Justin Welby’s strop on Rwanda Bill was more Grace Kelly than Your Grace
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As ever, the House of Lords was choice in its language. Lord Dobbs, the creator of House of Cards, mentioned “muscular Turks”, which must have had whoever mans the defibrillator in the Upper Chamber perking up to standby. Lord German’s complaint that the Rwanda Bill asked their lordships to believe “black is white” elicited the odd side-eye from peers.
The Earl of Kinnoull, convener of the Cross Bench peers, offered a learned discourse on the Salisbury Convention. On the day the PM had chosen to unveil a major policy announcement via an interview with the viral content spreader LADBible, it was nice to hear a speech that wasn’t designed with TikTok in mind. That said, it would be sensational if the noble Earl did become a social media star: I can hear the hordes of South Korean teenagers screaming “Kinnoull!” now…
Perhaps the most anticipated speech of the day came from Justin Welby, graduate of the Thomas Becket School of Church-State Relations. His assessment was clear: “The Government is continuing to seek good objectives in the wrong way, leading the nation down a damaging path.” Similar things might be said of Welby’s tenure at Lambeth Palace and its effect on the Church of England. Physician, heal thyself!
You sensed that Welby knew he was in the limelight. More Grace Kelly than Your Grace. Behind this self-imagined role as unofficial Leader of the Opposition was a more conciliatory note. He praised the Government for bringing small boat numbers down, and even suggested – heresy on some of the reddest of the red benches – that agreeing effective controls on immigration was necessary. However, as the speech wore on, it was clear which way the archiepiscopal wind was blowing: the Archbishop said that “sadly” he would need to wait until the bill’s third reading to vote it down.
Clearly, recent censure of the bishops’ voting record was troubling His Grace. His most animated moments came as he tried to bat off these attacks. Welby isn’t renowned for his ability to take criticism. “Bishops often cancel each other out!” he stropped. Their lordships obliged with a polite ripple of awkward laughter. He sounded like a man having a breakdown at a chess tournament.
“Here we stand, we can do no other,” concluded Welby, with a deliberate misquote of Martin Luther, before promptly sitting down next to the Bishop of London. Only the current CofE high command could turn up at a debate about the policy issue of the day, and end up making it about themselves.
The Lords tut-tutted, clutched their metaphorical pearls and belched out purple prose; Lord Hennessy described the rule of law as the “most lustrous of our values, almost talismanic in its virtues”. But alternative policies were thin on the ground. Lord Dobbs threw down the gauntlet; “I’m very much looking forward to hearing the specifics of what the Opposition will do,” he said. “We will wait, we will wait, and we will wait.”
And wait we did. “All people are made in the image of God,” said the Bishop of London. Which means, presumably, that we can never refuse to admit anyone, ever again. We heard from that expert in all things Tory – Baroness Chakrabarti – who branded the Rwanda Bill “un-conservative”. The noble Baroness also bemoaned its impact on the “separation of powers” even though… Britain doesn’t have a separation of powers.
But it was Labour’s Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede who took the palm for the most “motherhood and apple pie” offering of the day. He wanted to stop the boats by “restor[ing] the aid budget”, developing a “renewed focus on conflict and mitigation”, and cooperating with “our friends in Europe”. He might as well have suggested a border force staffed entirely by unicorns.
