Grabbing the Dead Man's Mitre

Not two days have elapsed since the Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation, and already the moral conscience of the Conservative Party has bestirred itself to warn Daveybloke of the wailing and gnashing of teeth which will ensue should he appoint the wrong successor. The tradition is to alternate candidates from the Church's loony wing with candidates from its pharisaical wing, as when the blathering imbecile Carey was succeeded by the dithering hypocrite Williams; and Daveybloke is being warned in no uncertain terms that he had better stick to that tradition or else. "I don't want the Archbishop to say we can't have gay marriage because it is not socially acceptable. I want him to say we can't have it because it is wrong," huffed a Peter Bone, whose opinions on the social acceptability of giving all one's property to the poor were regrettably not solicited. Nadine Dorries had one of her occasional lapses into veracity and stated that Williams did not "stand up for Christian values that the vast majority of Christians identify with": Williams did not detectably stand up for any values at all, aside from the institutional one of holding the Church together despite the clearly expressed wishes of its noisier adherents. His intention now is to return to his university career, presumably on the grounds that in-fighting, backbiting and petty politics are slightly less prevalent among academics than they are among Christians.