Justin Welby fails to surprise with no hope for Pope

Times

4 hours ago

Justin Welby may have said that his ousting as Archbishop of Canterbury was based on a flawed report, but he is courting less controversy by asserting that he is unlikely to become Pope. Asked what his papal name would be, he opted for either Hadrian or Francis, but was keen to stress that a Welby papacy would be unlikely. 'I have had six children, therefore there is some evidence that I've not been entirely celibate,' he said, adding that he was also a 'lousy theologian'. Still, this needn't rule him out as a Pope, if the Borgias were anything to go by. Welby remarked: 'It was a Borgia who said, 'Since God has given us the papacy, we may as well enjoy it'. '
Glastonbury brings together the revolutionaries and the posh, and this year is throwing together particularly strange bedfellows. The other night, the same backstage VIP bar was frequented by the controversial band Kneecap and the uncontroversial Samantha Cameron. It's not like they have nothing in common, though. For instance, as she was a PM's wife, both have benefited from government money.
Jeffrey Archer's success is not as impressive as it sounds. The former Tory MP's first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, is still topping bestsellers' lists after racking up 25,000 sales last month, but he points out that this is worldwide and it's not all that impressive when you divide it by 151 countries. 'I got a call from Iceland saying your latest book is number one in the bestsellers' list,' he tells the Rosebud podcast. Archer, right, was filled with pride, until he asked how many copies had taken him to this giddy height. The answer was 83.
Much excitement on the left this week about the potential for a new Jeremy Corbyn-led party. Many are saying that polls have shown it would get 10 per cent of the vote, but the pollster Joe Twyman offers a note of caution. 'May I gently suggest that 'would' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here,' he said. 'I say that as the official pollster for Change UK.'
It is official — politicians don't talk like humans. A study to be published in Comparative Political Studies has found that politicians' speeches become more interminable as soon as they are elected. The study looked at 1.5 million extracts from speeches by Danish parliamentarians across a quarter of a century from 1997. It found that the speeches became less readable after the speaker was elected but this reverted as soon as their career ended. It's cited by the political scientist Philip Cowley in his latest for The House. 'You campaign in poetry, govern in prose,' he says, 'but even the prose suffers when in office.'
With books like his new history of St Petersburg, the author Sinclair McKay has become an adept copy editor, but he learnt the craft the hard way. He used to be a diarist and tells me he got into terrible trouble when he wrote a piece about the political salon host Lady Carla Powell. She was furious about one word. He admits it was probably an error to call her 'fawnlike' in the first place, but what was worse was that he also got the third letter wrong and had to explain to Powell that he hadn't meant to suggest she was half-man, half-goat.