Cain and Able

If you want Christianity, then go to church. Zia Yusuf's proposal to stop former churches from being converted into mosques presupposes that they would already be redundant. According to Nigel Farage, "More people might go to church, had we had better Archbishops of Canterbury." Dame Sarah Mullally may well retire during the next Parliament, with Farage possibly in a position to choose her successor.

Since Reform's Britain would by then be the principal redoubt of Trumpism, Farage should nominate Paula White. It is historically anomalous that eight of the nine Archbishops of Canterbury in living memory have been Trinitarians, even if the other one was an atheist. Not only would Her Grace correct that, but she would bring refreshing connections to the Unification Church, and through that to the Nation of Islam with which it organises mass events; in turn, the Nation of Islam promotes Dianetics, which is the foundation of Scientology.

As for the prosperity gospel, Donald Trump grew up in the Marble Collegiate Church of Norman Vincent Peale, who even took Trump's first wedding there. The Power of Positive Thinking was the old mainline American Protestant tradition reconfigured by the New Thought movement, and prosperity theology is that reconfiguration of Pentecostalism. It was only to be expected that White should head Trump's White House Faith Office. Now to bring her to Canterbury. Complete with her third and current husband, Jonathan Cain. Yes, the one out of Journey. Don't stop believing, hold on to that feeling.

  

The present arrangements have never been adequate to the task of filling 26 seats in Parliament, three of which carried automatic seats on the Privy Council, with two of those having hitherto led to life peerages on retirement. The Liberal Establishment in the Church of England presumes the right to make those appointments, in one of many examples of the fact that there is far too little direct exercise of the Royal Prerogative by Ministers accountable to the House of Commons.

Like the Police, or the education system, or the BBC, or anything else that is alleged to have become "politicised", the monarchy has always been political, since, like each of those, the very concept of it is profoundly so. The question is whose politics. We ought not to be seeking to abolish the Royal Prerogative, but to exercise it. The whole of it, no matter to which committee or self-perpetuating oligarchy any part of it might have been surrendered. All of it must be taken back, and in most cases that would be perfectly simple to do.

Previous Governments have handed over vast powers to the Deep State. For example, while each generation presumably produces an obvious Astronomer Royal, why hand over the power to appoint Regius Professors, or certain Oxbridge Heads of House, or the Poet Laureate, or the judiciary? Yet those powers have never been legislated away. Almost nothing in Britain ever is quite abolished or repealed. It falls into prolonged desuetude. But it is still there.