No love for Keir Starmer from HTB millionaire

KEN COSTA, one of the evangelical millionaires around Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB), occasionally writes articles for the Telegraph. On Monday, I noticed an article urging readers to vote Conservative: “Many Conservative supporters, activists, business owners, donors and core voters are angry and frustrated. Most have trouble supporting Tory policies but are angry at the party for not implementing genuine Conservative values. . .

“Traditional party supporters and undecided voters are threatening to punish the Conservatives by either not voting or supporting the Liberal Democrats or Nigel Farage in protest. And the beneficiary of both will be Labour.”

It really looks like he has been given a word of wisdom.

The irony, of course, is that HTB is doing to the Church of England what Reform UK is doing to the Conservative Party. It takes a finer brain than mine to understand why that is so terribly wrong in one case and not in the other.

Perhaps it is the quality of the messianic leader that makes the difference. But that doesn’t matter when it comes to making money. Costa’s most frequent topic in the newspaper is the need to kiss Saudi Arabia’s ass: he has written three articles explaining that Pecunia not oletwhich, as every well-educated schoolboy knows, is the Latin word for “oil has no smell.”

Oh, and he also claims that “Sunak is right: National Service is exactly what Generation Z is crying out for.” That was the only policy that provoked spontaneous laughter at the election rally I attended in Ely Cathedral. Mr Costa’s view is, by the standards of the telegraph these days. Today’s opinion page says: “Joe Biden’s presidency was a conspiracy against the world”; “Tory Remainers are the authors of their party’s defeat” (enjoy that for a moment); “Britain is about to be pushed over the edge”; and “Doomsday is coming and Britain will never be the same again”.

Still telegraph was also the only national newspaper to take note of the alliance’s announcement, de facto Schism (News, June 28). Even with an election looming, I would not have thought that the Church had strayed so far from the mainstream.

FERGUS BUTLER-GALLIE had a blast in The audiencetriggered by the decision to sell the church where Dick Whittington is buried (News, 28 June).

“The diocese of London has become synonymous in Church of England circles with the worst excesses of the culture that is slowly killing the Church,” he wrote. “The leadership – its bishops, archdeacons and faceless grey managers – are hopelessly out of their depth. They lack pastoral instinct, practical talent or any sense of the deep beauty of God’s glory. I know this because I used to work for them. There are some good and talented clergy on the ground but they are largely undermined or ignored. Those in power plunge from one mistake to another, then from one cover-up to another, before finally emerging and repeating the same process. They cannot criticise, they do not want to hear from people who think differently. It is the scene of the end of the 20th century. Downfall set to Gregorian chant.”

All of this may be true, but there is no indication of how the diocese could repair its finances other than by selling its assets. This is true even of the dioceses that have no assets to sell. The problem will only become more pressing when the “Alliance” churches start putting their money into their own organization.

All the respectable mainstream Anglicans I have spoken to about the split think I am an alarmist, relying on the same institutions that in other contexts they would not trust to manage even important matters. But the national church has no whips to crack, only a handful of broken reeds.

HOW different are the affairs of the Vatican? Both The guard and that Financial Times reported on the civil case in which Raffaele Mincione, a London-based Italian businessman, is seeking a declaration that he acted in good faith in a real estate deal that ultimately cost the Vatican £100 million.

That was not the opinion of the Vatican court, which sentenced him and six others to significant prison terms; his co-defendants included Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who, like Signor Mincione, received five and a half years. All of them have appealed, although none of the others have come up with Signor Mincione’s brilliant idea of ​​a new trial in London. I am glad that he somehow managed to raise the money for the lawyers here.

Apparently the rules were changed four times during the Vatican process, a fact that reminds me of an old, battered policeman who once told me, “Justice is when someone gets their just punishment, even for something they didn’t do.”