Dr Hope, 64, is to become Vicar of St Margaret’s Church, Ilkley, a northern centre of Anglo-Catholicism whose patrons are the monastic Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield, of which Dr Hope is Visitor.

Dr Hope is intending to cease all formal duties as diocesan bishop, archbishop of the Northern Province and Primate of England in mid-January. He will be inducted as a parish priest early in March next year by one of his parish priests when he will be five years from his formal retirement at 70.

The decision to return to the stipendiary ministry is understood to be unprecedented for an archbishop, his spokesman, Rob Marshall, said yesterday.

Although other bishops and archbishops have returned to parish ministry on retirement, they have done so as non-stipendiaries.

Dr Hope said he was most looking forward to the regularity of worship, the daily round of services and prayers in normal parish life. “It is an extraordinarily erratic thing as a bishop,” he said. “Also I am looking forward to just being with people, caring for them and about them.”

Dr Hope had originally wanted to return to parish work at Easter this year. But the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, beset by disputes over gays and women bishops, asked him to stay.

Already senior diocesans have begun jockeying to succeed Dr Hope as the country’s second most senior prelate after Canterbury.

Present favourites are the Bishop of Exeter, the Right Rev Michael Langrish, an Anglo-Catholic; the Bishop of Liverpool, the Right Rev James Jones, an evangelical; the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Church’s only diocesan bishop of Asian origin and a conservative evangelical; the Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, a leading evangelical scholar; and the Bishop of Leicester, the Right Rev Timothy Stevens, a classic middle-of-the-road Anglican.

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