On a wing and another prayer

Perhaps the best soundbite to emerge out of the protest outside St Paul's Cathedral came at the weekend from Ken Costa, former chairman of Lazard's Investment Bank who has been tasked by the church to head a group looking at what can be done about the issues which have been highlighted. He is, he said, looking to reconnect "the financial with the ethical." And he goes on to argue that maximising shareholder returns should no longer be the sole criteria for judging how a company is run (or sins).

Sterling stuff but there is still a whiff of a church trying to catch up. The structure of the Church does not allow a command and control system in the normal form, so the fragmented system in place has allowed the Cathedral response to appear disjointed. The Archbishop of Canterbury has, in the word of one commentator, broken his silence and attempted to rest control of the agenda; it was a rudderless ship with events taking over.

On a wing and a prayer

To lose one cleric may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. (With apologies to Oscar Wilde.) St Paul's has now lost its Dean, following on from the resignation of the Canon. All driven by confusion of how to deal with the anti-capitalist protest on the doorstep.

To be fair it is hard for a symbol of the established church in England to come up with a coherent way of dealing with an event which has managed to close the doors of St Paul's with a subsequent loss of revenue and international prestige. Hard, but not impossible.