Swallows Swoop in God’s house

Evensong on Trinity Sunday at Kingsey (Many thanks to Martin Hodson for pictures, and Charles Deane, churchwarden, who provided refreshments for all in his most amazing garden.) It’s good to see traditional liturgy flourishing in a rural benefice fed by, not set against, more contemporary worship. Main object of attention afterwards, however, was a swallow’s nest in the porch, with young peeking over the edge demanding food.

Psalm 84:3 proclaims that swallows nest in God’s house. They have a distinctive flight pattern, looping freely in and out.

This is exactly what Margot Hodson the Vicar and I saw a mother swallow doing, inches away from us. With an extraordinary freedom and grace, ignoring people entirely, Ma Swallow wheeled in looping circles outside the porch, then swooped in with incredible precision and, seemingly without interruption of her flow, dropped off food in a baby’s open mouth, before looping out again into what Scots call the gloaming.

For those of us who mis-spent too much of our youthful prime filling notebooks with word-by-word Hebrew parsings, this is significant. In most English translations of Psalm 84 “Sparrow” figures — poetic coloration, into which translators were led by the Vulgate’s mis-rendering the second bird in the strophe as “passer.” The first is correctly rendered as “avis” — any old regular common-or-garden bird (צפור — as in Psalm 8:9 צפור שמימ). Attention is drawn to its ordinariness in the psalm by the enclitic “גם”.

Seeing Ma Swallow’s feeding routine for real shows why it is important to the meaning of the verse that the swallow is, in fact, a real swallow. דרור is most definitely this bird not (as in the reformed monastic psalter) “Turtur” — more elegant metrically than “hirundo”, but completely the wrong animal. (Root דרר cp: Arabic دَڗ .t √דרר means “flow freely” and is used of running horses, streams, and light, as well Liberty in Jubilee passages like, e.g., Leviticus 25:10 / Isaiah 61.)

The point isn’t that the bird homes in the temple (though that is a nice enough thought) but that, exactly as the pilgrim in the psalm wishes s/he could access God’s altar gracefully and freely, this bird swings in and out to and from its nest. It was strangely moving to see this precise behaviour from a real swallow in a real church, before our very eyes, on a summer’s evening. One swallow does, perhaps, make a bit of a summer.

Start by saying yes

I am often struck by the force of St Paul’s words about all God’s promises being "yes" in Christ. This week I have been going round meeting churchwardens — the process, evey three years, of formal “visitation.” I’ll post some material early next week.
For now, I notice that parishes where there is life, vibrancy and growth, seem to approach their surrounding contexts positively rather than defensively.

This doesn’t mean they can’t criticise those contexts; indeed the capacity of a church to critique its surrounding culture is far greater, not less, when it does it from a positive relationship, not fear. Interestingly, some such places seem to be running services where they begin with coffee, not end with it — a new trend?

I am taken back to some words of Richard Rohr about the need to see everything (in the tradition of Hugh of St Victor) contemplatively, not simply in terms of our preconceptions about it. God’s vision is surely fresher, and more understanding than ours. So he says

Philosphically and psychologically, a certain assent precedes all true knowing. If you watch closely, you will often see that an initial change of heart or attitude precedes any willingness to change your mind. In my own Franciscan philosophical tradition, both St Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus thaught that love or willingness were higher than mere knowledge. You only really know that which first you love, they felt, because otherwise you invariably distort and divide your sight and eliminate any bothersome or threatening information. Then you do not love it but (at best) only your idea of it. How often we see this in our relationships; Romance instead of real love, and infatuation (“false fire” in Latin) instead of genuine fire. Words and thoughts are invariably dualistic, but pure experience is always nondualistic. Think about that!

Fundamentalism suffers from the same false seeing. It is basically a love affair with words and ideas about God instead of God himself or herself. But you cannot really love words; you can only think them. You cannot really love reaity with the judgmental mind, because you’ll always try to control it, fix it, or understand it before you give yourself to it. And usually it is never fixed enough to deserve your unprotected gift of self. So you stay on Delay, Paue or Still forever. We see this fear of intimacy in most people, but in particular with men, who tend to have a more defended ego structure.

The fact that some form of loving must precede true knowing helps us appreciate why the prophets used the intimate word for carnal knowledge or sexual intimacy when they spoke of “knowing” God (see, for example Hosea 2:21, 6:6, and John 10:14-5, 14:20, 17:3). This is a tremendous insight, but one that comes only from inner realization and not from books. So many of the mystics and the Song of Songs had to make use of sexual imagery to describe the relationship of the soul to God. From inside experience, you know God’s love is a tender dance of give-and-take, rescue and holding.

Dunkirk: Home Front recollections

Something of the scale of Dunkirk becomes apprent from the fact no fewer than four friends turn out to have parents who were evacuated or otherwise involved at the sharp end. The Wilsons being avid scribblers, who threw nothing out, we have boxes of World War II at home. In May 1940 my Father was in Kent, not France. His mother, however, an invalid with Parkinson’s Disease, supplies an interesting old lady’s eye view of the unfolding history:

I’ve got in such a muddle over this war you’ll really need leave soon to tell me whether we’re going or coming, who we’re protecting next? when Hitler’s going to heaven & if statesmen shouldn’t be abolished! I feel I shall never wake up without “Dunkirk” being the first thought. What a ghastly history! Which all the heroic adjectives of the language can never disguise for the relatives of those for whom there is no return. Are they lucky or we I wonder?

Her letters record interesting incidents — the crash of a German Bomber in the Bishop of Chelmsford’s garden in June with four airmen burned to death — amidst more reflective thoughts. This, for example, from Chelmsford (where her cousin lived) on the day before Paris fell:

I came here by car and we were stopped about Margrettng for identity cards & with all place names removed we felt quite foreign. Expect you will be glad it's cooler especially if there’s more digging to do. What ghastly news again — nearly another Dunkirk — what blue pencil luck we have had everywhere — surely it must be our turn soon. I have to ration myself to news but there seems always some horror to listen to and for the men you have met and passed on [my Father was serving in a training unit in Kent] just to be wiped out in thousands — such a tragedy of useless waste. What a life! so much beyond our control. It’s no use trying to write about it & yet one cannot keep from thinking about it. Just our destiny to go one road or the other so it’s only courage is any good. I hope you are beginning to feel as tough as a gangster. Meanwhile I still dream of a real miracle & Hitler into little pieces...

God Not Englishman: Official

Cole Moreton’s Is God still an Englishman? How we lost our Faith is a brilliant, compelling journalistic romp through the past thirty years of goings-on in the Church of England by a disillusioned Charismatic Evangelical. It’s the low-church version, so he doesn’t really do Gary Bennett or Brian Brindley, but his vignettes of various Evangelical attempts to call down fire from heaven and defibrillate the old girl are painfully acute. His marvellous eye for detail and crisp, open style make this a real page-turner, although it is stitched together from various pieces penned nearer the time.

It sounds a loud death knell for the C of E as the all-pervasive National Trust for Morals presided over by Almighty Gawd himself. Cosmo Gordon Lang invented this role for it in the 1920’s. It reached its apogee under the Headmasterly eye of Geoffrey Fisher, and suffered its inevtable Oz-like deflation in the days of Robert Runcie. Attempts by George Carey to transmute this vision of Church into a new model C of E plc are seen as a dying flick of the tail. Cole Morton sincerely bought this Kool-Aid at a time he was very impressionable, swilled it, relished it, gargled it for the best part of twenty years, and is now, with relief I would think, spitting it out.

On the way he provides a fascinating and at times painfully acute critique of the various crankdoms and nostrums that were going to save the C of E through the eighties and nineties. None of them, surprise surprise, turn out to have been all they were cracked up to be. All the various Evangelical Body-building schemes seem to have built some muscles, but in funny places. This book should, therefore, be compulsory reading for all Ecclesiastical Don Quixotes.

What is less secure is in the book’s grasp of the longer sweep of history. It takes the Cosmo Lang/ Fisher fantasy as sober absolute truth, rather as Fisher and Lang did, then projects it back in a monolithic way that, if true, would, for example, have made the Civil War impossible. But the book isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be historical. It’s a most excellent topical romp through the stories that made the Church trade press, seasoned by hindsight.

And when, in W. H. Auden’s poem, the lovers they were gone, the deep river ran on. It is this deep river that the book attempts to plumb for its view of where all this leaves the English. It’s very hard to put flesh and bood on that kind of Englishness without sounding like a folkloric fetishist, but the book does land, in the end, on Peter Owen-Jones, a Sussex Non-Stipendiary Vicar, who relates in sincere, compassionate, subtle and creative way to the community he serves in what can only be described as the very best traditions of the Church of England.

Whilst young Cole was getting slain in the Spirit and lancing himself till the metaphorical blood ran, there were thousands of vicars all over England, of all Ecclesiastical stripes, doing an Owen-Jones type Job. Thank God, there still are. I was burying the dead of Reading myself, and learnt from the thousands in whose front rooms I sat a mass of information they don’t teach you at college. Many of the people I served, Churchgoing or not, were far wiser, more loving, courageous human beings than I’ll ever be, and their general spiritual instinct to prioritise the Good Samaritan over Boanergic indoor Churchy games, was, in the main, sounder than any of us knew at the time.

This book chronicles someone struggling his way, using Church, through Fowler’s stages of faith development from stage 2 to early stage 4 (Mythic-Literal to Synthetic-Convetional to early Individuative-reflective). Therefore there’s much good to come. Ahead lie the increasingly sunlit uplands of stage 5 — that’s where the crock of gold, if there is one, lies. It probably always did.

Four Lions: Urban Village Idiots

Before saying anything about Chris Morris’ new film, Four Lions, we have to get our heads round a basic question, “Is Al-Qaeda supposed to be funny?” If there really is a war against terror on, surely it could be, however disturbing the humour. Nobody walked out of Will Hay’s The Goose Steps Out (1942) because there was a war on — quite the reverse. However if you can’t or won’t see the funny side of Jihadism, this film is, frankly, not for you. Whether it should have been funny or not, thirty punters in Wycombe on Friday found it hilarious, with a steady stream of chuckles, and a belly laugh every twenty minutes or so.

Four Lions tells of the everyday lives and activities of four dim Jihadists, as they bungle and bomb their way around South Yorkshire, confusing themselves and occasionally foxing the neighbours. The surrreal humour is pure Spike Milligan. Our heroes’ Jihad is internal, mainly against their own stupidity.

It culminates in a tacky and mainly incompetent bid for immortality in London. Nothing in the Al-Qaeda lexicon is sacrosanct — martyrdom videos, training camps in Pakistan, explosions in public places.

It is necessary to suspend disbelief about the characters, who are very much cardboard cutouts; but then this is not a sympathetic exploration of the psychology of martyrdom so much as a rollicking send-up. As a matter of public policy, is this a fit subject for parody? Well, as a matter of public experience, what did for Mrs Thatcher was Spitting Image, not Michael Foot. Any young man joining Al-Qaeda after Four Lions is bound to take the rehtorical world of the organisation with a pinch of salt, and to feel that bit sillier and more exposed. It might even put him off. It’s a very different approach from the Government’s all-too earnest Violent Extremism programme, but probably more effective.

And anyone who can induce a couple of paroxysms of helpless mirth in three dozen of their fellow citizens about a thing like this on a Friday night in Wycombe can’t be all bad. Four and a half out of Five stars.

Pentecost, Spirit and Dogma

Pentecost does raise in acute form the question of what we really believe Christianity is. It burst on the world as a process of incarnation, God breaking out beyond the limits of preconceived thought about him, and starting again.

Christian faith was a process of personal, spiritual and social renewal, more like a fire than an object or a doctrine.

From Christianity’s earliest days, people who didn’t quite get this tried to debase it into a knowledge-based religion. Gnosticism often came with weird ceremonies and strange terminology but its heart was the idea that getting the doctrine, “the knowledge” right, led to everything else. The knowledge was absolutely right with God in a way flesh-and-blood human beings never could be. It was the dogma that judged everything, and established itself by fear.

Dogma is meant to be the wrapping of the process for purposes of transmission — an encapsulating membrane that enables the activity of the Spirit to be passed on, picked up and personalised in future. It is not an absolute in itself, however, and it’s a poor substitute for the Holy Spirit. The Spirit gives freedom, where the categories and concepts, even good ones, easily become idols, especially when stuck up and treated as absolutes. Pathetic substitutes for faith, like being right, create their own ideologies and sticking points. Still, however, the Spirit animates those who will let him, from the inside out, and raises fresh possibilities in every fresh context.

Even Christian History is the Holy Spirit’s — for it is no mere catalogue of facts, far less a chain of legalstic precedents to bind the Spirit. Rather it is the discipline that restores to people whose lives we embrace as intricately bound up with ours within the communion of Saints the freedom that once they had. By doing this, we are enabled to live free and faithful lives in our circumstances, without manipulation or pretending.

India: Legally Hung Over?

My children are amazed as I tell them I worked in a prison long enough ago to have met a clergyman who had officiated at a hanging in England 30 years before I knew him. I remember there being an execution suite in HMP Wandsworth in the 1980’s, just in case.

“Suspended sentences,” as one POA wag used to call them, struck my children as an extraordinary survival from an age of barbarism, like witch trials or the Iron Maiden. I promise my children, to stares of disbelief, that this grotesque carry-on, happened (but only just) in my lifetime, and was only finally abolished in 1998.

But there seem to be two distinct ways to abolish the death penalty. You can pass laws, as in the UK, or just leave it to the moral instincts of potential hangmen. In India no-one is willing to do it any more, according to this week’s Delhi Open magazine:

In Pune’s Yerwada prison, there are 11 convicts who have been condemned to death by hanging. Kept in solitary confinement in the barracks close to the gallows, some of them have languished there for nearly a decade. Their mercy petitions have been rejected by the President. But it is unlikely that they will be hanged anytime soon. Maharashtra does not have a hangman. The two prisons in the state where hangings are carried out—Yerwada and Nagpur Central—have sought executioners from other states but no one has responded. It seems there are no hangmen in the country. They are all retired or dead.

To kill a man, the Indian Government pays Rs 150. The job of a hangman is not a full-time government post. He is a sanctioned volunteer, his pay a special allowance. Hanging involves techniques and procedures very simple to learn, simpler than probably learning how to drive a car. Senior police officials are willing to teach them to anyone who comes forward, but no one does.

Officials at various central prisons across India confirm that they are unable to find hangmen even though the candidate need not have any previous experience, nor does he have to be literate. It is a strange situation in one of the few countries in the world that still have capital punishment. India has about 300 prisoners on death row.

For the princely sum of £2 a go, you’d think someone would be interested, but apparently people are afraid of stoking up bad karma. In a sudden rush of public disgust at terrorist attacks in Madhya Pradesh one man actually came forward and offered to hang Afzal Guru. Unfortunately he was 82 years old, and died before the job could be done. So, with a whimper rather than a legal bang, hanging seems to be finally on the way out in India.

Funny Old World.

The Beatitude of letting go

This has been a rather intense week catching up with the results of being away, largely taken up with visitations (2 down, 3 to go). So, in haste, I’m running right now on a very interesting take on the Beatitudes by my much-loved and quietly canny boss, John Pritchard:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven —

Letting go of our need to be somebody

Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted —

Letting go of our pain

Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth —

Letting go of our need to be right

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled —

Letting go of our concern for ourselves

Blessed are the merciful,
for they will receive mercy —

Letting go of our need for revenge

Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God —

Letting go of our need to look good

Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called the children of God —

Letting go of our need to win

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven —

Letting go of our “safety first” approach to life

Why is our Christianity so Immature?

I’ve just sneaked back home under a volcanic ash cloud. The Munich Passport Contoller who said the flight was cancelled was wrong.

I’ve said various things about Kirchentag, but it is remarkable how the Germans do serious theology on a mass scale.

Equally remarkable was the age breakdown of 167,000 people a day doing this:
. 7,68% Unter 12 Jahren
. 13,74% 12 bis 17 Jahre
. 16,45% 18 bis 29 Jahre
. 7,77% 30 bis 39 Jahre
. 19,07% 40 bis 49 Jahre
. 18,12% 50 bis 59 Jahre
. 7,34% 60 bis 65 Jahre
. 9,83% über 65 Jahre

Think about it.
Incidentally, where were the 30-39’s?

Thoughts such as these, Nick Baines’ reaction to the Hans Küng / Jurgen Moltmann evening, struck me again and again —

This evening was remarkable. Thousands arrived early to ensure a place in the auditorium – I got there for 6.30pm thinking it began at 7pm only to find it was scheduled to start at 7.30pm and didn’t in fact get going until 8pm. More people were locked out than could get in. The excluded crowds chanted ‘Wir wollen rein’ (‘We want to come in’) to listen to these two elderly men talk together about church.

Can you imagine that ever happening in Britain? Most of the excluded were young people eager to garner the wisdom of these two theologians. Why? Because their theology is neither dry nor ‘merely academic’, but engages with the real world of economics, politics and culture. They bring to their subject the intellectual rigour that is associated with German philosophical thinking. Yet, they speak with simplicity, clarity and passion – eschewing theological cleverness in order to communicate accessibly with all-comers: they are remarkable men who show no sign of being ego-driven.

This brings to mind a disturbing question posed by Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest and spirituality wonk, about why the way we do Christianity in the West is so childish and discombobulated by rushes to judgment:

All spiritual teachers tell us “DO NOT JUDGE.” For those of us raised in a religious setting, this is very difficult. In a strange way, religion gave us all a Ph.D. in judgmentalism. It trained us very early in life to categorize, label, and critique. It told us all about worthiness and unworthiness. This judgmental mind told us what is right and wrong, who is gay or straight, and who is good or bad. This sort of mind never creates great people, because everybody has to fit into our way of thinking. At an early age our grid was complete. We had decided who fit in and who did not fit in. We fashioned our own little world.

Christianity that divides the world in this manner and eliminates all troublesome people and all ideas different from our way of thinking cannot be mature religion. It cannot see the multiple gifts of each moment, nor the dark side that coexists with it. This mind does not lead us to awareness, and above all, this mind will find it impossible to contemplate. To practice awareness means you live in a spirit of communion; your world becomes alive and very spacious, and not divided by mere mental labels.

Christian values in Germany

Christianity is a fundamental root of societal values in Germany. Official. I just heard it from the Bundeskanzlerin herself. Speaking in Munich to 6,000 people, the Prime Minister of the largest democracy in Europe acknowledges freely and imaginatively the significance of Christianity as one of the great root of her country’s social values. She is not saying these humanistic concepts could not have been developed in other ways, but the fact is it was from and through Christianity that they have been.

Here in Bavaria there is a refreshing absence of crude secularist rant, along with scare stories got up by the right wing press to suggest that any departure from Victorian morals and dogma means the end of Christianity and ruin of society. Those fears and fantasies are expressed on the margins of society, where they belong.

Neither do I detect the lazy old English idea you “leave morality to the bishops”. Mrs Merkel calls for a dialogue between churches and society, where both engage closely and bless each other and are willing to be changed according to their values and experience — so no crude monopolies of truth, no slippery slope panic, no fear that engagement between churches and society will corrupt the Churches or Confessionalise the State. Freedom is a Christian value, but not egoistical freedom from taking responsibility. Christian freedom is the use of possibilities to follow values as a way of supporting others — another one of Mrs Merkel’s core Christian values.

All she is saying is that there needs to be respect, realism, self-awareness and truthfulness. In this context, Mrs Merkel is just announcing €60Bn of cuts between 2011 and 2015, asking around various possibilities. She isn’t claiming a godlike command of all possible answers, but owning up to a serious problem, addressing pragmatic reality, asking for hep and obviously winning some respect for her candour. How refreshing! How grown-up!

Politicians, even controversial ones with cuts to announce, seem to be held in higher respect in Germany. Wondering why I am told they have a more realistic mandate from a more fully democratic voting system, and that there is a higher value of corporate civic life here. They are not thought to behave that much better, but they are held to account more tightly over their views as well as their expenses. They have to treat people more like grown ups, partly because there is a very direct relationship between how many votes and how much power. There is often a higher degree of historical awareness and pragmatism, with less simple sloganising. By comparison, much UK debate about Church and society, such as it is, simply bears out the old maxim that Clichéd words reveal clichéd thought. There has to be a better way!

MK on the Isar

Here, in the Agora of the largest Christian Get-together in Europe, Milton Keynes Ecumenical Partnership have taken a stall. It’s dominated by Mrs Lazarus, by local sculptor David Moore. She was aspin off from Robert Koenig’s Odyssey project, which celebrated the East European relatives he never knew, some of whom had perished in the holocaust, and some of whom he had not been allwed access to as young man because of the divisions of Europe.

Mrs Lazarus has graced the Church of Christ the Cornerstone, on and off, for the past two years. She gained her name from the sculpotor's mpother, who kept returning from death’s door. The last eighteen months of her life, she picked up the name and it suck. She died at the age of 94 in March this year.

Like Lazarus, Mrs Lazarus is wrapped, with only her feet showing — the message is “we’ve only just begun” on the Ecumenical journey. The unwrapped portion of the bandage carries specific photographs and messages about inclusion, surprising new relationships, the joy of coming in many colours, and the challenge of faith-keeping. Text cards are also being distributed with quotations from pope Paul VI, Dom Helder Camara, and Fr Harry Williams, CR. The last is particularly significant:

God’s Love for me is his love for the world,
and so is mine for God,
if it is genuine.

Everything will be revealed when Mrs Lazarus returns to Milton Keynes, including the host of messages she has collected during her time in Munich. Sjould you be one of the 300,000 people celebrating hope in MInich, she can be found at stall A6 D09 in the Messe.

Gordon Brown: Der Untergang

Fully Democratic voting systems deliver 36% of the power for 36% of the votes. This is boring for career politicans, but it’s also predictable. Most European politicians have to exercise skills to work together in the national interest more than once every 36 years plus remembrance day. As the only way to more power is to win more votes, they have to work harder with the public, and are generally more respected for it.

As it is in the UK, ninety years of cruising around in the belief that 36% of the vote entitles our political masters to 100% of the power has scarce prepared them for an hour such as this. Although they are being uncharacteristically soppy-stern and polite, they don’t seem to know how to talk with each other, rather than at each other. One optimistic hope is that they will learn, and this will be good for us all. The problem has been acknowledged since the 1860’s, and the kind of solution we need an open secret since the Royal Commission of 1908-10. They can hardly say they weren‘t warned.

And as the great Poker Game in the Sky grinds on around Westminster, first man down is Gordon Brown. How will historians see him?

Two interesting counterfactuals could be run:

• What if John Smith had lived another ten years?
  
  
• What if Brown had cut and run in 2007 to establish his legitimacy?

To Brown’s credit, probably, is his performance as a very British iron chancellor. His staunchest opponents will have to grudgingly admit he held his nose and did what probably had to be done about the credit crunch, and competently. His tax credits scheme was a way of redistributing income without raising income tax. He generated shedloads of cash to throw at education and health after thirty years of cuts. Yes, there’s a comparatively high peacetime public debt, but everyone’s got one of those coming out of recession, whilst economic historians will point out that as a proportion of GDP it’s actually lower than for most of the tweniteth century.

Brown was a Roundhead at Tony Blair’s Cavalier party. When Blair and Brown met at the Loch Fyne Fish Restaurant, or wherever, they carved up the next 13 years of the governance of Brtain between them. The process was probably much swifter and easier than what has been going on since last Thursday, and considerably more lasting.

However, as Blair swigged the champagne, Brown gagged on his Irn Bru. Therein lies tragedy.

Once Brown had gotten over the joy of playing with the real levers of power at Number 11, he probably hated the party, but hung on in there for the joy that lay ahead. How sad that it was so joyless when he got it. Nobody knows at what point Blair and/or Brown bricked up the corridor from Number 11 to Number 10, but his estrangement from his ertswhile dinner companion was disastrous. Brown, as a man of genuine rectitude, probably found it hard to believe what some of his less puritanical colleagues were up to.

But Brown was a genuine conviction politician. I remember his appearance at the Lambeth Conference. He obviously knew and owned the Millennium Development Goals without cue cards. He actually belived in that stuff.

Colleagues from all over the world, who believe the English to be clever but devious, were impressed by his obvious sincerity and passion. Not quite English. Scots, in fact.

Too passionate, not emotionally intelligent enough? How about what they are already calling Bigot-Gate? Other politicians suggest they would never call a voter anything as rude as “that woman.” When the great bin of emails is emptied out on the day of doom, and the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, I believe it will show other politicians have, in fact, called voters, and their colleagues, considerably ruder things and got away with it. But not with the microphone on.

And after all those complaints about Tony Blair’s addiction to spin, it’s ironic and sad, in some ways, that Brown’s “Lion in Winter” style was such a rat sandwich to Fleet Street, if not all the British public.

Blair danced for us and we tried to dance, with all the finesse Btits bring to that activity. Brown wept for us and we would not wail. He’s almost certainly done the decent thing politically. I think history will be kinder to him than the Sun. Let’s see who’s next.