Pravda, the whole Pravda, and nothing but Pravda

Welcome to An Exercise in the Fundamentals of Orthodoxy. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date with what I'm writing. Alternatively, if you want to contact Peter in relation to issues of human sexuality, please use the contact form here. Thanks for visiting!

Ruth Gledhill, Times Religious Correspondent Extraordinaire, has just written this devastating critique of the official Lambeth Conference media operation.

At Lambeth, the journos have been divided into the ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’. You can guess which mob I’m corralled in with, and some of you probably think I deserve it. But pause to think for a moment. After dealing with a thankfully long-gone staff member at Lambeth Palace, a former editor of The Times told me, his voice shaking with stunned incredulity: ‘They’re just like the Communist Party.’ He meant the Communist Party before the wall came down. Read and believe if you like the official stuff trickling in a tghtly-controlled way out of Jim Rosenthal’s entirely independent press operation operating from a place I’ve yet to track down somewhere on the university campus. This is where the ‘on side’ ‘journalists’, many of whom seem by coincidence to wear episcopal clerical collars, are permitted to hang out. I am sure the citizens of the former USSR were similarly enlightened by what Pravda produced on a daily basis. The real operation, the concrete prison where proper journalists do their work, is being run by the staff from Church House. Peter Crumpler and his minions, themselves shut away in an even more terrible bleak hole  of a broom cupboard than our own, are brilliant, utterly brilliant.

There’s nothing like a Lambeth Conference or two to swing me back into the conservative camp. Here I am, separated from the leaders of the Anglican Communion, of which I happen to be a covenanting member, by a ten foot wall. I’ve helped pay for this! Oh it makes me so cross.

Ok then, it’s not a wall, merely a security fence. Complete with security guards. The wire lacks barbs but I’ll try and supply those. I guess David Virtue, George Conger and Riazat Butt and I, all equal in our exclusion, are the ‘terrorists’. I’m telling them, a three-foot fence of hurdles, or even a green line made of ribbon, would have been enough. Or even, they could have just asked us not to go in the Big Blue Top. But no. Forget simple human means of exchange. The staff running the Anglican Communion Office have moved beyond that. They’re probably wearing bomb-proof vests under their copes in case my pen is loaded with a bullet. Pathetic.

By golly she’s angry. Read it all here.

Tags: Anglican Communion, Broom Cupboard, Church House, Clerical Collars, Conger, Crumpler, Daily Basis, David Virtue, Foot Fence, Foot Wall, Former Ussr, Incredulity, Independent Press, Jim Rosenthal, Lambeth Conference, Lambeth Palace, Pravda, Proper Journalists, Ruth Gledhill, Security Fence