Vicar of Chesterfield’s Crooked Spire pens open letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson

I hope you had a lovely holiday. I was glad for you that you recovered so well from Covid-19, and to see you obviously windswept and having fun with the family was a breath of fresh air. I am among the many who have appreciated your refreshing optimism and the encouragement you give for us all to have a ‘can-do’ attitude to life.

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I just wish you and your senior colleagues could manage a bit more of it, for example by giving us stuff to be optimistic about. You see, everyone seems to think you’ve chosen only to work with the people who agree with you, and look at all the talented people you’ve got sitting on your backbenches. And look at the talented people who are sitting on the ‘other side’. I’m sure some of them actually do want to work with you and help out with things like getting a better future for our people, levelling up in schools and colleges and across the board, giving people – young and old – opportunities they might never have dreamed of.

Or the dirt-poor people across the world whom this nation has hitherto been proud to support, especially over recent years. They aren’t all in places that spend their riches on space programmes instead of overcoming poverty, or rake off international aid for their servants and mansions, instead of their people who are currently facing Covid-19 without hope of medical aid. These poor people aren’t the ones who will benefit from linked trade deals and diplomatic mutual back-scratching.

How do you expect us to be optimistic when you leave so much work to be done by colleagues who are there for their conformity not their competence? When it looks like the UK will be even worse off at the end of the transition period with the EU because the negotiators are just not good enough to get the promised trade deals with the rest of the world’s nations, let alone the EU itself? Or is the silence hiding something? Have you got a Boris rabbit ready to bring out of your bush hat in time for Christmas?

I’m glad at least that you and your Government recognised the importance of the church’s work and prayer in the community by designating us as key workers, though your predecessors gave us bishops who decided we are no longer essential enough to be there with our sacred buildings at the heart of our communities to support the key workers in health and services who have gone to work all through the past months, many of whom use the clergy and building at the centre of Chesterfield as a place of refuge and sanctuary. I really want to thank you for that.

What you might do to blow us all away this autumn is to be there and visible like your hero Churchill, and as he did in wartime, to gather around you all the best experts and public servants so that we can really move forward and do as much as is humanly possible for the greater good of all. I’m sure in the end that’s what you really want. But at the moment it seems to be taking a back seat to other ambitions and agendas, and for a Prime Minister that’s not good enough.

Give us reasons to be optimistic, and so many of us at this time will put aside politics to be behind you – not to stab you in the back, but to give support in action, and in good wishes, and those of us who think that prayer matters will do that as well.

Keep safe and keep well.

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