“The abuse and manipulation of God's name to justify this and any other war is the gravest sin we can commit at the present time”.
 Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Patriarch of Jerusalem, 17 March 2026.
 
What do Peter Hegsmith, US Secretary of Defence, Naim Qassem, secretary-General of Hezbollah, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli Minister of National Security, have in common?  They all believe that military force is there to fulfill their version of God’s will.  Deus Vult, God Wills it. That their use of force does not conform to the laws of war does not seem to bother them.  Their own might is always right because it has a divine purpose whether inspired by Christian nationalism, extreme forms of Islamist thinking or Zionist Judaism. 

Modern warfare  has become an exercise in increasing the distance between those perpetrating the killing and the reality on the ground.  ‘Collateral damage’ sounds like storm damage - to a building.  But those words frequently indicate dead and maimed children, women and other non-combatants.  Political leaders, military chiefs and nuclear scientists,  called ‘high value targets’,  are “taken out”, not assassinated.  With them often die their wives, children, and friends; it has been reported that Israel calibrates the number deemed acceptable against the estimated importance of each target.  ‘States have “capabilities”: the vast array of technical resources capable of overwhelming an enemy not their capacity to resolve conflict diplomatically.  Vague euphemisms, the ‘cuttlefish ink’ Orwell described  in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, are spurted out daily trying to obscure what television news reveals thanks to courageous war correspondents. 

At the opposite pole from military euphemism is the word ‘terrorist’, covering a multitude of sins.  The once functional definition of terrorism - violent actions by a sub-state actor to achieve political goals by instilling fear in communities is increasingly inadequate.   States themselves can, and do, terrorise their citizens.  Iran is an obvious example.  Sub-state actors become a part of a government, or at some point take over the State itself.  If terrorism simply means violence to achieve political aims there is no moral reason not to accuse brutal States of ‘terrorism’   Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton 1997-2001 pointed out – at a later date - that the United States has often had "limited success when declaring war against nouns”.

Slovenly use of language creates a pernicious loop with what Orwell called ‘foolish thoughts’ and with what we today call ‘spin’.  This loop characterises the arsenal of disinformation and propaganda used to quieten citizens’ moral concerns about today’s wars.  Had he not been a “Christian atheist” confronted by totalitarianism, Orwell might have added how misuse of language and poor theology links to ‘foolish thoughts’ about war and God’s will.  Christian nationalists are a good example.

Just war theory, both Islamic and Christian, makes the distinction between combatants and non-combatants.  But the nature of today’s weapons,  modern warfare, the relationships within civil society created by Islamist dispensations, or implanted in other religious communities by propagandists, makes distinguishing actual combatants more difficult.  Today’s war in the Lebanon makes it almost impossible.   If a war is God’s Will, it seems, the Divine Will overrides moral restraints.

Trump and his circle convince themselves with their own misleading language.  Given the information available to his Intelligence agencies, the US Administration’s misconception about  likely reaction to their attack on Iran is startling.   Iran obviously had been long preparing for war and would prove a resolute opponent, drawing in Hezbollah, yet the White House didn’t anticipate blocking of the Straits of Hormuz.

Hezbollah’s origins lie in the war between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel’s 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon targeting refugees and the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) militia.  Lebanon had fallen apart into a civil war between ten different religious communities and their militias, segregated along sectarian lines. 

Export of its 1979 Islamic revolution was the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran lead by Ayatollah Khomenei.  Hezbollah initially saw itself as an integral part of this new dispensation.  In 1983 it placed bombs by the US embassy and marine barracks killing 241 Americans.   The Ta’if Agreement mediated by Saudi Arabia and brokered by the Arab League, designed to end Lebanon’s civil war, was signed in 1989:  Hezbollah was recognised as the sole militia responsible for future resistance. 

Modelled on Iran, Hezbollah created a multi-layered pyramidal structure for governance: a Majlis Shura al-Qarar, a consultative council of seven primarily clerical members, Sheik Naim Qassem amongst them, elected every three years by a convention of some 250 Hezbollah top cadres.  There are executive, political, judicial, jihad/security and the parliamentary work, councils. By 1992 Ayatollah Khamenei, successor to Khomenei, was recommending Hezbollah adopt a policy of Infitah: participation  in Lebanon’s elections.   They maintain on average ten deputies in Lebanon’s parliament and are guaranteed two Government Ministers.

According to Joseph Daher’s Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God, Pluto Press 2016, Hezbollah developed organisations for health, education, seminary training,  orphans, and emergency aid.  Islam compliant loans, zakat tithing, donations and discount cards aided the poor.  An extensive education system plus a TV network, radio station and publishing outlets inculcated the principal of Iltizam, religious commitment and adherence to strict Islamist practice including the duty of supporting Hezbollah. 

Houses were rebuilt after bombing raids honouring the slogan ‘reconstruction, resistance and rebirth’.  Disciplined lives became prosperous lives; a Shi’a middle class grew. The vision was a pure society uncorrupted by the West, an Islamic milieu, hala islamiyya, a ‘resistance society’ against the Zionist enemy. The provision of public services and charitable outreach, a  ‘combination of consent and coercion’, in Daher’s words, encouraged Lebanese Shi’a acceptance of Hezbollah’s authority. 

Southern Lebanon, predominantly Shi’a, dotted with small towns with some ancient Christian villages, now under Israeli attack, has an agricultural economy.   Its people are farmers plus well-off entrepreneurs, landowners and Hezbollah local government officials.  There are possibly 60,000 fighters including part-time reservists and a UN peacekeeping force reduced to 7,500 mandated to secure a buffer zone south of the Litani river.   A significant Shi’a community lives in the more mixed northern Beqaa Valley.

It is easy, especially in war time, to interpret attempts to understand a party to a conflict as support for that party.   Support is clearly not the intention of Daher’s Hezbollah.   Nor is it mine.  But for several reasons, including future negotiations, ignorance is not bliss as  the Middle East today demonstrates.
With its armed wing, trained by the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hezbollah poses an intractable problem for Lebanon’s army and government.  Its rocket attacks provide Israel with their perennial justification for prolonged invasions of Lebanon and the bombing of “Hezbollah strongholds”.  Over one million people, 18% of Lebanon’s population, have had to abandon their homes as the invading Israeli Defence Force (IDF) pushes further into the South again.  In Dahieh, a densely populated southern suburb of Beirut,  controlled by Hezbollah residents cannot easily be sorted into combatants and non-combatants.  Bombs hit buildings which collapse burying people under rubble In Dahieh as in Gaza  The death toll is already above 1,000, 10% children. 

An infinite gulf exists between the Will of a loving, merciful and compassionate God and the will to power that States, and non-state actors, exert in war.  It cannot be bridged - least of all by euphemistic language, ignorance and disinformation.  On his right biceps, Peter Hegseth has a Deus Vult tattoo.  A  chant from the First Crusade, it marks the clear and present danger of Christian Nationalism.
 
 
 

Anger and apathy, Bankers and BREXIT, Corruption and COVID, the ABC of Britain’s decline, has determined our recent history.  The Venerable Bede wrote in the 8th century that history should record the “evil of wicked men” to avoid sin, while describing the “good things of good men” to encourage virtue.  James Macintyre’s insightful and balanced  Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose, Bloomsbury 2026,  falls into Bede’s ‘good men’ category encouraging virtue even though as the work of a journalist this biography is ‘a first rough draft of history’, and Gordon Brown remains a consequential figure.

Whoever is Prime Minister, the moral and the expedient often clash.  Gordon Brown’s  political misfortunes arose from tipping the balance towards morality and social justice. Like Angela Merkel and Theresa May, his father was a Protestant Minister.  Rev. Dr. John Brown served as Church of Scotland Minister, from 1954 in Kirkcaldy for 13 years, revered enough by Gordon Brown to present a book of his sermons to Pope Benedict XVI in September 2010.  But arguably his religious commitments also strongly influenced his political life.

At Labour Party Conference in Manchester, September 2009, with polls dropping fast following his indecision over calling a general election, Prime Minister Brown deliberately challenged popular assertions that all parties were the same.  He listed the impressive achievements since the 1997 General Election that he had been involved in: half a million children taken out of poverty, Sure Start, child benefit at record levels, numbers of pensioners below the poverty line halved, the Disability Discrimination Act, the minimum wage, the Winter fuel allowance, trebling of foreign aid, debt cancellation for the poorest countries. Then “crime cut by a third, “the shortest NHS waiting times in history” and a “legally enforceable right to early cancer screening and treatment within one week”.  For ten years, of course, he had shared these achievements with Prime Minister Tony Blair.  He was responsible, as Prime Minister himself, for the first ever Climate Change Act in 2008, and the Equality Act 2010, transposed from EU law,  protecting everyone in Britain from discrimination in work, education, housing and provision of services.  Compared with these achievements progress during  2010-2023  comes as a shock.

In the 2008-2010 global economic crisis Gordon Brown rallied the G7 and G20 around his plan for a $1.1 trillion recovery package taken from national budgets – and taxpayers  known as ‘quantitative easing’ to recapitalise the banks, boost demand and counter recession.  He admitted responsibility for too light regulation of financial services, failure to spot the dangers of the market for sub-prime mortgages and the banks’ casino culture whilst the Conservative Party wanted less regulation.

Brown’s dithering, his fall from grace in the public eye by 2009 and resultant electoral failure, illustrate a number of perennial features of British politics: the influence of the right-wing press such as the Daily Mail and, in the Murdoch empire, notably The Sun, on a public tired and suspicious of politicians, giving no second chances to political leaders it turns against. 
 
Labour leaders have always faced headwinds.   Clement Attlee, who sustained a radical socio-economic programme for six years despite post-war bankruptcy, was defeated only in 1951.   Later Labour governments walked a tightrope: policies promoting a more just society on one side, the imperative of winning general elections to implement such policies on the other.  And Brown had a strong moral compass, combined with only a modest ability to connect with, and breakthrough to, a fractious public.  Change ‘moral’ to ‘legal’ above and this could be said of Sir Keir Starmer.

The turn of the millennium heralded a particularly sharp national decline in Christian faith and church attendance.  No politician could safely ‘do God’.  Kate Forbes, contender for the SNP leadership, and Tim Fallon, Liberal Democrat leader 2015-2017, were both damaged by disobeying Alistair Campbell’s golden rule.

Reviewers have been positive about Power with Purpose focusing on issues of interest to themselves.  Thus tensions between Brown and Blair over the years feature prominently, but the chapter “Joy in the Morning: Gordon Brown’s quiet faith” does not.   There is only a passing mention in the Church Times which has hosted a podcast on the book instead.  But few doubt Brown’s religious upbringing was influential in his politics. 

Brown became known for phoning NGOs to coordinate public advocacy for overseas aid and debt reduction with his own diplomacy and government action. He was also quite open in his relationship to the Churches and religion.  If there is one speech - missed by Macintyre - which illustrates Brown’s Christian motivations and their significance for government policy as Chancellor of the Exchequer, it is ‘Economics of Hope’, his address to the Church of Scotland’s 1999 General Assembly, dedicated to his recently deceased father, a passionate call for debt relief to the poorest nations, increased aid, and the pursuit of the millennium development goals. “For it is our Christian teaching - the faith I was brought up in – that when some are poor, our whole society is impoverished; that when there is an injustice somewhere it is a threat to justice everywhere; that what – as Dr. King said – selfish men tear down, selfless men and women must build anew”.

On 24 July 2008, after the ecumenical Walk for Witness in central London led by Archbishop Rowan Williams, Gordon Brown spoke on the moral imperative to reduce global poverty in the courtyard at Lambeth Palace.  Brown and the march were promoting the millennium development goals (MDGs) lagging as the half-way mark passed to the 2015 closing date for reaching them.  Some 650 Anglican bishops, politicians attending the 2008 Lambeth Conference, plus heads of NGOs were present.  This was no sudden embrace of the Churches and NGOs. 

Brown has even joked about the wrong sort of approach to religion and politics recounting how his father told a story about a fellow minister’s choice of hymns after local elections:  “Sometimes the congregation was asked to sing the hymn, ‘Now Thank We All Our God’.  When the other party won he announced the hymn, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind Forgive our Foolish Ways’.  And in the event of “no overall control” he could always perform “God works in Mysterious Ways His Wonders to Perform”. 
​
Gordon Brown would be the first to say secular values could equally have motivated, and been in play, in government policies that prevailed from 1997-2010.   And a quiet faith does not eliminate bad mistakes.  But faith values truth in the exercise of power and enhances clarity of purpose.  James Macintyre should be applauded for a good title, a good book, and daring to write sympathetically about religion and high political office.
 
 
 
 
 
                        
 

“I don’t need international law”, Trump told the world in January;  his “own morality”, his “own mind” was all that he needed to formulate foreign policy. Trump’s mind and morality do not inspire confidence.  

No reasonable person in a democracy would willingly agree to tolerate or endorse lawlessness within their own nation-state, so why is lawlessness between States once more acceptable?  If law and moral principles underpin a successful economy and a harmonious society, why should we consider them superfluous to the conduct of international relations?  Yet, political leaders are balancing speaking clearly in defense of international law with avoiding alienating Trump.

If there were no ‘structures of sin’, covetousness and the quest for power and dominance, if humanity overcame its failings and all became virtuous citizens, we might do without laws, national and international.   But for the time being, our attempts at formulating and enforcing just laws is as good as it gets. 

Thomas Aquinas roots ‘natural law’ in human nature tapping into God’s eternal law.   Catholic social teaching with its virtues, values and principles of compassion, solidarity and justice is an important expression of it.  And the Eucharist mediates a specifically Christian form of globalisation, relativizing national and ethnic identities, giving sense and transcendental meaning to a common humanity seeking the common good.

The Vatican, internationalist in outlook, now led by an American born citizen of Peru continues to promote its conception of international peace and justice which it sees as inseparable. This means rules about the conduct of war must be respected and the promotion of existing conventions about the rights of peoples within nations as well as those crossing borders in flight from persecution and danger.  But Papal teaching is essentially that war should be outlawed especially as it is the nature of modern weaponry to cross the boundary between combatant and non combatant and to maximise damage. On the very first day of the attack on Iran, bombing killed over a hundred 7-12 girls in a school.

An extraordinary social video came out of the White House last Thursday: alongside clips from Top Gun, Spiderman, and perhaps a nod at Trump’s ancestry, Braveheart actual ‘strike footage’ from Iran illustrating the promised “death and destruction all day long”.  Entitled ‘Justice the American Way’, its moral depravity is striking.   Just as Archbishop Blaise Cupich of Chicago wrote in response, it depicted a “real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game”: an ‘American Way’ which ignores the very existence of international law and the values it attempts to preserve.   Pete Hegseth, self-styled US secretary of State for War, a man responsible for command of the largest military force in the world both approved it and appeared in it.  

Archbishop Cupich is a refreshingly clear voice of condemnation and focus on the victims of war.  But the response of many Church leaders to wars and conflict is to call for reconciliation.  It is sometimes as if the Church is hovering between and above the oppressor and the oppressed, the torturer and the tortured.  This was the gist of the theological critique directed in 1985 at the height of the struggle against apartheid in part at what they called ‘Church theology’ distinguishing it from the ‘State theology’ and their own prophetic voice. The Kairos document, signed by some 180 Christian leaders, began life in the Institute of Contextual Theology led by the late Albert Nolan, a Dominican friar and Frank Chikane from the Apostolic Faith Church, soon to become the General-Secretary of the South African Council of Churches.  There is a contemporary Palestinian Kairos document too. 

The point is that conflict between two individuals in a family is not like that between ethnic groups, different religious groups and States.  Their reconciliation demands repentance expressed in justice restored, some sense of historical antecedents, culpabilities acknowledged and remedied before any genuine resolution.  There is not going to be any reconciliation between the barbaric regime in Iran and today’s American government.  At best there will be some kind of transactional agreement after thousands are killed from the air.

After the Second World War, the Church supported the creation of the UN and its international institutions.  These were  intended to protect and develop the principles of international law pioneered by the League of Nations Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ).  The prime purpose of these was to reduce and eliminate causes and justifications for States going to war again.
Catholic statesmen made a significant  input into the creation, in 1952, of the European Iron and Steel Community which by 1993  had evolved into the European Union as defined by the Maastricht Treaty.  The EU and its predecessors have produced, embodied in its institutions,  a unique body of supra-national law, its consequential judicial proceedings respected within the courts of its member States. 

But law to be effective must be enforceable.  The UN International Court of Justice (ICJ), set up in 1945, suffered, and suffers, from the limitations of needing  States’ consent to be a party to a dispute in the court, and the lack of enforcement procedures after adjudication.   South Africa’s filing a complaint, called a ‘Memorial’, garnering support from other countries for their application under the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, against Israel’s conduct in Gaza was an almost unique event.  In this sense the court’s power is to provide more of a moral than a punitive constraint. 

Trials, convictions and punishment of individuals for the most serious offences, such as war crimes and genocide, have taken place in the International Criminal Tribunal  for the Former Yugoslavia, 1993-2017, and the International Tribunal for Rwanda after the genocide (1994-2015).  The International Criminal Court  (ICC) set up in 2002 has issued several warrants for arrests.  But it has been mainly African offenders who have seen the inside of a prison cell.  The USA, Russia and China play no part in this judicial body.  Trump’s administration positively tries to undermine it with sanctions.

In an important 1999 speech in Chicago, with the somewhat Catholic title “Doctrine of the International Community”, Tony Blair reflected on the beginning of three months of bombing  of Serbia in response to Milosevic’s forces’ mass murders of Muslim men and boys in Kosovo.  Tony Blair set five conditions for getting involved in other people’s conflicts.  Does the case for intervention hold water? Have all diplomatic options been exhausted? Can military operations be sensibly and prudently undertaken?  Are we prepared for the long haul?  Are our national interests involved?   The plight of the Kosovan people was in his mind.  His own failure to apply these criteria to the Iraq invasion was a tragedy.  Keeping close to America, sharing in its military interventions had overridden all other considerations.  He should re-read his speech and apply his conditions to Iran.  Sir Keir Starmer thankfully seems to have done so.   And being  verbally attacked by Trump is a kind of assurance you are doing the right thing.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

At last week’s Gorton and Denton by-election results, the neatly coiffed man wearing an expensive suit, large pale blue tie and air of superiority was the Reform candidate, Matthew Goodwin, not the Conservative, Charlotte Cadden. Perhaps a sartorial come hither to Tory MPs watching her lose her deposit? 

Unlike the winner, the Green candidate Hannah Spencer who took 12% more of the vote than Reform, and who entered politics to oppose greyhound racing, Goodwin’s political debut might have had  more equine undertones: Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself and falls on the other [side]”.  Ms. Spencer stood in the Manchester mayoral election, was a member of the local Council, a plumber specializing in the installation of the new heat pumps – illustrating the essential political  qualities of fortitude and managing the impossible, – and, unlike Goodwin, was genuinely working class.

But wait a moment, didn’t a Matthew Goodwin author a number of books on the “new elite” in Britain, identity politics and suchlike.  Yes, one and the same.  So why wasn’t Professor Goodwin, a recent recruit to Reform endorsement, wearing a jacket with leather patches and corduroy trousers, or arranging a little tousling of the hair?  Why the unexpected dress code?

I went away and read his Penguin 2023 book Virtues, Voice and Values and understood why.  He’d moved from explaining to joining what he called the national populist ‘counter-revolution’.  And, at a fair guess, within a year or two would be leading it.  Or what was left of it.  We TV viewers weren’t supposed to ponder his career trajectory. 

The book is not only about a clash of values in Britain, our divided society, but the assumption that voice and virtues are the prerogative of the ‘new elite’.  On the altar of the ‘new politics’  Good win describes the ‘liberal progressive’  triptych:  cultural liberalism, human rights - for black, ethnic, and sexual minorities - and ‘hyper-globalisation’.  In recent years, these have created a significant reaction, to EU membership, immigration, regional unemployment, with a perception of an insulting condescension by a new elite made up of academics,  journalists, creative artists, Oxbridge graduates, and the rich towards those without university education, particularly White blue collar workers.  Add cultural discomfort with growing numbers of women in elite positions and resultant changes in family life - allegedly for the worse.  The result, Goodwin argues,  is a nation increasingly  divided into ‘traditionalists’ and ‘radical progressives’, the new elite and the ‘left-behinds’, the ‘anywheres’ and ‘nowheres’,  cosmopolitan London plus the big cities against the rest of the country.

The book provides an historical perspective with comparative statistics on changing opinions and control of key institutions and power structures, but all shoe-horned in a variety of binary  categories, subsets of the one theme: how a dominant, arrogant new elite rejected, neglected, the country’s - 20-25% - minority whose values, voice and virtue it discounted.  Like most binary stories it sounds compelling until you step back and think about it.

The book, apparently a Sunday Times bestseller, has several flaws.  There is much emphasis on the big picture in which politics has been transformed from primarily seeking economic goals to cultural ones.  That is not an either-or though a quick reader might come away thinking it was.  Nor is there any significant elaboration of the core content of one side of the divide, the supposedly despised British, traditionalist values. 

The word ‘England’ appears only in the last chapter as if it can be used interchangeably with Britain.  So it is as if the cultures of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are all the same.  No mention that the population of the UK has, of course,  been created by waves of migrants from Vikings and Normans to Huguenots and Flemish weavers, to Irish dock workers, Jewish, Polish immigrants to Commonwealth and Muslim arrivals, Vietnamese, Hong Kong, and Ukrainian refugees, each bringing something new to different parts of the country and to “British culture”.   ‘Diversity’ isn’t some new elite obsession, it’s in our genes. 

Then there is the problem of agency and the implicit causality found throughout the book. The new elite doesn’t cause the problem, the divisions, nor invent globalization, nor economic transformation from the industrial to financial services and the information economy, it has limited agency and struggles to gain some control.  It is an effect.

Employment has always relied on particular sets of skills with formal education required to perform complex tasks becoming increasingly important.  And the epochal changes from agricultural to industrial to information economies have changed society, the nature of power and how people live.  So most probably will AI. 

Goodwin makes it difficult to understand the demands made on Government by these changes.  In a number of instances, the ‘new elite’ becomes a ‘class’; he conflates them with university graduates (rising to some 50% getting a university education today from 5% in the 1960s).  This makes even less sense now that even post-doctoral qualifications do not always result in elite jobs.

The casting of - implicit - blame over the new elite in Goodwin’s book can only be justified by its failure to ‘level up’ and achieve some degree of redistribution. But the odds against this are impressive: Brexit and COVID damage to the economy, a right-wing Press, and mighty, mobile transnational companies, and investors,  more interested in profits than social stability and social justice. 

Attempts at redistribution have been made.  Tony Blair made a dent in child poverty.  Gordon Brown did his poverty reduction by stealth on the assumption that if the public noticed it, being anti-tax, they would vote Tory.  Just coping  with socio-economic change has been overwhelming.  The pace of economic transformation has been ferociously fast in the 21st. century.  No Party radical and progressive enough to bring about the necessary change gets elected or re-elected.

There is a glaring omission in the book:  Churches and secular NGOs which cut across Goodwin’s social binary divisions.  Only a fleeting mention occurs of their contribution to poverty alleviation, sustaining and promoting values, requiring  virtues of their members.    Remove the charitable work of the Anglican and Catholic Churches most notably  - but that of others too including Muslims and Jews – and the gap between the poor minority and the rest would be much greater, the voice of the poorest heard or heeded even less.  Nothing either on the impact of their faith-based global consciousness.   But are these the missing ingredients of Goodwin’s ‘British values’? 

The irony of Goodwin’s career move is how many ‘new elite’ boxes he ticks himself.  He stars in State of the Nation on GB News, was a former associate fellow of Chatham House, a former member of the Government’s anti-Muslim Hatred working group, and his Father was CEO of the Greater Manchester Strategic Health Authority.  He did not convince the Gorton and Denton electorate.  A populist he might be but not popular enough.

Nigel Farage, though, has some proven appeal.  He too ticks several elite boxes though he never went to university; he was Private school educated and a former city trader, and worth a few million.  He better keep waving his pint of bitter around and keep up his man-of-the-people performance.  He’s going to have competition for the Reform leadership.
 
 

We hear “nobody is above the Law” more in hope than expectation.   So it is heartening to hear that the Thames Valley Police arrested Mr. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor,  younger brother of King Charles, former inglorious Duke of York, and former Special Representative for Trade and International Investment, 2001-2011, on suspicion of misconduct in public office.  The mighty are rarely pulled down from their thrones as the Magnificat recommends.  Despite almost a rule of omerta, efforts to cover up some of the worst incidences of royal misbehaviour in the past  - misplaced patriotic instinct? - have rarely succeeded.  Today’s is a very British news bomb-shell. 

Wikipedia already knew of several surprising incidents of commercial wheeler-dealing by “Air-miles Andy”.  But Chris Bryant noted in the House of Commons in February 2011 how “it was very difficult to see in whose interests he was acting“. For some of the time, his own is the suspicion.  Prince Andrew was also something of a royal arms trader on our behalf,  and was close, Bryant believed, to Libya’s Gaddafi and allegedly to a notorious Libyan arms dealer.  

So could all this have been averted?   Could the Security Services via Tony Blair have warned the Queen that making Andrew a Special Representative, let loose globally, was a bad risk?  Perhaps they did and he did.  Then again, Peter Mandleson was put in the House of Lords so he could serve as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in October 2008 in Gordon Brown’s Government, just a few months before Epstein’s conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.   Was it considered improper then to intervene or, indeed, build up files on Ministers and members of the royal family involved with Epstein’s rich and powerful network?    We’ll never know. 

Between 2017-2025 the British Security Services stopped 43 late-stage terrorist attacks.  They deserve recognition for getting it right first time, and most times, a rare ability in today’s State.  Unsurprisingly, what else they were doing is not in the public domain.  But it would be interesting to know how they handled the rumbling Epstein scandals and the goings-on of the Duke of York.

In mitigation, despite the Good Friday agreement in 1998, our Security Services didn’t suddenly have time on their hands.   Osama Bin Laden had bobbed up in 1996 with some worrying suggestions about what jihadists needed to do to the “corrupt West”, and not just its ‘lackeys’ in the Middle East, and even before 9/11, went on to bomb American embassies in Africa with huge casualties.  But it was only in late October last year that, amidst the fall-out from the Epstein affair and the Palace’s distancing itself from the Duke of York, that The Telegraph reported that the Intelligence agencies had come out and declared Andrew a potential national security risk. 

The royals have suffered twice in living memory from the bad-brother syndrome.  In his 10 December 1936 letter of abdication Edward, the eldest son of King George V, let his “irrevocable determination to renounce the throne” be known.   Then using the title, Duke of Windsor, Edward with the twice divorced American, Wallis Simpson, for whom he had sacrificed kingship, travelled to France and married. 

After his brother Albert, Bertie,  became King George VI, Edward visited Germany in 1937 on the steamship Bremen at the invitation of the Nazi State Labour Front.  Preparations for war in Europe were well underway.  Buchenwald concentration camp has opened a few months earlier.  Some British tourists were still going to Germany but this was a semi-State visit and different.  The Duke of Windsor dutifully visited factories, inspected a SS unit, had tea with Goering, dinner with Goebbels, and  made a friendly, private visit to Hitler in Berghof, outside Berchtesgarden,  Bavaria - a thank you letter survives plus photographs. 

After Hitler’s invasion of France, the couple were given Nazi safe-passage south to Spain then,  in July 1940,  went on to stay with a rich banker in Lisbon.  The Marburg files reveal Operation Willi, discovered by US troops in 1945 in abandoned vehicles near Marburg Castle, near Hesse.  Correspondence between the German ambassador to Portugal and Berlin, shows a plot to co-opt, if necessary kidnap, Edward which ultimately failed.  Under Churchill’s pressure, Edward accepted a post as Governor of the Bahamas and sailed from Lisbon.

What to make of all this?   In 1936 a Joint Intelligence Committee was added to work with the tiny and somewhat ineffectual predecessor to MI5.  Baldwin, Churchill plus the Security Service, such as it was, handled the critical period 1937-1940 with  skill.  Edward fancied himself as mediator between Britain and Germany and was correspondingly vulnerable to his pro-Nazi wife, the German Foreign Minister, Joseph Ribbentrop, who was described as her ‘close friend’, and his own anger at his brother becoming king.  Like Andrew he became a national security risk.

Both Edward and Andrew seem to have had no sense of what might be meant by unacceptable company and association for a representative of the State.  Both had to leave their desirable residences in Windsor Great Park.  Both, lost their royal title and, perhaps unfairly, gained a reputation for treachery.  Both were provided with a cover-up costing money and time – to little avail – to retain the royal family’s image: a £12 million settlement for Virginia Giuffre while Edward, cheap at the price, received an annual allowance of £1.4 million, in today’s equivalent, and a Governor’s hat in a warm climate (he also realised some £250 million by selling two royal residences to King George VI).

The details of what exactly needed covering up is difficult to pin down.  The Marburg papers have him talking privately to a Spanish diplomat in 1940 contemplating the coming Blitz pushing Britain into peace negotiations.  But German counter-intelligence was playing games, and possibly putting their spin on his words reported back to Berlin.

Fast forward and, other than Epstein, nobody seems to know who knew what.  There are reports of pin-hole cameras for filming visitors’ activities found in rooms on Epstein’s  island.  Kompromat is to recruiting intelligence assets as an Arsenal match is to a ticket holder.  Were Epstein’s obsessively comprehensive archives for self-protection or for remunerative transactions with intelligence agencies, and if so, which ones?  We may never know.

Given the magnitude of the Epstein scandal, the other big question is could victims, and others, have been spared the consequences of the moral failings of its rich and powerful elite by swift and decisive action by the Security services?  What did the FBI/CIA have on Epstein and did they share it with the UK? And is the clandestine surveillance of those in authority  a proper and necessary  role for our Intelligence agencies?   Political policing of Left-wing activists became routine in the Cold War.   NGOs have not been spared their attention and, sometimes, infiltration in the past.   In democracies, effective parliamentary systems for the maintenance of standards in public life with appropriate monitoring, and less gullible political leaders, should obviate such surveillance. But do they?  

We now have one of the best Intelligence services in the world.  Lets hope our parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee are finding ways forward with them on such critical issues. 
 ​

“Every world crisis is, as the word denotes, a judgement and a decision out of which something new must come.  It is therefore an opportunity to hear the Word of God and for the Spirit to manifest its creative power to humanity. This is the hope that the prophets always maintain in their vision of judgement against the nations, and which the Church constantly repeats in the liturgy”. 
 
Pope Leo on today’s crisis?  No, Christopher Dawson, writing in 1941.  He was a Catholic historian and Vice-President of Cardinal Hinsley’s Sword of the Spirit which dropped pamphlets over Nazi Germany calling Catholics to resist and, in the 1960s, produced the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), later known as Progressio.  Led by Mildred Nevile, CIIR developed a distinctive approach to solidarity with, what was then known as, the ‘Third World’.

With his hope that ‘something new must come’, Dawson might be speaking directly to our current global crisis.  But what might it be?  And where might the Church be hoping the Spirit would be manifesting its creative power today?  The suffering and prophetic voices of women in and beyond the Church, and in the solidarity with them, suggests itself. 

Mothers are last in the family to eat in Gaza and in countless areas of conflict around the world.  Rape in wars continues unabated.  The sexual trafficking of women, treated as a passing story in our own cities, has now been brought into global prominence by a criminal elite, Epstein and his powerful, rich friends.  Then there is the suffering of women oppressed by – what is imagined as - 7th century Muslim religious duties, imposed as the law of the land, cruelly implemented, even by the denial of education making gender equality in Afghanistan a distant hoping against hope.  A movement of solidarity with the plight of vulnerable women has been increasingly coming to the fore. 

It was Pope John Paul II in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concerns) who gave a straightforward definition of solidarity as a virtue: “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good”.  It stuck because it bypassed binary arguments about the individual versus the communitarian, liberalism versus post-liberalism.  In that sense, and in that sense only, the Christian understanding of solidarity isn’t a political principle.  It is by definition a personal commitment to a type of relationship, to friendship and just social structures.  John Paul II also described what solidarity wasn’t: “not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many others”.   Solidarity was set in opposition to “structures of sin”, alongside individual moral failings, (he was celebrating the 20th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s  Populorum Progressio which condemned unfair trade practices imposed on developing countries by powerful states).  If “economic structures of sin” sounds a little academic, think of the cruelty and violence embodied in the laws and social  structures of former Apartheid South Africa and in Israel – and the resistance to them, past and present.

I remember taking Rev. Frank Chikane, soon to be General-Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, 1987-1994,  but on the run, a target for the apartheid regime, to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Basil Hume.  There was an immediate rapport between Robert Runcie and Frank.  Runcie had been a tank commander in the Second World War and knew what it was like having someone intent on killing you.  Cardinal Hume was kind and welcoming but the ‘vibes’ were more formal.  On another occasion, I asked Cardinal Hume to make an appeal for the ANC brother of a young South African women who had come to London to try to save him.  He was about to be executed in Pretoria.  The Cardinal was sympathetic but clearly wasn’t going to do so.  And there was not much chance it would have had any result.  I later heard he had driven to Heathrow the next morning to comfort her before she returned to Johannesburg.   People are different.   They show solidarity in different ways.

Pope Francis, too different for conservative tastes, added his distinctive coda to John Paul II’s words in 2013 speaking off-the-cuff in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Bonaria, patron saint of sailors, in Cagliari, Sardinia.  Francis called for compassion for “real people who are suffering and starving” - rather than abstract statistics on poverty.  He lived up to his words.

Why choose Cagliari on a coastal hill in a town on an island in the Mediterranean?   The clue is in ‘Bonaria’, Good air/winds that had blown sailors in the 16th century, with their veneration of Our Lady with them to Santa María del Buen Ayre, Buenos Aires, Good Air, Francis’ former Argentinian Archdiocese for 15 years. The Cagliari meeting was at his request with local prisoners and the unemployed.  His solidarity with them came at a personal level: from recalling stories of family poverty in Italy and how his unemployed father had suffered during the Great Depression in Argentina.  Unemployment, denying a vital space for human creativity, was a “wound to human dignity”.   Francis came back often to the centrality of solidarity in a life of faith responding to injustice.

Injustice has moved not only NGOs but has also evoked, directly and indirectly, Government concern and concerted action.    Both Conservative and Labour governments have promoted protections for women in war, culminating in rape being made a distinct, recognized war crime.  The Metropolitan Police set up a new Violence Reduction Unit in 2022.  Domestic violence against women is a key part of it.  Women played the leading role in making both the above happen.

Governments obviously have the power, money and resources to achieve more than any number of NGOs, though very often in democracies it is pressure from  NGOs, such as the Catholic Institute for International Relations using  effective advocacy alongside public opinion, that lies behind or promotes new government initiatives.  Building up public opinion against the headwinds of a Right-Wing press is no easy task.   In addition, any response to today’s prophetic voices has to weigh up what is doable in different contexts, in the short term and what may require a life-time.  It is one thing to seek justice in a land led by a narcissistic sociopath showing symptoms of cognitive decline, another to deal with a Communist Party led by a ruthless dictator, and another for those living in democratic States with fragmenting political Parties.  Each situation will demand analysis and dictate a different expression of solidarity.  Seeing round corners is not just a political skill.

The UK has the chair of the UN Security Council for this month of February.  OXFAM and other NGOs will be pressing for progress in gender equality and in countering violence against women. In all societies, secular or religious, in back-streets and in global institutions, the creative power of the Spirit is at work, bringing the prophetic voices of women to bear.   Christians are called to be its head, heart and hands.
 

The Labour Party has entered a political Bermuda Triangle.  The relationship between Peter Mandleson now disgraced former UK Ambassador to Washington, and convicted US financier and criminal, the late Jeffrey Epstein, may have more damaging outcomes for the UK’s ruling Party than the Profumo affair did for the Conservatives in 1961-1963.  The then Secretary of State for War was exposed as having a sexual relationship with a 19-year old model who was also sleeping with a Soviet naval attaché.  The scandal acted as catalyst for the resignation of Harold Macmillan’s and the defeat of his successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, in the 1964 General Election.   But the exposure of Epstein’s activities has had wider consequences, not least for dozens of abused women coping with blighted lives, one who tragically took her own life. 

The political damage goes deep.  It plays into the - transatlantic – belief in corrupt elites acting with impunity and holding ordinary people in contempt.   As many MPs (aware that they were already held in disregard or worse by the public) have commented, it further discredits politicians.  It entrenches the – erroneous – belief: ‘they’re all the same’.  We will hear much about ‘regaining trust’.  But the behaviour of elites is an integral and understandable cause of widespread anger, it is not going away, and is not just based on envy. Nor is it unfounded .

The term ‘elite’ itself is ill-defined, amorphous.  It approaches the pejorative echoes of ‘communist’ during the Cold War, a generic name for the enemy, bad and threatening people.   It offers, as a result, scant insights into how to deal for the common good with actual elites.  

Here, then, is a functional definition which may be helpful: elites exercise authority and power over citizens, occupy top positions in institutions where they can increase their access to resources and wealth through national and international networks.  I say elites, plural, because the positions taken up in society by today’s elite are more varied than those in the 19th and early 20th centuries; 30% are now women, and a small number are non-White from the old empire.  A consistent feature, though, is the predominance of the wealthy.

Public suspicion of elites is not misplaced.  Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008 and for sexual trafficking of minors in 2019.  In the 1990s, Epstein was receiving prodigious fees for  financial services from wealthy clients, amassing some £600 million,  dodging tax on his two American Virgin Islands companies, and attracting an international elite including Mandelson.   But the US public’s justifiable suspicion had a bizarre side.   During Trump’s 2016 election campaign, extreme Right-Wing social media gave considerable mileage to variants of a story that Hilary Clinton led an international paedophile sex-trafficking conspiracy, run by a “satanic cabal of elites”, in one version operating beneath the Ping Pong Pizza parlour in Washington D.C. 

Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman pose and research several pertinent questions about elites in their Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite Belnap, Harvard 2023.  They use inclusion in Who’s Who for membership of the UK elite and a variety of other sources for data in an pioneering historical study with a detailed appendix on methodology for sociologists.   Their most significant use of statistical data explores what they call ‘elite recruitment’, how you join the club, and ‘elite reproduction’, explaining how elites sustain continuity in a changing world.  They document a complex story.

The Clarendon group of public  (i.e. private) schools, Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Malborough, Merchant Taylors, Rugby, Shrewsbury, St. Paul’s and Winchester is a key part of it.  In the second league comes the 350-plus Independent schools of the  Head’s Conference  or HMC, also to some degree, bar a few scholarships, ‘sieving’ out  children of less well-off families.  The contacts and friendships made at school are reinforced in Oxbridge dining clubs and on the sports fields.  The ‘Old Boy’s club’ can help in job hunting and the ascent through different hierarchies: government, law, business.   This was the main 20th century pathway before the Second World War when Britain’s military needed competent officers, not just ones with a sense of entitlement, ill-judged self-confidence and upper class accents.  The 1944 Education Act created competition from State-funded school pupils, aged 11-15 from 1947, then up to 16 in 1972, promoting a challenging meritocracy.   The 11-plus exam for Grammar Schools, and the development of separate Secondary Modern schools for those who failed it, created heartbreak for children.  And the route to the core of the elite remained stubbornly the same.  By the 2020s, Born to Rule finds 47% of the elite went to Independent schools compared with 10% of population,  and compared to less than 1% of the population nearly 9% attended  Clarendon schools with 35% going on to Oxbridge – including Mandelson the ‘meritocrat’ from Hendon Grammar School.

Privileged education remains the propellant boosting youth into an elite orbit.  But the rocket fuel also remains family money, large amounts of it.   Britain’s richest top 1% held 70% of national wealth in 1900 but, for a variety of reasons, loss of Empire, pressure from trades unions, not least, this dropped to 20% in 1980 hovering around that figure for several decades.  Recruitment into the elite has stayed steady around 20% of the wealthiest 1% in the country.

Born to Rule’s interviews provide  insights into elite thinking.  As might be expected, the wealthiest and most powerful expressed what would be considered Right-wing views about equality, tax and inheritance.  But with more varied occupations, creative artists, academics, media stars, more women, concerned with social justice,  a range of political positions were included bringing key aspects of social democrat and ‘progressive Left’ policy, a priority for poverty reduction, alongside racial and gender equality. 

The most striking change since the 1940s is in how today’s elite wish to be seen: ordinary, rewarded and rising due to their hard work.  Nothing to do with inheriting wealth or earning a fortune in the City.  A few of the wealthy elite speak in the book of their family wealth, innate skills, arrogantly confident in their judgement, ready to take big risks.   And these beliefs can be their downfall.

A chapter recommends what to do about elites but the recipe contains essentially the ingredients of what would be considered a socialist approach, taxing financial services’ transactions, high value property wealth and inheritance, VAT for public schools, 50% worker representation on corporate boards, a satisfying meal for the Left but indigestible for much of the British public. 

There is no nod towards the growth of international elites indicated in the volumes of Epstein correspondence.  And no mention of the international power of the US IT tech giants’, nor the related policies of the thuggish US elite – originally brought for transplantation to Europe by a Trump White House strategist, Steve Bannon.

Elites depend on a lack of accountability in political systems to sustain their impunity.  Investigative journalists, an almost extinct species, despite the elite proprietors controlling the media, need time and money to do their job.  Gordon Brown, former PM and  voice of the Manse, has proposed several times a range of doable measures Government can immediately implement to root out elite corruption.  As the Profumo and Epstein affairs illustrate, elites may not be defeated but they can be curbed.
 
 
 

At a rough estimate, the Church runs 3,100 hospitals and 15,000 clinics in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs).  From Pope John XXII’s Mater et Magistra in 1961 to Pope Leo’s Fratelli Tutti in 2020, the Church has consistently called the rich nations to action: supporting the poorest, engaging their citizens in development, reducing indebtedness, extending the outreach and effectiveness of the Catholic agencies under the CARITAS INTERNATIONALIS umbrella (founded in 1951), and seeking integral human development for all.

If you were called to sum up in just three words what Catholic Social Teaching was about, you’d do no better than ‘Solidarity’, ‘Justice’ and ‘Compassion’.  And if you were to find four words most used to oppose NGO international development agencies and Official Development Assistance (ODA) it would be “Charity Begins at Home”.  The natural commitment to family, friends and community has been set up against helping the poorest overseas, either-or instead of and-and.  Who wants to join J.D. Vance in his justification for cutting aid?  Sadly increasing numbers.

Last year, Elon Musk froze some $58 billion in US ODA allocated for 2025: in other words for poverty alleviation, emergency humanitarian interventions, conflict prevention, peacebuilding,  global public goods such as health care and vaccination, or climate action.  Out of a total payroll of 10,000, 1,200 USAID staff were fired and 4,200 put on ‘administrative leave’.  Meanwhile substantial buildings occupied by USAID were handed over to Customs and Border Patrol.

The US Government’s only compliment to virtue was certain temporary waivers to cuts.  Parts of infrastructure were left standing amongst the wreckage of Federal foreign aid.  The priorities were telling.   Most of the temporary exemptions related to the spending of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.   After 13 February 2025, the latter received exemption for $5.3 billion expenditure of which $4.1 billion went to Israel and Egypt, plus more moderate sums to Taiwan and the Philippines’ military.  The announced USAID exemptions for - non-food - aid to Gaza, were $78 million and $156 million for the Red Cross’s work.

PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS, launched by President G.W. Bush in 2003, is estimated to have saved 26 million lives around the world.   It was operating in 2025 on 8% of its 2024 budget of $6.5 billion with consequences that hardly need spelling out.  The waiver covered - in theory -  all aspects of provision: antiretrovirals, testing, treatment and supply-chains. But the disruption caused by a 90 day freeze, let alone long term consequences, cost lives.  Money to pay local NGO staff suddenly disappeared globally with an immediate halt to their work amongst some of the world’s poorest people.

Global aid flows, currently between $170-180 billion, rose between 2019-2023 then dropped by 9% in 2024 and are currently falling at somewhere between 9-17%.  The UN Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) calculate 239 million people currently require humanitarian aid.  Between 2016-2019, UNOCHA reached some 130 million people but now has to adopt a prioritization programme for the very poorest, serving only 87 million, though hoping to return to 130 million in the future.  OXFAM’s statistics have a more powerful impact ; due to the US aid cuts “a child under five could die every forty seconds by 2030”. 

The justification for US aid cuts is allegedly to reduce national debt.  Trump’s acolytes complained about what they called ‘woke’ projects funded by USAID.  Would funding a feminist theatre company who, amongst their performances role play preventative health care, be ‘woke’ and suspect?  Women, of course, play an important educational role in health.   Even giving ‘woke’ the widest interpretation, projects that might be eligible for this description amount to an infinitesimal percentage of overall expenditure on aid.  And when a tiny fraction of a State institution’s activities are ill-judged, most people living in the real world would say such institutions were doing well. 

Aid is used to strengthen health systems.  HIV, Ebola (funding for prevention frozen then re-instated), Marburg, West Nile and new lethal viruses do not respect borders.  Can’t aid-detractors recognise even self-interest?

There is the recurrent  claim that development aid doesn’t work because it hasn’t jump-started the economies of poor countries.  If that is the criterion, one reply is that it rarely has been given a chance to work.   War, bad governance, and endemic corruption blight economic development.  If you need to bribe your way through several roadblocks to get to and into a port, export growth will be stunted.  Dealing with a wide range of problems, development aid, which  encompasses many different and vital interventions, makes a major contribution to human well-being.

It does contribute to economies.  Timely peace-building can avert war and subsequent collapse of the economy.  If half the workforce is infected with malaria -  thousands of their children dying from it - this harms productivity.   As the CEO of an international aid NGO working in three continents, I’ve stood admiring trained senior women in West African villages, some of them illiterate, chatting to mothers as the sun went down, cleverly passing on health messages that reduce infections.  Bonny babies in bathtubs, midwives learning literacy and becoming better midwives,  were a living testimony to the effectiveness of supporting health systems, providing finance and upskilling.  
 
In the UK, Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to reduce the ODA budget, between 2025-2027/8, from 0.5% to 0.3% of UK Gross National Income (GNI), came after a reduction from 0.7% to 0.5% made by  Conservative Governments.  Some 25% of this diminishing budget is still being spent on accommodating refugees in the UK.  In 2027/2028, Defence will be extracting £6.5 billion - not including funding for Ukraine - from today’s £14 billion aid budget 

The need for increased defense spending is itself  a knock-on from the policies of the Trump Presidency.  The UK Government’s mantra “this is a difficult decision” neglects mentioning the choice of alternative difficult decisions, such as wealth taxes - which come with greater political costs.   GNI percentage cuts, but less severe, have also been made in Germany, Europe’s other major donor, from its much higher peak of £28.5 billion in 2022.

No-one denies that despite foreign governmental and NGO funding for development, in much of Africa and parts of Asia, populations remain mired in poverty.   But this does not justify slashing development aid least of all treating it as if it were a criminal enterprise, what President Trump called “the left-wing scam known as USAID” ?

The causes of poverty are complex.  As a result the mix of international development aid needed to reduce poverty is complex.  Because it takes place abroad, the vast majority of people cannot directly see its benefits and can be misinformed.  We seem light years from Live Aid’s response to the Ethiopian famine in 1985.

Two final questions: Will our children and grandchildren be living in a world in which powerful States deny our common humanity – with further devastating consequences?   If and when they are told in school to consult the Oxford English Dictionary - or will it be AI - do we want them to find ‘archaic’ in brackets next to the word  ‘compassion’?  We may not have long to determine the answers.
 
 
 
 

After tea in the late 1940s, Dick Barton Special Agent, solving crimes and saving Britain with much derring-do, was on the BBC Light Programme.  In 1954, the 10-inch television brought Sherlock Holmes into the sitting room from Baker Street, and a year later kindly constable Dixon of Dock Green from London’s East End.  Policing got rougher in the 1960s with Z-cars.  By the 1990s, detectives were getting above themselves: Morse in his red Jaguar frequenting Oxford university, or the immaculate Poirot exposing posh villains.  You could also watch Maigret,  Commissaire in Paris’ Brigade Criminelle, catching sundry French criminals.    

Police procedurals are now as much part of British TV as Football.  They have a distinctive formal structure: predictable set-piece moments raising expectations and players with defined roles.  There’s the police chief trying to close the case, the ill-matched pair of cops who grow in mutual respect, the corrupt detective taking back-handers or the honest detective taken off the case only to solve it.  There’s Line of Duty, The Killing, Patience and multiple series to choose from.  

The Police Procedural’s formulary, like Evensong’s, is predictable, comforting and contains moral messages.  And you are safely at home on the sofa, ready for surprises though aware, more of less, what’s coming next.   If you aren’t, you haven’t watched enough.  Take opening scenes.  The purpose of showing an expanse of water, river, lake or sea is to allow the camera to close in on a body being washed up, floating face down.   Joggers in parks, woods or countryside will inevitably find any chance of achieving their personal best  spoilt after finding a leg or hand carelessly sticking out of the ground or grass.  If jogging with a dog, it’s a certainty the dog will disappear barking into the bushes.  And it’s not because of a rabbit.  Dogs have much to complain about their parts, often getting drugged or killed for barking out of turn. Though some receive a lot of patting, a sign that a character is a good guy.

Contemporary police dramas have found new ways to signal which character is good and which bad.  The detective used to look fondly at their child at bedtime, tuck them up, and gently shut the bedroom door.   That was a really good guy about to have a hard time before things came right.  If an American he was likely to get shot.  Or the child was going to be kidnapped   Or both.  But today we know the detective is a good person if he or she has a parent with dementia, visits them in the care home and is a dutiful son or daughter.   All good domestic signals.

After the discovery of the body, alone or with a subordinate the lead detective arrives, establishing the all-important police hierarchy.  The lifting of the blue-and-white tapes and the ceremonial ducking under are followed by complaints that junior uniformed police have allowed contamination of the crime scene.  This is extras’ big moment: to look sheepish.

The next set-piece, the morgue, features the ritual with the forensic pathologist pulling down the white sheet that covers the corpse to reveal an actor with a remarkable ability not to blink.  In case you’re not convinced the body on the trolley is dead, there often follows a funeral or burial scene with someone standing at a distance from the action either a mystery figure or the detective.  All very predictable.

But fear not, the creative spirit of TV or cinema isn’t dead - yet.   After the preliminaries, it’s time for intensive detective work – and for some viewers, beset by flash-backs and red-herrings, to lose track of the plot.   Time for countless murder investigators to develop their different characters through varied, but mostly miserable, relationships.  It’s a poor show if the hero isn’t estranged from his daughter, divorced, alcoholic, extremely grumpy or, more recently, putting autistic skills to good use.  Female detectives are specially burdened often dealing with a disrupted work-life balance, caring for rebellious teenagers and fathers with dementia.  Visits to care homes fill dull moments between action.  Dona Leon’s contented, connubial Venetian Commissario Brunetti, with his academic wife who makes tasty Italian family meals, reached German TV and Amazon Prime, the exception that proves the rule.

We now expect certain scenes to involve modern police kit: , helicopters, drone shots, CCTV replays, mobile phones which ring at critical moments, and laptops.  In fact, we know a computer geek, preferably hairy and disheveled, will be needed to make a crucial discovery.  But cars remain very important.  People cuffed, or having buddy conversations, are endlessly getting in and out of them, when they are not being blown up in them.   Though cars are petrol-driven.  No shoot-outs while recharging – yet.  Chases are still indispensable to the action, ideally with spectacular crashes along the way. 
 
A less pleasant innovation is the toilet scene featuring much unzipping in the Men’s.   The Back Alley, complete with dustbins, once the number one venue for fights, is being replaced by the Toilet.  Women detectives spot women suspects hiding guns in cisterns or changing their clothes behind lavatory doors. Or vomiting.  Someone being sick demonstrates they’re hungover, or afraid, or upset.  Directors need to pull the plug on such excesses of realism.

So all praise to Brendan Gleeson’s Bill Hodges, a retired cop tracking down the damaged, psychopathic killer, a preternaturally clever villain Brady Hartsfield, in Mr. Mercedes,  based faultlessly on Stephen King’s spooky trilogy, now streaming on Netflix.  Mr. Mercedes partly cracks the mold.   [ Spoiler alert] The opening scene is a view of a crowd queuing  in line for employment, not a lake or forest in sight.   A stolen car is the murder weapon.  Hodges is pursued unsuccessfully by the amorous widow next door.  He has a pet tortoise.  His police buddy Peter dies of natural causes but two captivating young people, Jerome and Holly,  befriend him and do his laptop tracking.   The killer’s mum is poisoned.  Jerome’s dog is spared.  Several characters have premonitions.  In the just-in-time ending Hodges finds the killer but has a heart attack and is unable to arrest him.

But there are also the set-pieces.  A car that blows up.  Hodges, overweight, unfit, grumpy but charming, courageous and kind, is fixated on an unsolved case and conducts an off-piste investigation.  He’s alienated from his daughter,  drinks a lot and lives on his own. Brian Gleeson is Bill Hodges just as Alec Guiness was, and always will be, John le Carré’s Smiley.  

What is the appeal of these dramas? They provide an hour or so of relative predictability in a world where we don’t know what’s going to happen next,  a world overtaken by darkness dominated by  powerful autocrats with scant regard for human life.  Watching, we enter another world where the good cop, or private eye, or sleuth, with their multiple quirks and defects, some like ours, defy the odds to defeat the murderous villain.   What’s not to like?   In the police procedural at least there’s justice after all.

If things get worse, though, I recommend switching genres to Pope Leo’s favourite movies: ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, ‘The Sound of Music’, ‘Life is Beautiful’ and ‘Ordinary People’.   
 

"Today the meaning of words is ever more fluid and the concepts they represent increasingly ambiguous”, Pope Leo told gathered diplomats in the Vatican on 9 January 2026…“Or rather in the contortions of semantic ambiguity, language is becoming more and more a weapon with which to deceive, strike, or offend opponents,” he continued. “We need words once again to express distinct and clear realities unequivocally”.  But did they ever?  Some of the Pope’s listeners must have wondered.  Wasn’t ambiguity often useful when diplomats tried to reach mutually acceptable agreements? However, Leo was making a more general point not only addressing diplomats.

To illustrate the Pope’s remarks, the words ‘Christian civilisation’ are both fluid and ambiguous, and offensive when they came to prominence in Europe after the Second World War and were applied to still colonized peoples.   European cities were rubble, like Gaza is today, in many countries people starving, and the horror of the Nazi death camps filmed for all to see.  Some 2,500 Catholic priests from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany had been incarcerated in Dachau.   ‘Christian civilisation’ referred to a shocking absence.  
 
Christian humanitarianism, though,  was an important presence.   Oxford Professor of Modern History, Paul Betts’ Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after the Second World War Profile Books, 2020, provides a comprehensive account of the role humanitarian organisations played and the extraordinary work of Americans and UNRRWA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

Set up in 1943, US Catholic Relief Services was one of the first to work in former enemy-controlled countries beginning in Italy and then in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland.  Abbé Jean Rodhain, from Lorraine 30 kms. from the German border,  set up the Vatican Mission with funding from the deputy Vatican Secretary-of-State Giuseppe Montini, future Pope Paul VI.  Catholic relief workers focussed on the French and American zones in Germany, with an additional special mission to Bergen-Belsen.  Abbé Rodhain arrived within 24 hours of its liberation and pulled in teams from Germany.  The saintly Abbé Charles Amarin-Brand is remembered caring for its victims many dying of starvation and typhus, with particular concern for the children.   The Quakers, disproportionately present, followed a similar policy towards suffering Germans as did the majority Lutheran Church.  In Britain the Catholic Women’s League found UK families who would take in children from formerly Nazi Austria.  Together these efforts represented a significant Christian - charitable - universalism, a forerunner of the later hope for a universal civilisation based on the concept of a shared humanity.   In the words of Abbé Regnault from Belsen, there would be “no distinction between race or religion”…”since we are at the service of mankind”. 
 
For many ‘Christian civilization’ now defined post-Nazi Western Europe as it confronted Stalin’s brutal repression in Russia and Eastern Europe. The sufferings of Cardinal Joséf Mindszenty rallied Catholics behind his 1946-1947 slogan ‘Hungary is Virgin Mary’s Country’.  Mindszenty spent many years  in captivity seen as a martyr for ‘Christian civilization’.   By 1951, from Liverpool to New York,  prayers were said for the Cardinal and to ask God’s forgiveness for his persecutors.  In the 1980s, Pope John Paul II, supporting the Polish national struggle, promoted devotion to Our Lady of Częstochowa.  In both instances the challenge to Europe pitted respect for  human rights and justice in the ‘Christian civilization’ of the West against the injustice of bureaucratic communism in the East.

The Christian basis of Christian democracy had been defined by the celebrated French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain who sought a pluralist society based on an ‘integral Christian humanism’, that he called a New Christendom.  De Gaulle appointed him French ambassador to the Vatican 1945-1948.   The  theme of Christian civilization worked well in strenuous efforts to ensure Communist Parties did not win elections held in Western Europe.  The Vatican, with CIA support,  threw itself behind the Italian Christian Democrats, defeating the Communist Party by a wide margin in Italy’s 1946 General Election.  And in Germany it served as a national  leitmotif in the success of German Chancellor, (1949-1953), Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU) hardening divisions between East and West Germany.  

The 19th century justification for colonialism, ‘bringing Christian civilisation to benighted races’, rejected by the colonised as racism,  had not disappeared.  In apartheid South Africa, National Party Prime Minister during 1948-1954, D.F. Malan asserted that white South Africans faced two irreconcilable ways of life,  “barbarism and civilisation”, “heathenism and Christianity”.  For the Christian African National Congress (ANC) leader, Albert Luthuli (1898-1967), “civilisation was neither white, black or brown”, it was what UNESCO called ‘broad universal civilisation’.   
 
Decolonisation in the 1960s washed the slogan of ‘Christian civilisation’  into the gutters of history.  It remains in the sewer today thanks to Putin’s weaponizing of Patriarch Kirill’s brand of Russian Orthodoxy and Trump and his coterie’s cosying up to apocalyptic forms of evangelical Christianity.  
 
So, beyond the language of individual human rights, we are left with UNESCO’s insubstantial ‘broad universal civilisation’ to support the rights of communities and nations.  But the Church with its body of social teaching, developed organically,  can offer coherent meaning to the word ‘civilisation’, defining the attitudes, actions and relationships required to build a civilisation expressive of “love and genuine compassion”, the family  as its foundation, “the glue that holds the whole of civilisation together”.  And, with the caveat of St. John Paul II, Francis, Leo and their predecessors, technology and science “evaluated in the light of the centrality of the human person, the common good , and  the inner purpose of creation”.  A dynamic vision interpreted through the prism of integral human development, social, spiritual, cultural, economic and political relationships, and realised as a lifetime vocation. 
 
Pope Benedict XVI  in his magisterial Caritas in Veritate 2009 wrote:   “Reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality between men and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity.   This originates in a transcendent vocation from God the Father, who loved us first, teaching us through the Son what fraternal charity is.” It sounds abstract and academic.  Much theological language does. But it speaks to the condition of Ukraine or Gaza or Sudan.  
 
For often it is believers in perverse ‘contortions’ of the Abrahamic faiths who are dropping the bombs.  To establish a ‘Christian civilisation’, shining its light upon a hill, the settlers in America dispossessed and killed the original inhabitants,  imported black slaves and, until the 1960s, denied  their descendants civil rights.  In Iran, where the BBC reports that families are paying $5,000 to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones, those who massacred them also pray to a Merciful and Compassionate God. 
 
Britain is a secular society.  Benedict’s insights reveal how secular societies lack an element essential to building a broad universal civilisation in a divided world.  Active Christians may now be only 9% , just possibly 12%, of the UK’s population. The BBC’s More of Less suggests there are no reliable statistics to confirm that the UK’s Christian community is growing.  That leaves Church leaders in the UK with quite a responsibility, a challenge, but a great opportunity.