find anything good in what you do.

This applies equally to both politicians and bishops. After a decade of watching the Church of England closely from the press room, I still do not think that the strategic importance of this truth has been understood by those who manage the public image of the archbishops and the Church of England generally.

Reading the Church Times press column in last week’s newspaper, written (that week only) by an English diocesan Communications Director, reinforced my view, a leader column in The Times on the final Saturday of the conference was regarded as a highlight because it was supportive of Rowan Williams, but in general this column was scornful of the press:

…the media arrived in Canterbury with an agenda: gay bishops and the split in the Communion; and little was going to shift them from it.

It was better summed up the in the Church Times leader in the same edition by Paul Handley:

A few journalists (and more bloggers) are inveterate stirrers; but had the representatives of the media been given the chance to hear debate, and to participate in worship, the predictable stories of split and schism might have been tempered. As it was, the story of greater understanding and respectful disagreement was received only second-hand.

I think there is more yet to be said about the strategic communication failures of Lambeth 2008, but fortunately for us all, quite a lot of bishops did write their own blogs during the conference, and I for one hope that many of them will continue to do so in the future. I compiled a sampling of these Bishops’ blog reports about the Lambeth Conference for last week’s Church Times.

Wrapping Up

Some Bishops wrote quirky reports about Lambeth; other conference reports were highly informative. But taken together, they conveyed an intimate sense of the conference from the participants view, that the relentlessly upbeat daily official press conferences (few of which resulted in newspaper reports) simply failed to provide.

Simon Sarmiento edits the Anglican News Blog Thinking Anglicans, and probably has more contacts with more different people throughout the church than there were Bishops at Lambeth (650, since you ask).