Last time the CofE appointed a new ABofC, the virtual unknown Justin Welby was catapulted into the top job. He immediately put several key protagonists into a locked room together until they could work out a way for the church to agree to women bishops. The issue had made minimal progress for several years but Welby cracked it.
Who are the left field candidates this time?
Jeremy Clarkson: with Clarkson's Farm having worked through pretty much all the plants and livestock its possible to grow in the Cotswolds, it's time for a new project. Clarksons Church. With additional funding from Amazon Prime, JC tries a series of crackpot schemes to make the church viable. Every now and again a churchwarden and a theological consultant turn up and roll their eyes.
Richard Dawkins: after the resounding success of the Agnostibus, resulting in an overall fall in the number of atheists in London, Dawkins knows all about managed decline and poor PR, which are the two strongest spiritual traditions in the Church of England after Anglo-Catholicism and Reformed.
Keir Starmer: by the time he is out of a job, the Church of England may have actually decided who the next Archbishop will be. In that respect, Starmer is a perfect match, being possibly the most indecisive politician of the 21st century. In keeping with the papal tradition of renaming the people who take on the highest office, Starmer would become Archbishop Schrodinger, capable of believing that one and the same person is both a man and a woman, or that Nigel Farage both is and is not a racist.
Greta Thunberg: selected on the radical ticket of accelerating the CofE drive for net zero by closing all 13,000 church buildings.
Brian Blessed: chosen in part due to a mistaken assumption based on his surname, and in part because BB will be so constantly outrageous that none of the other clergy misdemeanours will ever make it into the press. Has the advantage that if the sound system in Canterbury Cathedral fails, it won't make the slightest bit of difference.
Donald Trump: Make Anglicanism Great Again hats will be standard issue to all clergy. In a rushed compromise, they will be available in a range of liturgical colours for anglo-catholics and a 20% tariff will be imposed on churches that don't wear them.
Fiona Bruce: After hosting Question Time for many years, she has more experience than anyone in the country of holding together a room of people who fundamentally disagree with each other.
Robert Peston: in many respects a vicar already - poorly dressed, dishevelled, and when he speaks you're so distracted by his mannerisms and delivery that afterwards you can't remember a single thing he said.
The Dowager Countess of Grantham: like the CofE (sometimes) a treasured national institution, irrevocably linked to the upper class, occasionally haughty, belongs to a past age, lives in an old building, and occasionally says something worth paying attention to.
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