Episode 24: Paul Handley

Interview Date: 15 October 2020. Interviewer: Dr Jason Clark. Research and questions by Dr Simon Machin.

Paul Handley - Timed Interview Summary

25:47 - 40:23 University

Arriving at Goldsmith’s he very soon meets and is attracted to a young woman (his future wife) who then invites him to attend the church she goes to, St Mary’s Islington, a cathedral of evangelicalism throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Slowly Paul becomes interested in finding out more about Christianity.  He is baptized and confirmed.

40:24 - 42:46 Entry into journalism

Paul graduates from his degree in English Literature and starts doing freelance work including book reviews and then news reporting for the Church of England newspaper. He is offered a job there.

42:47 - 52:55 Community life at Little Gidding

Paul and his wife join a lay religious community at Little Gidding which has an ancient church and farmhouse and some converted barns turned into dwellings. About 40 people are living there. It is a good time initially and becomes less so in their second year. A guest speaker advises them that it is time to leave. After a short time in a borrowed flat with two small children, Paul is offered a job at the Church Times and their life settles down. He works in an old-fashioned set up with manual typewriters and hot metal linotype machines in the attic.

52:56 - 59:46 Lambeth Palace

Paul is phoned while he is at Church Times and offered a job as press secretary at Lambeth Palace, where the Archbishop of Canterbury is based. It is at the time that Robert Runcie steps down and George Carey is appointed. It has since been helpful as Editor of the Church Times to understand the pressure that the press secretary at Lambeth Palace faces. During his time at Lambeth Palace Paul is also having to deal with the fallout from the kidnapping of Terry Waite. He is called into an office to watch an unbroadcast interview with Brian Keenan, an Irish journalist, who was released earlier and his testimony is the first intimation that Terry Waite might still be alive.   

59:47 - 1:06:20 Westcott House

Paul supports his wife’s calling to Anglican ordination and training for ministry at Westcott House, Cambridge. There is no argument within the college about the ordination of women, and there is no issue until the vote to allow women priests passes, whilst they are there. The arguments have rolled around more seriously since, when the impact across diverse parishes has to be faced.  Without endorsing the opinion, even in 2021 there is still the image in some people’s minds of “the right vicar” who may have a wife willing to take on the social side of ministry.   

1:06:21 - 1:14:05 News editor at the Church Times

Paul returns as news editor to a paper that is still quite intellectual and astringent at a time when journalism is changing with the launch of The Independent. It is a time when the broadsheets still have religious correspondents, and as senior figures, the journalists do not have to fight for space. Broadsheets are daily whilst the Church Times is a weekly, so it saw itself more than it does now as a paper of record.  There is no editorial board at the Church Times and no internal or external pressure to follow a particular line. Over the years, as the Church of England has become a more delicate plant, the role of the Church Times has changed to become more nurturing, and less challenging.    

1:14:06 - 1:22:33 Journalism in a digital age

 The Church Times online launched in 2000 and it is now on its fifth-generation website.  Print copies go almost entirely to the UK but the digital offering is picked up around the world.  Print circulation is about 19,000 but there are 1.5 million unique visitors to their website each year. The written version still needs careful crafting. So, there is a complex dynamic of producing copy continuously for the online product but also working to the weekly deadline of the printed version.  The picture on the front page is hugely important to Paul as are the cartoons, so there is a marked visual aesthetic.

1:22:34 - 1:35:17 Christian Prime Ministers

The UK has seen Prime Ministers, Blair, Brown, Cameron and May, who have espoused Christianity either religiously or culturally. This has led to some invitations to 10 Downing Street but in Paul’s view although the culture of post-modernity allows for religion at least to be talked about, it is neither taken terribly seriously nor accepted as an overarching metanarrative.  In Paul’s view this is throwing the church back into the days of the early church, so it is the behaviour of Christians (if it is exceptionally good or distinctive) that becomes persuasive. It is good for Christians to be faced by the fact that they do not have a monopoly of good behaviour.  At the same time, he is as horrified as anyone else in the way that the press has lost a sense of integrity in the presentation of news and current affairs to the public. He is pleased to be working out of a tradition of probity and an effective model in which advertising supports print journalism. For example, only paid journalists have the time to phone up and check a story. On issues such as safeguarding, people are realizing that exposure of wrongdoing is necessary.     

1:35:18 - 1:39:58 The New Atheists

The publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in 2006 and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great in 2007 has led to a ridiculing of Christianity which may not have existed quite so much in more deferential times. The Church Times is essentially preaching to the choir, so its approach does not leave room for apologetics.   

1:39:59 - 1:44:21 Archbishops of Canterbury

As Editor, Paul has seen three rules: of George Carey, Rowan Williams and Justin Welby. The really important thing to note is that in a typical rule of ten years, what is achieved in the first five years is usually more effective than the second five, because of the pressures of the role. 

1:44:22 - 2:01:20 Other aspects to journalism

Because there had been a growth in opinion pieces in newspapers, Paul is very careful to keep opinion out of news reporting. He was pleased to continue the tradition of cartoons in the Church Times and to win an award (the following year it went to Private Eye). The Church needs cartoons! There is always a concern about missed stories or those that are too big for the paper’s resources. Social media is an innovative if double-edged means of communicating and the Church Times has 41,000 followers. The use of scepticism is underrated in journalism, and this ties into Paul’s belief that scriptural texts should be closely read too. Information does need to be closely interrogated, and this is one of the problems with social media, as it encourages confirmation bias. Fake news gets a hold because people do not pay enough attention to detail.