New Archbishop must focus on Church and England - it's literally the job description

It's the job nobody wants, despite a whacking great salary, a vast amount power in the land, incredible digs and a very stylish wardrobe to boot. Yes, it's the Archbishop of Canterbury gig - the one made famous by such luminaries as St Augustine, Thomas Beckett, Thomas Cranmer and my own personal favourite Baldwin of Forde.

The job has been in the "situations vacant" columns for seven months - and insiders suggest it will continue to be so for a whole lot longer. Meanwhile the Catholics elect their new boss in the time it takes to down a carafe of chianti and a slice of pizza. And the reason for this, I suggest, is that the top CofE job no longer has anything to do with spirituality and higher planes of existence and everything to do with a poisoned chalice of woke meddling.

I took the kids to midnight mass at a north London church on Christmas Eve. There were 16 people there. The vicar was almost pathetically grateful for our attendance.

The Church of England is a failing - perhaps failed - institution. Yet it still possesses wealth and power way beyond most people's comprehension.

However, the way it chooses to use this wealth and power is even more baffling to us mere mortals.

Lambeth Palace needs to be spending every penny supporting ramshackle churches like the one I visited. Instead, it is building a £100m "reparations" fund to atone for the church's part in transatlantic slavery.

Lambeth Palace should be building a spirituality-based religion fit for the 21st century instead it preaches how attempts to tackle soaring illegal immigration are "ungodly".

Lambeth Palace should be figuring out how to offer our rootless Gen Z-ers real spirituality and belonging right here in Britain's churches. Instead, our disgraced outgoing Archbishop Justin Welby (one of 26 Archbishops still exerting significant clout in the House of Lords by the way) took a junket to Russia where he courted Russian Orthodox Church leader His Holiness Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. Kirill is a man who described merciless psycho Vladimir Putin as "a miracle of God", and the ongoing murder of Ukrainians as "Holy War".

With friends like those... Or take my own personal favourite Lambeth Palace hobby horse. Last year I spent time working in Azerbaijan and Armenia - two neighbouring countries who have been seemingly intent on kicking seven bells out each other for 30 years.

In recent days Armenia's rather sensible, West-leaning, democratically elected Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has agreed a huge trans-continental road and rail infrastructure project linking its former enemy Azerbaijan and, crucially, Turkey.

First proposed by the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev this "Zangezur corridor" project as it is known is perhaps the biggest step to lasting peace in two generations.

It massively thumbs Armenia's nose at Russia and a Putin who has viewed the country (and Azerbaijan) as Soviet states just ready to be taken back into his orbit.

While carrying out this brave act of high-level diplomacy senior Archbishops of the Armenian Apostolic Church, along with an Armenian-Russian oligarch in business with Putin's Gazprom, were allegedly attempting a Moscow-backed coup. Arrests were made last week.

The man accused of being the coup leader - Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan - was educated at the University of Leeds (yes, you guessed it, the temple of learning that also brought us Keir Starmer...) where he was apparently introduced to "Green Theology", just the sort of wokery you would expect to hear from one of our own Archbishops. But Galstanyan is, shall we say,

rather more of a political roughrider than our Sir Keir.

Having created his own Armenian Church political party, amongst his demands was being open to becoming Prime Minister himself ... oh and going back to war with neighbouring Azerbaijan after the latter's recovery of territory Armenia had occupied for 30 years.

It seems unlikely Galstanyan was doing this without his Church's tacit blessing when he is one of its most senior clerics. And Galstanyan's boss - Supreme Patriarch His Holiness Karekin II is wont to accept medals of honour from Vladimir Putin and send congratulatory messages of support to the dictator on his post-invasion re-election as Russian president.

This is the poisonous situation our own Justin Welby inserted himself into when he visited Armenia in 2023 to meet with Karekin II in support of the Armenians who had left the territory they had been occupying in Azerbaijan (or, as the Azerbaijanis might put it to bolster those who would like to re-occupy parts of someone else's country...). Welby said his visit was all about "peacebuilding" and of course to him, it was. But, trust me, some of the folks he met with were - and still are - keener on having another regional war.

Which brings me back to my initial question: Why oh why does anyone think it is the business of the Anglican church to attempt to intervene in foreign matters thousand of miles away which it knows little or nothing about while its domestic base is crumbling around its ears?

It is interesting that a recently commissioned survey to explore trust and trustworthiness within the Church of England has been cancelled.

Bishop of Peterborough, the Rt Revd Debbie Sellin, suggested it wouldn't tell them anything they didn't already know... namely that the Anglican church really isn't trusted.

And, unfashionable as it has become, I would suggest further that the next leader of the Church of England (who the bookies suggest is likely to Iran-born woman Rt Rev Dr Guli Francis Dehqani) keeps two words front and centre.

Those words are "Church" and "England".