Mark Vernon, The Guardian, 12th September 2012
Whatever his supposed shortcomings in an impossible job, the outgoing archbishop of Canterbury practises what he preaches
We will miss Rowan Williams when he is gone. Not because public life will be the poorer without that beard, those eyebrows: Boris Johnson’s blond mop can fill the gap. Not because conservatives and liberals alike will lose a ready scapegoat: there will be others upon whom to load our discontent. But because he is, to my mind, the leading public intellectual of his generation.
Whatever his supposed shortcomings in an impossible job, the outgoing archbishop of Canterbury practises what he preaches
We will miss Rowan Williams when he is gone. Not because public life will be the poorer without that beard, those eyebrows: Boris Johnson’s blond mop can fill the gap. Not because conservatives and liberals alike will lose a ready scapegoat: there will be others upon whom to load our discontent. But because he is, to my mind, the leading public intellectual of his generation.
