Giles Fraser is never taken in by establishment self-delusion | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

How is it that an organisation as full of clever people who believe that they must love one another can manage to behave with the monumental stupidity and pettiness of the Church of England? The resignation of Giles Fraser, the canon chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, is a loss to everyone concerned: he loses his job, his family lose their home, the Church of England loses respect and sympathy, the cathedral loses a cogent and attractive advocate. The dean may believe he saves face.

Fraser has his faults. He's far too fond of ecclesiastical politics, until now as a spectator rather than a piece on the board. As a journalist I can't think this is a vice, but as a friend and human being, I do. None the less, he is one of the very few people in the Church of England who can think about important questions out loud in ways that are comprehensible to the outside world.

Conversation with him always feels like watching a fast-burning fuse in a cartoon. It's exciting in itself, and you know there will be explosions from which everyone will, miraculously, emerge unscathed. He loves to shock, but he also loves to think and the simple pleasure he takes in life is quite remarkable. Time in his company makes me feel better about being alive.

I remember the night I introduced him to the poetry of John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. We were sitting outside a noisy wine bar in the smokers' courtyard: Fraser, for once with a dog collar on, which made him more impressive when he approached a complete stranger to bum a cigarette for me, and more impressive still when he started to read with noisy relish from the screen on my laptop:

"So when my days of impotence approach,
And I'm by pox and wine's unlucky chance,
Driven from the pleasing billows of debauch,
On the dull shore of lazy temperance …

When we got to the verse that starts "Nor shall our love fits, Cloris, be forgot" there were people looking as they had never looked at a vicar before.

He enjoyed that. The delight in shocking is part of his character but it is also connected to his most valuable gift to the Church of England. He actually notices the audience reaction. So much of the church's energies are taken up in make-believe about its position in society that Fraser is really shocking to anyone used to professional Anglicans.

There was an example of this just this week in the Bishop of London's statement about the protesters explaining that they could go away now because the grown-ups had taken over: "The St Paul's Institute has itself focused on the issue of executive pay and I am involved in ongoing discussions with City leaders about improving shareholder influence on excessive remuneration."

Never mind that the St Paul's Institute was run by Giles Fraser, who the bishop must have known was about to resign. There is one huge shrieking question about a press release like that: who is it meant to fool? Does anyone really think that the City takes more notice of a bishop than of a genuine popular demonstration? Does anyone in the wider world think that the bishop's words count for as much as the protesters' acts, or that they mean anything at all?

Fraser was never taken in by that kind of establishment self-delusion, in part because as a former private-school boy and an Oxford don, he knows it from the inside. There are precious few others like that where it matters in the church.

Still there may be one glint of hope in all this. For the first time in perhaps 50 years, the public has seen that Christians can act on principle in a disagreement that has nothing whatever to do with sex. Is it too much to hope this will go on?

via guardian.co.uk