Symbolic Gestures

The chair of Daveybloke's Cuddlies, Lady Warsi, has been blathering at some bishops in Oxford. She accused New Labour of having acted as if religious faith were the preserve of "oddities, foreigners and minorities", and of being too suspicious of the potential of religious charity to provide an inexpensive dole for the proles without lecturing them too much. Leaving aside Tony's crusade against the infidels, New Labour's enthusiasm for faith schools, the Glorious Successor (he was the son of a preacher man) and his Rowan Williams-model moral compass, and one or two other minor matters, I suppose this might be considered a reasonable point of view; at least by anyone capable of believing in a sky-daddy who gives brownie points to good little grovellers and considers female ordination almost as forgivable as child-buggering. Lady Warsi has spent the week celebrating the Muslim holiday of Eid and dining with the chief rabbi, and will be meeting the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak later on; she hopes that this will banish the myth that Daveybloke's Chopper Coalition does not "do God". Unfortunately, she did not specify whether the God which the coalition does is the Jewish, the Muslim or the Christian; and she was almost certainly too tactful to point out that the adherents of all three of these amiable faiths have a habit of going for one another's throats in places where a non-secular government explicitly favours any one of them. Yet still there are those who think of the Conservatives as the Stupid Party.

In other news, the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak has been praising America's co-crusader as an enormous force for good, and has made a symbolic gesture at the titular head of the Church of England. The gesture took the form of a ninth-century illuminated manuscript which was torn apart during the Thirty Years' War, when religion was being an enormous force for good in Germany. Half of the original is now in Romania, where Nicolae Ceausescu's Catholic attitude to family planning was such an enormous force for good; the other half is in the Vatican library. The version presented by the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak is a facsimile, doubtless prudently low-priced compared to the original fragments, and an apt symbol of Christendom as he would have it: reunited, whole, entire, and fake.