Of Coronets and Mitres

Daughter? Mistress? Who knows? But Charlotte Owen is a usefully egregious example of the entourages of Prime Ministers. Imagine who you would have. Then look who they choose instead.

When Keir Starmer has one of his relaunches, then every Labour MP in the region is instructed to bring 15 people. In the middle of a normal working day, they all do. A backbench MP needs a staff of perhaps five, but if three times that many funded positions were available, with staff access to the parliamentary system, then imagine who you would have. Then look who they choose instead. Life peers of the future, and apparently of the very near future at that.

Whatever else she may be, Nadine Dorries is a former Cabinet Minister. If she can be denied a peerage while Little Miss Owen is made Little Lady Owen, then she has a legitimate grievance. But Rishi Sunak says that he cannot overrule the House of Lords Appointments Commission. The Royal Prerogative is as wasted on him as it would be on the Tweedledumber Leader of the No Position, and as the Apostolic Succession is on certain other people.

This cannot be an executive summary of this. Read them. It is impossible. Something has changed since 3rd May. What is it? I do not resile from, but rather I reiterate every word of, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this. There was no cathedral sex party. There was no allegation of sexual assault against Bishop Robert Byrne CO. The move from the old Bishop's House to the new one made a profit. There has been a liberal coup in the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle.

The Dominicans tried to have Timothy Gardner laicised, but Rome refused, which must have been for some reason, and he maintains his innocence, protesting that he pleaded guilty under duress. At least when it comes to convictions in this country, unless I personally witnessed the offence, then I believe in the innocence of almost anyone who professes it, and so should you.

Fr Gardner had not been sent to prison, which says a lot in itself, and he had to live somewhere. Bishop Byrne tried to find him work in the Diocese as an archivist, involving little contact with adults and none with children, and then a post at an overseas seminary, which is an entirely adult institution, and which is often located miles from anywhere. We think of Ushaw as remote, but in much of the world, the middle of nowhere really is the middle of nowhere. Living in the guestroom of a bishop's private quarters does not afford access to children. Indeed, it is hard to imagine anywhere less likely to do so. It is right up there with a seminary, or a diocesan archive.

Similarly, being Dean of the Cathedral did not give the late Canon McCoy any great access to children. It was not Bishop Byrne, but his predecessor, Bishop Séamus Cunningham, who made Fr McCoy a school chaplain, and the Youth Director of the Lourdes Pilgrimage for the 10 years before his appointment as Dean, giving him access to thousands of children. Bishop Byrne was here less than four years. Bishop Cunningham has been a priest of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle since 1966, including periods as Vicar General and as Diocesan Administrator, as well as the 10 years until 2019 as Bishop.

In August 1996, Fr McCoy "was facilitating underage drinking in local pubs", but that was not and is not illegal, at least if it was beer or wine, and provided that they were 16 or 17, that an adult was present and paying, and that they had so much as a scrap of food, such as a packet of crisps. These were obviously Sixth Formers, or action really would have been taken even then. But while that sort of thing probably would not happen now, let me tell you, as a Sixth Former of that generation, that it was far from unheard of, or even unusual, in those days. Fr McCoy seems to have kept it up after it had become unfashionable, although he did not break the law. As for supervised teenage drinking in private houses, the authors' private houses may be built of glass.

"A clergy friend spoke of being shocked that Canon McCoy allowed young people to refer to him by an abbreviated version of his Christian name, and he advised him that this was a breach of appropriate clergy-parishioner boundaries"? That is not an uncommon opinion, but it is far from a universal one. "Another member of clergy recalled attending Canon McCoy's presbytery to find the door answered by young people who used Canon McCoy's nickname when informing him that he was out"? The horror! Yet, "Canon McCoy displayed a clear pattern of grooming behaviour over the years"? Grooming for or into what?

Ah, yes, grooming for or into what? We are dealing here with a certain feminist generation's swivel-eyed hostility towards any independent social, intellectual or spiritual relationship between older and younger males, purely because it is beyond their control. And they well and truly control the Catholic Church in this country. Along with most other things. Major political projects have been brought down in no small measure for the same reason. But Canon McCoy coordinated school chaplaincy in this Diocese for many years, so is the safeguarding-industrial complex admitting that he was doing so while subject to one of its "plans"? There remains no suggestion that he was guilty of the allegation that was used to hound him to his death.

"In addition, a lack of information sharing between departments in the curia has resulted in the inappropriate appointment of school foundation governors. Failure to undertake due diligence in making these appointments further undermines safeguarding process"? Name them, complete with an explanation of how each of them was "inappropriate" and "undermined safeguarding process", or every governor appointed under Bishop Byrne should lawyer up, because that allegation is outrageous.

The safeguarding-industrial complex is trying to wrest control of the appointment of school foundation governors, so as to reserve them even further to a self-perpetuating oligarchy of generously salaried, if sometimes dubiously qualified, laywomen who used priests as errand boys, who spat the word "safeguarding" at anyone who dared to answer them back, and who actively preferred to have no bishops. Bishop Byrne resigned on 12th December. This significant Diocesan See has been vacant for six months, under an Administrator who is at least four hours away and who has more than enough to do as Archbishop of Liverpool. Who is really running things? Who do you think?

The coordinated resignations of lay trustees were professional politics. One of the many huge differences between the executive summary and the full report is that the latter makes no mention of academisation. In their shared historic fiefdoms, such as the North East of England, the liberal wing of the Catholic Church is symbiotically related to the right wings of the British Labour Party, of the American Democratic Party, of the Australian Labor Party, and so on. At least in Britain, those political machines' strongest powerbases are in the state-funded schools, meaning that the Catholic ones are dominated by liberals as a subset of Labour Rightists, and indeed vice versa. It is undeniably the case that academisation was and is an existential threat to all of that. So yes, they are well and truly taking back school governorships, even if they have to insinuate that the present governors are paedophiles. That is what we are up against. This is where we are.

Much like Jeremy Corbyn, the sum total of the charge sheet against Bishop Byrne is that he did not automatically do as he was told by the hired help. The next one will make no such mistake. If there ever is a next one. Likewise, there could be three Prime Ministers last year and it hardly seemed to matter, because the real power was elsewhere, with the whole thing coming to an end only when 10 Downing Street had been filled, without a vote's having been cast by anyone at all, in the person of a good public school Head Boy who would never have dreamt of, say, overruling the House of Lords Appointments Commission.

Lined up as the alternative is a former Director of Public Prosecutions, who is himself obedient to the latest answer to the perennial English conundrum of what to do with the younger sons, and now also with the daughters, of the gentry. The Empire has gone, the Officer Corps has been professionalised, and the Church of England is not what it was, but someone is always going to have to staff the Labour Party.

Still, when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.