The Next Prime Minister: why character matters

This post is not about Boris Johnson. Well, not directly.

But recent events have posed sharp questions for those who are standing as candidates to become the next prime minister, and for the electors who will decide. Does it matter what kind of person you are, or only what policies you promote? Is your private life relevant to your public role, or should we mind our own business when it comes to salacious headlines about the personal conduct of people in prominent leadership positions?

I have a lot of sympathy with the idea that we have a right to a private life. The intrusion of print and broadcast media into our privacy is in many ways a distasteful thing, fuelled as it often is by a deafening clamour of online voices. I've spent my working life in public roles as an ordained priest in the Church of England. In no way is this comparable to being a politician, though when you are a cathedral dean, you necessarily find yourself the focus of public attention. It’s not always welcome. For example, a few years ago I found myself embroiled in a contentious debate about a local football manager who had (in my and many people's opinion) espoused a version of fascism. I protested that football supplies key role models to the young and fascism ought not to feature among them. I was subjected to shedloads of abuse from people who cared only about their club's footballing success. My personal origins (regarding my German-Jewish mother) were invoked in a stream of abusive forum comments I was foolish enough to look at. It was uncomfortable to say the least even though I had not said or done anything I later regretted.

Yet it seems to me that when you take up a leadership role in public life, you do in an important way renounce the privileges of a private life most people take for granted. Let me speak about the world I know best, the Church of England. At this time of year, men and women are being ordained across the country. I shall be speaking to a group of them in a week's time. The ordination season is always a joyful, but also a solemn, thought-provoking time not only for the candidates themselves but for the whole church. It asks us reflect on the kind of public ministry that is needed in today's and tomorrow's church if it is to flourish and serve the nation and its peoples as well as it can.

In the ordination service the Bishop asks this question of the candidates. Will you endeavour to fashion your own life and that of your household according to the way of Christ, that you may be a pattern and example to Christ's people? To some, that could feel intrusive. What right has the church to ask this? What has my personal life, still more that of my household, got to do with my fitness to lead and serve in the church? Surely that is purely a matter of charism, aptitude and skill?

Well, not entirely. What the ordinal is getting at is the exemplary nature of leadership. As all the textbooks tell us nowadays, good leadership is about much more than strategic aims and smart objectives. It's as much about what you are as what you do and how you perform. It pays equal attention to how you embody and live out the values of your institution to those towards whom you have the responsibility of oversight. Words like virtue and character are used a lot. Some senior leaders in politics and business have said that they keep a copy of The Rule of St Benedict on their desks to remind them what this great book from 1500 years ago teaches about the virtues needed in a good leader such as the abbot of the monastery.

The fact is that people (not just church people) regard clergy as "exemplary" Christians and human beings. To the public, it's not simply what priests and bishops say but what they do that counts. We may balk at that, protest that clergy are ordinary men and women who as fragile and broken as everyone else. The last thing we should do is put them on pedestals. And of course, that's right. Except that it ignores the dynamic that is going on when leaders hold public office. As soon as they step into an official role, they attract projections and transferences that invest them with hopes and expectations that can be almost numinous, invested with a kind of sacred quality.

I preached at an ordination last year on John the Baptist's words "I am not the Messiah" and said I'd have them emblazoned on the robes of every new clergy man or woman! But you can't deal with messianic projections so easily. Unconsciously people want leaders to be their messiah. And as far as clergy are concerned, they certainly want the ordained to be model Christians, "a pattern and example" whom they can emulate. So when clergy fail by catastrophically undermining the gospel values they stand for, it is shocking. Priests who abuse children, for example.

Something like this is going to be true of leaders in every institution - public, private or voluntary. And where an organisation's values feature prominently in its public presentation of itself, its leaders are bound to be subject to particular scrutiny. This is where churches and political parties perhaps have something in common because they are value-driven. Political leaders are looked to as much for their values and personal authenticity as for strategic direction and policy-making. This doesn't mean they won't fall below their party's standards from time to time. But when they do in non-trivial ways, that becomes a matter of legitimate public concern. Is this person all they say they are? Are they as trustworthy in their personal life as in their public role? Is there a consistency of values and behaviour across the whole of their persona?

I can only say that these questions have been central to my self-understanding as a priest in my years of public ministry. I have made mistakes, let people down, disappointed their proper expectations of what a priest should be, fallen short of my own standards for my personal as well as my public life. In some ways, letting myself down is harder than anything else as I look back - not being consistently my best self in that "inner room" as Jesus calls it, the place where people can't see who and what I truly am. I have tried (and am still trying) to learn that in some respects, what goes on in secret really is the business of the people I've been called to serve and lead. I don’t mean we should condone nosiness or prurience: there is a line to be drawn between what it’s appropriate for people to know about my personal or family life and what it isn’t. But if others have a legitimate concern about the consistency of my professional and personal life when measured against values I publicly represent, that isn’t prurience. That’s caring for the church’s welfare - and mine too.

Thinking about the election of the next prime minster, I recently tweeted the seven Nolan Principles of Public Life. This isn't the first time I've mentioned them in my blog. The government website tells us that "the 7 principles of public life apply to anyone who works as a public office-holder. This includes people who are elected or appointed to public office, nationally and locally. The principles also apply to all those in other sectors that deliver public services.They were first set out by Lord Nolan in 1995 and they are included in the Ministerial code".

The Principles (which I think are worth a capital letter even if the website doesn't) are: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. These are the seven standards - maybe we should call them virtues - to which everyone in public life should aspire. They set out what we should properly expect of those who undertake public roles. In public sector organisations leaders are required to sign up to them formally. I wonder why we don't ask church leaders to do the same. Because they describe behaviours as well as aspirations, they seem to me to apply to the personal as well as the professional "character" of leaders. In ancient Greek, a character was literally a text or design that was stamped on wax, thus transmitting the essential quality of the original pattern. It's a good metaphor of the way we are formed (or should be) by the values and virtues of the institutions we belong to and lead.

Which is why it's relevant to ask the candidates for one of the highest offices in the land whether they are committed to these Principles. In an article in today's Observer, Simon Tisdall draws on David Miliband's Fulbright Lecture to ask why world leaders these days can get away with lying with impunity. Do we in the UK not want our own leadership to be free of mendacity, to believe that truth is fundamental to good leadership, not merely truth about facts (though that is important) but truth-seeking and truth-telling as essential personal qualities? That's what's at stake in this election.

And when the dramas of someone's personal life hit the headlines, we need to ask what it means to have signed up to values like integrity, openness and honesty? Electors have a right to know about the character of the candidates who are competing for their votes. They have a right to explore whether their professional and personal ethics are rooted in the same set of values. You shouldn't trumpet "family values" if you are cavalier in the way you treat your own family. Questions at hustings about these things shouldn't be shouted down. We need to be assured that the man who will lead this nation is free of hypocrisy, and displays the qualities that make him worthy of our confidence. He needs to be an exemplary human being whom we can respect, emulate and even admire.

Perhaps integrity is the controlling value of the seven Principles. It has the connotations of completeness where disparate parts are brought together, integrated into a single whole. Beati quorum via integra est says the Latin translation of the opening verse of Psalm 119, "Happy are those whose way is pure". Purity means being "single-pointed", having one focus for life in all its aspects. It's not a matter of being a perfect leader, still less a messianic one. What's required is consistency in anyone who aspires to leadership, to be emotionally intelligent, self-aware enough to be in touch with his own humanity with all its flaws. We need him to be integrated, to be one single person, not two or more depending on the audience.

We need him to be good enough to trust.

Seascapes: a retreat for those being ordained.

In a fortnight's time I shall be conducting a retreat for those who are being ordained deacon this summer in my home Diocese of Newcastle. They will be ordained in Newcastle Cathedral on Saturday 30 June. That's the day after the anniversary of my own ordination as a deacon in 1975. I shall give the sermon at that service. It goes without saying that I am looking forward to it. It's always a privilege to be with ordinands as they cross this crucial threshold and take up their new roles in public ministry.

The retreat will be at Alnmouth Friary on the Northumberland coast, just down the road from Alnwick where I was Vicar in the 1980s. I got to know it well at that time. Before my institution as incumbent, I spent a few days on retreat there. I made regular visits to speak with one of the senior Brothers who was a wise, kindly spiritual director. Every Friday my curate (who belonged to the Franciscan Third Order) and I would attend the midday office and eucharist there and then stay on for lunch with the Brothers. The Friary was, and still is, a real foyer, a place of warmth and hospitality.

"Thin" places where we spend times of spiritual significance often provide their own symbols and metaphors to help us reflect on whatever experience we are undergoing. I vividly remember my own priest's ordination retreat during the hot summer of 1976. I stayed with a Benedictine community, and apart from prayer times, meals and sleep (when it came), spent the entire time sitting under a lime tree in the beautiful grounds. The grass was already parched in the fierce heat, but not under that tree. There I read a lot, wrote a little, pondered much and stumbled around in my personal prayers. The community left that sunny patch of England many years ago now. I have no idea whether the tree is still there. But its shelter during those three days has remained an important grace-filled memory. It's felt like a symbol of God's care and protection, especially when the realities of public ministry kicked in as they always do eventually, and sometimes it felt hard and (here's where the metaphor of shelter is important) exposed. Like Jonah and his gourd, perhaps?

What metaphor could the Friary offer this year's candidates as they think and pray about their ordination and the lifetime of public ministry that lies ahead? It's not for me to do more than make suggestions - they must do their own search look for whatever images and symbols are there to recognise them. But an obvious one is the sea itself. What everyone loves at the Friary is the chapel which looks out on the beach at Alnmouth. At high tide you see mostly sea. At low tide, there is a broad expanse of beach, beautiful glowing sands like the ones we remember from childhood seaside holidays. Sometimes I've almost wanted to cry out in that chapel like the ancient Greeks on their long march home, ecstatic on their first sight of it: "The sea! The sea!"

The sea is the chapel altar's backdrop, its reredos if you like. Inevitably, it is always changing and this is its glory. The rhythms of the tides, the changes of weather, the alterations in the light with the ebbs and flows of the seasons - all these add their own dimension to the spirituality of the chapel where we shall gather for the daily prayers of the community and for the eucharist. Your eye is constantly drawn to what's happening out there in this magnificent seascape. It could so easily be a distraction from prayer and meditation. And I'll admit it sometimes is, the magic of what takes place when the sea meets the land. When Cuthbert created his hermitage on the Inner Farne twenty miles up the coast, he built the walls of his cell high enough to cut out the views of rock and sea - for this very reason maybe, so that he could focus more intently on God?

That's the via negativa at work, understanding the spiritual path in terms of what God is not. On the other hand, and more accessibly for most of us, we can train ourselves to try to discern where God is in what we see around us, or at least find in the world of our experience images of what God could be like. I don't mean only blue skies or glowing sunsets or cute animals or fine landscapes and seascapes, though these are all gifts of God. I mean taking in what surrounds us in all its vicissitudes: dark as well as light, storm as well as stillness, rough seas as well as calm, monochrome as well as a vibrant colour. (I've found photography to be a great teacher here in helping me not simply to see but to notice, try to see into, feel for what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls the inscape - but that's for another blog.) For me the vista is a vision of the real world as if viewed through the lens of the eucharist, glimpsed as God sees it. It draws us back into its beating heart because we are learning to see not simply with our eyes but in our souls. That makes it a living icon, written by God himself.

Here, the Friary chapel can help us integrate what we see and touch and experience with how we pray. For if the reredos, this east seaward window is not to be a distraction, then it must provide us with spiritual food for thought to inform our prayer, whether corporate or personal, and our celebration of the eucharist. All of us will find our life-experience mirrored in that window from time to time, in the ever-changing conditions of land, sea and sky. Sometimes the alterations can be so subtle that we hardly notice them, like the tide creeping in over the sand on a calm day. At other times there will be dramatic changes whose suddenness takes us by surprise, as when a storm breaks unexpectedly, or a sunburst emerges out of a sullen lead-grey sky.

And if the window is a symbol of life, it is also a symbol of the tides of ordained ministry. The seascape is always changing. Sometimes those changes seem charged with promise, at other times laden with threat. As men and women in the public ministry of the church, our calling is to enter into human life in all its variety, and in God's name help people to make sense of it, even glimpse where God might be in it all. It calls for solidarity in both storm and sunshine, troubled seas and still, perilous journeys into the unknown as well as calm sea and prosperous voyage. Our new deacons have no idea of where their ministries will take them even in a few days' time, still less in the years of their lifetimes. How can they? How could I, sitting under that lime tree more than forty years ago?

But what we can and must do is offer the path ahead to God. "Lead kindly light" were words often in my thoughts as I stood in that chapel as a parish priest and pondered on my ministry in the parish a few miles inland; and even, in a highly symbolic way, "for those in peril on the sea" when things felt rough. There's a poem by William Blake, one of England's great "see-ers", that I shall quote in one of my addresses:

Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.

Those words are embroidered on a sampler the parish gave us when we said farewell. It still hangs in the room where we spend most of our daylight hours at home. They remind me of that window at the Friary and the years of stipendiary ordained ministry I have now laid down. And now, it's time for a new generation of clergy to pick up the baton in turn. I can promise them that Blake speaks the truth, not only of human life and discipleship, but of ministry too. And it's all there, in that window and in what they will recognise as they gaze into it and say their prayers and offer their lives as God's deacons.

It goes without saying that my prayers will be with them too. And with all those who are being ordained in the coming weeks in churches and cathedrals across the country.

On Hearing Howells on the Radio

I was listening to Essential Classics on BBC Radio 3 this morning. We have it on every day. There's a daily fixture at half past nine, a light-hearted challenge to test our knowledge and wits in the domain of classical music. I often have a go and tweet my answer, only to find a few minutes later that I'm hopelessly wrong.

However, today Sarah Walker played a piece of church music and under the rubric "mapping the music", asked us which place it was associated with. I didn't need to hear more than a couple of bars to recognise it. It was Herbert Howells' Gloucester Service, his setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis that are sung at evensong in cathedrals and choral foundations across the English-speaking world. Howells' setting of the evening canticles are regarded as among the noblest of the twentieth century. What singer doesn't love his Gloucester Service, Collegium Regale and St Paul's Service? I learned to love them as a chorister myself more than fifty years ago. I shall always love them.

But hearing Gloucester unexpectedly on the radio this morning had an arresting impact on me, so much so that I found myself on the edge of tears. Why was this? Because it was the music I'd chosen for my last ever service in Durham Cathedral as Dean. It is barely eighteen months since we said farewell to that wonderful place. Yet in retirement in our Northumberland village on the banks of the Tyne, it already feels an age away. It's as if it was another life, a distant world far removed from this one, wonderful at the time but now like a beautiful dream that has gone forever.

Like all dreams, memories are partial and selective. I am not rose-hued about my time in Durham: there were joys and ordeals, agony and ecstasy like there are in everything we give our lives to. But as I look back on those nearly thirteen years, they do feel to have been the most privileged of my life. Saying farewell to them and laying them aside was hard when the time came. In my last blog as Dean I tried to put this into words. They were raw then, and as I re-read them, those last treasured days come flooding back. Especially the memory of that farewell service of evensong:

The final service is evensong. There is a great crowd filling the nave. I walk the Lord Lieutenant up the aisle as I would at any big event. Then I think, disconcertingly, they are here because I am leaving. I don't mean they are not here to worship God - of course that is why we are at this service at all, but valediction is what has brought so many people together. I arrive at my stall and find a colourful folder put together by the choristers with pictures, personal messages from each of them, tributes and prayers. The tears in things are real even before the service has begun. As they are several more times during the service: at that amazing leap up to a top 'A' in the Gloria of Howells' Gloucester Service, the paradisal ending of Bairstow's Blessed City, our beloved Coe Fen (How shall I sing that Majesty?'), the beautifully crafted intercessions by Sophie the Canon in Residence, the final hymn 'Glory to thee my God this night', and laying up the Dean's cope on the high altar after the blessing.

This power of music to evoke memory was what was triggered by hearing the Gloucester Service again on the radio today. And listening to it again, I realised how exactly it seemed to fit the occasion. There's an undertow of melancholy in so much of Howells' music. For all its luminous beauty, it feels autumnal, elegiac, plangent, full of wistful longing. For all that his glorious settings of praise and celebration like the Magnificat sweep the spirit heavenwards, it's as if these moments of transfiguration in a major key have to be fought for. When you know something of the personal circumstances of Howells' life, the death of his beloved nine-year-old son Michael from polio, you realise that he "drew glory from a well of grief" for the rest of his life. Every Nunc Dimittis he wrote must have brought it back to him, this song of endings by one who has waited to see the promised Messiah before he dies. "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace."

Retiring was for me a kind of Nunc Dimittis: recognising what has been glorious and still is, being thankful, laying aside, saying farewell, departing. Every leave-taking is little death. That day was not just for saying goodbye to Durham. I was saying farewell to my working life, forty years of ordained ministry, and to all the people, all the communities among whom I had lived and worked in that time. I knew when we left Durham that it was a real ending, a parting of friends. The Gloucester Service seemed to symbolise that. 

It felt bitter-sweet at the time, this amazing music. How could it not? But life goes on, and is good because it is filled with so many lovely happy things. To live out of gratitude seems to me to be the secret of fulfilment: gratitude for all that has been, all that is, all that is yet to be. Howells' music has the capacity to help me reflect on that broader canvas and remember past days and years with thankfulness. Perhaps that's the task of this stage of life I am now in, growing older, having lived the greater part of my allotted years. The capacity to see things for what they are a little more clearly, and appreciate what is of lasting value in the changes and chances of human experience - I find this is life-giving in a rather surprising way. "Then he thinks he knows / The hills where his life rose / And the sea where it goes" wrote Matthew Arnold in a poem about the flow of human life that touches me.

In the eucharist, memory is linked with thankfulness for the goodness of God by which we live and that is the source of our hope. Thankfulness is what the word eucharist means. Whatever else I was experiencing as I listened to Howells this morning, wherever those tears came from, his music made me think once again about the goodness of things, how life is always a gift, how we are endowed with a feeling for "the Love that moves the sun and the other stars". Farewells are poignant, and so is the memory of them. But gratitude is all. And if I look a trifle forlorn in the photo of my final service in the Dean's stall, I seem to have cheered up a bit in the final image as we listen to a former Head Chorister's charming farewell speech.

Deo gratias!