A BLACK bishop with “street cred” has emerged as a surprise candidate for the post of Archbishop of York, the second highest office in the Church of England.

John Sentamu, 56, who has fought tirelessly to end gun crime in his present diocese of Birmingham and has himself been stopped and searched frequently by police in London, might not appear to be a natural choice for the cloisters of York Minster.

But his appointment would appeal to young people and please the millions of Anglicans in Africa.

His name is understood to be on a shortlist of five drawn up by the Crown Nominations Commission at a meeting at Ampleforth Abbey last month.

Two of those names have been submitted to Tony Blair for consideration but it is not known if they include Sentamu. He is well regarded at Downing Street, where he has advised the prime minister’s social inclusion team.

Sentamu has not hesitated to criticise the white elite that dominates the Anglican church. “Its organisational culture is still socially glued together by a culture that is monochrome — that is, white,” he said after his own survey found in 1996 that out of 11,000 clergy, 92 were from ethnic minorities.

One of 13 children in a Ugandan family, Sentamu studied law and became a judge. But he fell foul of Idi Amin’s regime after he ignored an order to deliver a not guilty verdict and jailed one of Amin’s cousins for five years.

Sentamu escaped in 1974 to study theology at Cambridge. Ordained as a deacon and priest in 1979, he rose to become the Bishop of Stepney in east London in 1996.

During his six years there he was stopped and searched by police eight times. Once while driving near St Paul’s Cathedral, his clerical collar concealed by a scarf, he asked the policeman who stopped him for a written explanation. The officer replied: “Enough of that lip if you want things to turn out okay for you.”

Earlier he had helped to write the report of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, which described the Metropolitan police as “institutionally racist”.

He was also part of the independent inquiry into the death of Damilola Taylor, the murdered black south London schoolboy.

Other contenders for the archbishop’s job include Graham James, Bishop of Norwich; Michael Langrish, Bishop of Exeter; Nigel McCulloch, Bishop of Manchester; and Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham. But Sentamu’s inclusion on the shortlist will draw the Anglican church closer towards what some now seem as inevitable: the appointment of the first non-white Archbishop of Canterbury.

Additional reporting: Alex Delmar-Morgan

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