The Archbishop of Canterbury rarely lets anyone amend his speeches. Unlike his predecessor, George Carey, Rowan Williams is confident enough of his intellectual gifts to consider that he does not need the wisdom of others in guiding the public expression of his thoughts.

This illustrates the divergent backgrounds of the two men — one is working-class, self-taught, rooted in the simplicity of an evangelical faith, the other is Oxbridge to the depths of his complicated soul, espousing a Christianity at once liberal, catholic and ascetic. Lord Carey reads the News of the World, and likes to write for the paper. Dr Williams prefers Dostoevsky, and is writing a book about him.

Dr Williams was advised before his speech on Thursday evening that the content could prove controversial. He heeded the warnings but went ahead anyway. He was “taken aback” by just how controversial it then proved but remains “chirpy” and unrepentant about his comments because he believes that they needed to be made.

Although he is a holy and spiritual man, danger lies in the appearance of the kind of intellectual arrogance common to many of Britain’s liberal elite. It is an arrogance that affords no credibility or respect to the popular voice. And although this arrogance, with the assumed superiority of the Oxbridge rationalist, is not shared by his staff at Lambeth Palace, it is by some of those outside Lambeth from whom he regularly seeks counsel.

Multimedia

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Intellectual arrogance pervades heart of wisdom

Dr Williams was advised before his speech that the content could prove controversial. He should have listened to that advice

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I've read it so you don't have to

The Archbishop of Canterbury meant well and was quite aware of some of the objections

BACKGROUND

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Neither the Archbishop nor his staff regard his speech as mistaken. They are merely concerned that it has been misunderstood. This characterises the otherworldliness that still pervades the inner sanctums of the Church of England.

Last December, nearly two months before he delivered the lecture, his key adviser on interfaith relations, Canon Guy Wilkinson, wrote to the Jewish academic Irene Lancaster, in Israel, about the planned content of the speech. Canon Wilkinson said that the lecture would be “a response to rising concerns about the extent to which Sharia is compatible with English civil law, especially in the extensive Muslim neighbourhoods where informal Sharia councils are widely in operation. In areas such as marriage and divorce, there is evidence that there is no proper connection with the civil courts and that women in particular are suffering.”

Canon Wilkinson summed up in two sentences what Dr Williams was trying but somehow failed to get across in twenty times as many. For the past decade and more, both Buckingham Palace and Downing Street have mastered the black arts of spin and media control, to the point where they have a high degree of influence over how they are presented, but in a way that panders to the populism that is necessary for the modern media age.

Dr Williams holds such populist tendencies in disdain. His staff respect his office and his personal qualities too much to argue otherwise. The Archbishop’s lack of regard for the popular press in particular is indicated by the fact that his press secretary, the Rev Jonathan Jennings, is leaving in the next few months to return to parish work and insiders say that there are no plans to replace him. The present press officer, Marie Papworth, is expected to take on Mr Jennings’s duties.

The irony is that, at the highest level, Dr Williams has advisers equal to, if not superior to, those of Lord Carey. Chief among these is Tim Livesey, his secretary for public affairs. A father of five and a Roman Catholic, Mr Livesey succeeded Jeremy Harris, a man who shared the contempt for many journalists that they had for him, and who went on to work in a similar role at Oxford University.

Mr Livesey worked previously as public affairs adviser to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and before that served in Tony Blair’s Government, working in information and public diplomacy policy. He unquestionably has the abilities, contacts and intellect to extract Dr Williams from the hole into which he has cheerfully dug himself. The difficulty he and the Archbishop’s other advisers face is that Dr Williams does not believe he is in a hole, or that if he is, it is a false hole, one dug for him by the media.

His staff respect his right to be correct on this, as in everything else. As his predecessor was fond of reminding journalists who stepped out of line, he is, after all, the Archbishop of Canterbury.