For as long as anyone can remember, the Church of England has been a secular, national comfort. Before anyone ever thought of inventing a computer or IT support, the church was a haven for the uncoordinated, specky nerds, wonks, numpties and geeks. It offered succour to the worst folk singers and Andrew Lloyd Webber tribute band and a safe place for vile, evil-mouthed widows who are encouraged to do community service with flower and brass polishing.

As far as most of us knew, their only weird ritual was raising large graven images of thermometers on their steeples. It plainly meant something to the men in frocks and was pretty benign.

Then suddenly, out of nowhere and nothing, they’ve gone and got a conviction, and of all the things they’ve decided to have a belief about it’s homosexuality. Apparently homosexuality is a really gaudy sin and homos are hell-bound perverts.

This is achingly funny because, along with the geeks and malevolent widows, gays and the Church of England have always come together like Charles Hawtrey and the Royal Navy. The church has always been Hampstead Heath with a roof, albeit a leaky one. Now the prelates have all been over in Tanzania demanding that the gay-ordaining, queer-marrying, puff-friendly liberal wing of the church be forced to apologise for its wickedness in a gruff voice and wear tweed.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is bending over backwards to placate the rabid homophobes of the born again charismatic wing of the church in the belief that cohesion is more important than conscience. He knows what we all know, that gayness is not a sin, it’s not even a faux pas. It is the way some people are, but to placate a sordid, spiritually bereft prejudice he will go halfway round the world to search out mendacious phrases to keep the church one big, unhappy, sniggerable communion.

What he should be doing is laying about him with an axe. He should welcome schism. He should tell them to take their massive thermometers and smudgy imaginations and sod off.

The church isn’t a multinational company, believers aren’t shareholders. The church was born out of schism, it has constantly split and reinvented itself, forming new churches and ways of praying along the way, Methodists and Baptists, Presbyterians and Pentecostals. Schism doesn’t come from failure, but growth. It’s liberating and renewing. In this case it’s also right.

Which of us wants to get married, baptise the children or be eulogised by people who think of little else but others’ bottoms, and not in a nice way? Rightness and goodness are never about numbers, they’re about rightness and goodness. The church was rightest and best when it had only 12 members and one of them was a wrong ’un.

Clooney lifts lid on his eye job

George Clooney has admitted to Julia Roberts that he has had a tiny bit of eye work done. This is the sort of really important revelation that stars only impart to each other.

The fear of looking remotely normal is chilling the rebels of Hollywood. The latest terror is of high definition television. Insecure stars believe HDTV will reveal every sag and wrinkle and are rushing out for some remedial Botox.

On film, blemishes can be computer excised but television is the unflinchingly cruel inquisitor. The big screen makes your reputation. The small screen trashes it.

Listen to this, Tony’s working a new dodge

Listening to Tony Blair going at it with John Humphrys over Iraq on the Today programme last Thursday, I was, as ever, awed by the prime minister’s down home, colloquial deflection of the blitzkrieg inquisition.

He’s developed a new trick. When challenged with facts that contradict his evermore disconnected story, he says: “Look, I understand this is the opposing argument, I just don’t agree with it,” which is both disarming and deflating. He doesn’t have to confront the horrid thing, he can simply talk round it, tipping his cap as he goes.

By comparison, Gordon Brown’s slow laying of fact and statistic tarmac regardless of the questions sounds antediluvian; it’s the difference between those who learnt their debating over dinner tables or in halls.

o Oscars tonight. I’m sure you’ll all stay up. But did you know they are chosen by fewer than 6,000 people, most of whom have to travel with oxygen cylinders?

The original Academy only had 36 members and the first awards in 1929 took five minutes. A founder member was the writer Joseph Farnham who got the first and only Oscar for title cards, the little printed dialogue that pop up in silent movies. Films for which he won recognition included The Fair Coed, Telling the World and Laugh, Clown, Laugh.

o Acrobats, harlequins, jugglers, strong men, trapeze artists, plate spinners, fire eaters and animal acts all march through the streets of Cucuta in Colombia to protest against the shooting dead of two clowns at a performance last week. Now, you see, here there is an intrinsic concept fault. Killers of clowns get a circus. Dad, dad, please shoot Coco and get the funny people back.

o Michael Meacher, Michael Meacher, Michael Meacher — please stare at that name, concentrate, just let your mind go blank, focus all your energy on those two words, repeat them over and over. Let Michael Meacher filter down through your consciousness, past your unconsciousness into the id.

Now let it sit there, stay focused, relaxed, even-breathed — in through the nose out through the mouth. Okay, now what’s the first thing that comes to mind? What are you thinking about? Go on, tell me.

Nothing, absolutely nothing. Isn’t that amazing! It’s really weird.

I’ve tried it on dozens of people. It works every time. Michael Meacher is a completely blank name, totally empty of any association, image, idea or feeling, and that’s really something or nothing.

There’s a company trying to find ways of marketing the pristine emptiness of Michael Meacher. So far, all they’ve come up with is having it said by the mechanical voice in lifts when the doors are opening but there’s no one there.

I suggested that Michael Meacher be added to the Oxford English Dictionary as the definition for getting halfway through a number and forgetting who you’re phoning.

Times Recommends

• Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
• They’re still wriggling to avoid the flak on Iraq
• Rule the waves? Not any more we don’t