Van Rompuy's tax plans
on Nov 22, 2009Cranmer was going to talk about the 20-minute meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury had with the Pope yesterday. But it hardly seems worth it. They have agreed 'to make progress'. That's nice, but there can be none. Bruno Waterfield today reports on...

Rowan Williams – Defender of the Faith
on Nov 21, 2009Cranmer never thought he would write that, but credit where it’s due. The Archbishop of Canterbury appears to have (re-)discovered a (slight) Protestant streak, even if his rebuke to Pope Benedict was cushioned with ecumenical pleasantries, conceal...

Rompuy-Stiltskin – the first President of Europe
on Nov 19, 2009Who is he?God knows.But perhaps that’s the point.Just as the Son of God was incarnate as a humble carpenter in Galilee, so Satan does not always appear as an angel of light: sometimes he just skulks incognito, concealed in tenebrous anonymity until...

Churchill beats Jesus as ‘most wanted Twitterer from history’
on Nov 19, 2009Cranmer simply cannot be bothered with Twitter: it is nothing but a cacophony of inane flashes of gossip and damp squibs of naught; ephemeral bleats of gossamer and fatuous cock and bull; characterless whisperings of vanity, idle trivia, airy utterin...

The Government of Opposition
on Nov 18, 2009Only in the postmodern era in which black can be white, good can be evil and right can be wrong could the Government be the Opposion.We have been treated to a seven-minute glimpse of the 15 (or was it nine?) Bills which will constitute Labour’s fin...

Labour’s Equality Bill means Christmas could be ‘killed off’
on Nov 18, 2009Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without the annual Daily Mail blurb about Christmas being banned somewhere or other: lights being renamed to accommodate other religions; Santa being banned on health and safety grounds; reindeer having their animal...

Conservative Muslim Forum shunned by CCHQ
on Nov 17, 2009Cranmer covered the establishment of this official Conservative-Muslim website exactly two years ago. There is nothing wrong in principle with political campaigning websites aimed at the micro-narratives of the diverse and disparate. Let us have one...

Dispatches and the ‘pro-Israel lobby’
on Nov 16, 2009Cranmer does not know what Peter Oborne intends to say on tonight’s C4 Dispatches programme,Inside Britain's Israel Lobby, but judging by many of the histrionic comments beneath the publicity spiel, one might think they are about to broadcast a rev...

David Cameron does Songs of Praise
on Nov 15, 2009In a continuation of his 'doing God' period, today David Cameron appears on the BBC's Songs of Praise as the programme was filmed in his Oxfordshire constituency of Witney. He confesses again his belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the...

Straight couple demand civil partnership
on Nov 14, 2009He he. Well, why not? Just as homosexuals complain that the institution of marriage is discriminatory because they are forbidden to enter the divinely-ordained institution, so heterosexuals may complain that civil partnership is discriminatory becaus...