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Rowan Williams |
Dinners leave Williams with a lot on his plate
WHAT A week for poor old Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England!
After learning disgruntled priests are lining up to defect to the Catholic Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s controversial views on Sharia law were back in the spotlight.
Early last year Arch. Williams warned courts should take notice of Sharia law when judging some cases involving Muslims. But instead of starting a debate, Williams whipped up a storm. Since then Lambeth Palace has been quietly organising exclusive dinners to bring the different sides together.
Pouring a little – holy – cold water on the drive was the Reverend Robin Griffith-Jones, Master of the Temple church in Holborn.
Speaking at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury yesterday (Wednesday), he said Williams had been “blind to concerns” of lawyers about how Sharia would work and that his idea of a two-track system legal system was “grounds for deep division”. The historic Temple church, near the Inns of Court, is where the top barristers and judges go for spiritual guidance, so the Rev Robin has his finger on the courtroom pulse. He also knows a controversy when he sees one – his father Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC prosecuted in the Lady Chatterley trial four decades ago.
But if the hapless Arch. Williams brought the holy wrath of Fleet Street on his head he was at least a useful “lightning conductor” for the anti-Muslim hysteria, which blew over in time for the Palace to host its dinners in peace, said the Rev Robin.
Generally backing Arch Williams’s aim of debating the Sharia issue, the Rev Robin let slip that government diplomats invited to the Lambeth Palace dinners showed an “ignorance” of Islam and the after-dinner debates were gerrymandered. At one dinner the academic and think-tank boss Tariq Ramadan predicted “violence” unless the West stopped killing civilians in its Middle East wars. Questions from the floor were “filleted” forcing the head of an Oxford university to storm out complaining of being “muzzled”. The dinners, said the Rev, have been quite a “roustabout”!
Have the get-togethers been a flop? The Rev would only say that Lambeth Palace is changing tack and opening the debate up with a “roadshow” of talks.
Lawyers’ courtship ends in marriage
THEY didn’t sit together, but all eyes were on the silver-haired woman and the man wearing the pink and green tie of the Garrick Club at a charity bash in Hampstead on Thursday to raise funds for Burgh House.
The woman was soon identified as Maggie Wakelin-Saint, 73, retired eminent lawyer and former chairwoman of the Hampstead-based Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, who is a Burgh House trustee.
And the man was, thanks to TV, immediately recognised as genial Sir Thomas Legg QC, 74, the current scourge of MPs, who has caused havoc in the Commons with his pay-back demands over the parliamentary expenses scandal.
What’s more, the couple, who live off Flask Walk, Hampstead, have just got married – civil servant Sir Thomas for the third time, and Maggie for the second.
Tomorrow (Friday) they will receive a special blessing at the Temple church, in Holborn, familiar home ground for all the legal fraternity.
Who says romance is dead?
Not such class act at school
I AM fascinated by a press release about the new Haverstock Secondary School in Chalk Farm, built four years ago on a multi-million pound budget, by a Japanese company, Kajima, with great fanfare from Camden Council.
Breathlessly, it tells me that Kajima has won an award for its “ground- breaking work at the school – the award accorded for its Innovation in Customer Service”.
I wonder whether the body that handed out the award, the British Institute of Facilities Management, is aware of what the big talking point appears to be among pupils and teachers at the school – the recent lack of working “water fountains” in the playground now that at least one remains broken, and the poor condition of doors in the lavatories as a result of which many pupils, I hear, are too embarrassed to relieve themselves there.
This description of the state of repairs at the new school was given to me by pupils there – and, of course, as impressionable young teenagers they may have given me an exaggerated picture.
‘We need a major rethink’
HE is a Sir, a former UN ambassador and has even had a minor planet (No 5,971) named after him.
Now Sir Crispin Tickell, an internationally renowned expert on the diplomacy behind climate change, is heading to Channing School, Highgate Hill tonight (Thursday) as a guest of the Highgate Climate Action Network to reveal how exactly December’s Copenhagen conference on global warming could save the planet.
And it’s not just a question of cutting emissions and kick-starting a green revolution, he says. It’s about looking at the very basis of capitalism.
“We need an economic revolution – we need to think differently about how we measure growth,” says Sir Crispin. “It is something economists are not exactly happy to do.”
The short answer for Question Time
SHOULD the BNP be given a platform on Question Time tonight (Thursday)?
Not according to the poet and BBC freelance radio host Michael Rosen.
Speaking at a packed protest meeting in Conway Hall, Holborn, last night (Wednesday), he said every BBC radio or TV host was required to sign an agreement that nothing said on their show would “jeopardise the relationship between the BBC and the public trust”.
“By inviting the BBC on Question Time they are smashing that principle,” he said.
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