ROWAN and BARACK and ALL the GANG

My regular reader may perhaps be surprised to have found no comment here yet on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s outrage. (For the record, he tentatively advanced the notion that certain disputes in the Muslim community in Britain might be settled by specially convened courts operating under Islamic Sharia law). It seems an obvious one for me to write about, he or she would hazard (and not be far off the mark). I confess I have not “privileged” (as they say) my own blog on this matter. Upon listening to His Grace’s interview on The World at One (which preceded the formal address in which he formally unveiled his thinking on Sharia law), I did something that I have never done before which was to email a comment to the programme. For a few hours, I believed that my comment had been sucked into cyberspace. There were apparently no comments at all posted within three hours of the programme – all were timed later – and many of them were trivial and even rude. I wrote to the website asking why I should have bothered to email. Impressively, I received a prompt reply from no less a personage than the deputy editor of The World at One (who certainly must have more pressing duties to which to attend) and was able quickly to verify his assurance that my comment was after all there in all its glory. (Needless to say, I sent him a grateful and admiring response). The BBC had by then received upwards of 17,000 emails. Just processing them must require a dedicated team.

I was also an early joiner of the thread that inevitably spun out to inordinate length on the Richard Dawkins website. On-line newspapers and every other kind of forum have been humming with this matter. Cantab has unleashed a vast hornets’ nest and very, very few of those roused are buzzing in his support. The (pretty feeble) consensus among his few apologists appears to be that his view has been misunderstood, misinterpreted or taken out of context. It is true that there is a large amount of personal abuse in the reaction, not least in the tabloids. I tried to give Dr Williams some credit in my postings. He is, after all, about as liberal a leader as the Anglican church can boast in my lifetime (since Michael Ramsey, anyway) and, if this storm ensures that his successor is a flint-faced fundamentalist, the church and wider public life in Britain will be the poorer for it.

The argument that I put forward in my postings which I have yet to see in any others is this: I rather suspect that Rowan Williams is fundamentally a decent and caring man (and far from stupid) but he doesn't appear to comprehend the aspiration of Islam to control the whole planet. Here's a refinement of his proposal that would leave him with less egg in his beard and, at the same time, would demonstrate vividly where Islam stands. Let the Archbishop propose that all Islamic nations reciprocate and allow non-Muslims and (especially perhaps) apostates to bend to arrangements other than those prescribed by Sharia. I have no expectation that any Islamic nation would subscribe to such an arrangement but, if I were wrong, it would constitute a major breakthrough.

Further, I made this point on the Dawkins site: I remember lodging for a while in the 1960s in the Bourneville area of Birmingham (England). There wasn't a pub to be found for miles because the Cadburys were religious teetotallers of some stripe (quakers?) and their writ ran throughout the area. Maybe it still does. By itself, this is of no great moment (unless you're a lush) but it is really only a small step from that to the Bishop of Rochester's “no-go areas” and then on to a situation where Sharia is more powerful than the law of the land in the ghettoes that we always said we didn't want.

Another poster asked “How will it affect you if you're not Muslim?” Not to put too fine a point on it, I repeat that Islam is set on world domination. Today Southall, tomorrow south London, next week the home counties. If I live in a society or a world where being an infidel (which is to say, not a Muslim) is a capital offence, I think I will justifiably feel that the rise of Sharia has affected me more than somewhat.

This week is General Synod. Someone from high in the Anglican church must be monitoring the Dawkins site, it being always one's duty to keep an informed eye on the enemy (serious lefties take The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal). That spy, I suggested, should encourage Synod to tell Cantab that he ought to resign unless he can satisfactorily answer the largest question that his musings raise: whether anyone whose convictions run against the law of the land might expect to be heard before a court more sympathetic to his own stance.

In another part of the forest, the American primaries game (much relished by me if evidently not by everybody) has moved nearer to a resolution. In my earlier entry Five Days Are a Long Time in Politics (January 9th), I counselled that the respective party conventions were months away. Time enough for much to occur.

Events over the last month have refined my analysis and eliminated a number of the players. It seems to me now that the next president is most likely to be Barack Obama. He has astutely handled the obvious negatives that hang about him – his inexperience, his race – without offering other hostages to fortune. He has remained unknowable while yet firing up millions of voters. Who, even among the American chattering classes, could list five of his policy positions? What he offers is freshness, charisma, his mantra of change, the promise (probably undeliverable) of politics very much not as usual. Will he cope with his first crisis as president? Well, he will have shrewd advisors to head him away from the rocks.

Why him rather than Clinton or McCain? Because I think neither Clinton nor McCain has smothered the negatives so well. Every advance by Obama hurts Clinton double because it makes her look less and less the inevitable and the unbeatable candidate. Obama can cast himself as the underdog all the way to November. Clinton looks less and less likely to be able to maintain her image as the heir apparent. What is more, Bill Clinton has unexpectedly begun to seem more of a hindrance than a help. When he shines, he dims her light and people fear that he would interfere in her administration. When he attacks, he makes her seem simultaneously mean and weak. Meanwhile, McCain is no nearer being loved by his own party. The Republican electorate sent him a stark message in the votes yesterday. Mike Huckabee cannot hope to catch McCain in the delegate count but he certainly can hurt him.

No candidate is a sure thing. There may be more racism hidden in the anonymity of the November ballot than anyone has yet bargained for. Clinton would be just as hurt by unspoken misogyny and indeed McCain will be deprived of the votes of deep-dyed conservatives who might even switch to “punish” him. But I feel sure that the Democrats will begin crucially to realize that Obama can beat McCain more surely than Clinton can. Obama offers a sense of the positive that neither McCain nor Clinton can match. His presence underlines the doubts that the electorate have about two candidates who are both seen as machine politicians and yet who are both seen as divisive. To a degree, I think this a pity and that the Democrats may be missing a trick. I argued before for a Clinton/Obama ticket that could look forward to holding the White House for 16 years. But Hillary sure as hell won’t agree to be Barack’s running mate. When Obama wins the nomination, she and Bill will decide to retire to the semi-showbiz world in which Bill now operates.

In The Sunday Times today, Andrew Sullivan argues that the catastrophe (not his word) of the Bush presidency is the ingredient that will most determine the outcome of the state primaries and the national vote. There is something in his argument as presented, though to hazard that Bush has “crafted” (Sullivan’s word) the election is absurd. Had America enjoyed two terms of President Al Gore (whose Vice-President Joe Lieberman – perhaps not his only VP – would hardly be running now as a Democratic contender; what he is actually doing now is backing John McCain), the contenders would probably be the ones we have and the situation would probably be just as poised.

Few retiring presidents are able to bequeath a satisfied nation to an anointed successor as Ronald Reagan did (or could have done, had he taken the remotest interest in the identity of his successor). As president, Al Gore would surely have found a more cultivated response to 9/11 than the attack on Iraq. He would certainly have ratified the Kyoto Agreement and the US might now be in the vanguard of tackling climate change. But I bet Gore’s popularity would have suffered accordingly, especially insofar as his measures required personal sacrifice. So it’s just as likely that the 2008 candidates would have been distancing themselves from a Gore presidency (as indeed Gore himself did in 2004 from the Clinton administration of which he was part).

Most political careers, as Enoch Powell sagely observed, end in failure. Even President Obama’s may do that. And of course archbishops may also make a conclusive bish of it.