WHEN THE late Gary Bennett wrote his notorious preface to Crockford’s Clerical Directory some 18 years ago, all the newspaper headlines concentrated on the mean-spirited attack it contained on the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. But, in a sense, that was unfair on its anonymous author who, within three days of the preface being published (and on the point of being exposed) took his own life. Vindictive and malicious he may have sounded but, amid all the gibes hurled at the Archbishop, there was a serious point being made. What primarily exercised the ordered, academic mind of the former Dean of New College, Oxford, was the problem of where authority lay in both the Church of England and, even more markedly, within the Anglican Communion.

The crisis that blew up at the meeting of Anglican Primates at Newry in Northern Ireland last week was not, therefore, any sudden squall. Instead, it had long been seen coming. At least one learned tome, the work of a future Anglican bishop, had been published in the 1970s extolling the virtues of what it called “a dispersed authority”. And if that phrase meant anything, it had to be that it was all right for the various provinces of the Anglican Communion — there are now 38 of them — to do their own thing provided none of them sought to impose their own will on the others.

Such a flabby compromise was never going to hold indefinitely, though it is interesting that it should have taken the visceral issue of gay rights (rather than the merely vexed one of women priests or bishops) to tear it apart. The present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, behaved with considerable dignity last week, but even his mollifying manner could not conceal the fact that the world’s third largest Christian denomination was facing the parting of the ways.

The wonder, perhaps, is that it had not happened before. For the Anglican Communion, with its claim to 78 million members worldwide, has always been an artificial creation (even the Communion’s numerical total depends on counting 26 million UK citizens as Anglicans).

The awkward truth is that the Anglican Communion is a survival from the Age of Empire — an era when “colonial” bishops would be appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and, as expatriates who ruled in far-flung dioceses in heathen lands afar, would be expected constantly to look over their shoulders at how things were done at home. That great Victorian figure Randall Davidson best expressed the ethos lying behind the ten-yearly Lambeth Conferences when he famously wrote: “A missionary bishop stands so much by himself that, if he happens to be a man of eccentric mode of proceeding, he might in the course of time compromise the Church both at home and in the colonies.” But if it was sheer “Englishness” that provided the glue holding the Anglican Communion together, then that adhesive was bound to weaken as the years went by.

There are, after all, today many more committed Anglicans in Nigeria than in the whole of the United Kingdom. And historians, I suspect, will look back on the Primates’ meeting in Newry last week as the moment when the traditional Anglo-Saxon dominance over the Anglican Communion came to an end.

At least, though, it could be claimed that the Archbishop of Canterbury preserved his own role as “the freely recognised focus of unity” by refusing to side with the liberal minority represented by the Episcopal Church of the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada. Yet it should by now be obvious that no church can expect to carry much conviction if it insists on conducting its own affairs by what is, in effect, a majority vote. A church is not, or at least it should not be, the equivalent of a political party or, worse, a replica of a commercial concern. If that were the case, then Pope Jean Paul II would have been forced into retirement years ago.

Naturally, no one is pretending that what is currently going on in the Vatican is a shining advertisement for efficiency, but it is a salutary reminder that the Catholic Church is more than an international conglomerate. When Dr Runcie went to Rome in 1989 and shocked many Anglicans by declaring that he had no difficulty in accepting “the primacy of the Bishop of Rome”, he was wiser in his generation than many of our present leaders seem to have been in theirs. At least the Catholic Church has a coherent doctrine of authority — what it calls the Magisterium — and that is more than can be said for the 38 provinces that make up the Anglican Communion. In their separate interpretations of what Christian teaching means for personal behaviour they may each believe they possess the only true answer. But they cannot possibly all be right.

Debt to Crossman

WILLIAM HAGUE’s two-part series Yes Minister: The View from Whitehall got off to a good start on Radio 4 last Saturday. The former Tory leader had assembled an impressive cast of witnesses including two former Cabinet Secretaries (Lords Armstrong and Butler), three former Cabinet ministers and the joint author of the original series, Sir Antony Jay. The only fault I could find was a lack of generosity in not acknowledging the outstanding debt to Dick Crossman, who first revealed the relations between politicians and civil servants.

Crossman used to talk about “the gaily painted hoarding behind which lie hidden the true secrets of the State”. In his three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister he successfully ripped that hoarding aside. The BBC TV serial merely had to take matters on from there.

CORIN REDGRAVE is enjoying a great success in his one-man show, Tynan, at the Arts Theatre in Great Newport Street, just off Charing Cross Road. He doesn’t look or sound a bit like Ken Tynan, mercifully making no effort to imitate his subject’s often agonising stammer. But he triumphantly captures the spirit of his personality, down to the wry melancholic streak which was always part of his character.

In the latter part of his life in London Tynan took to eating his lunch at a modest Indian restaurant called the Ganges in Chinatown. The picture of him sitting there — never surrounded by cheerful chums, but always solitary and alone — remains for me one of the sadder memories of the so-called “swinging Sixties”.

Strong arm of the law

“In practice the corporal punishment of boys took the form of administering a thin, broad, flat paddle to both buttocks simultaneously in a firm, controlled manner . . . the child was then comforted by a member of the staff, encouraged to pray, and was given time to compose himself before returning to class.”

The appeal, I’m glad to report, was refused.

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