Just John: The Authorized Biography of John Habgood, Archbishop of York, 1983-1995
DAVID WILBOURNE
(SPCK, 224 PP, £19.99)
Tablet bookshop price £16 • Tel 020 7799 4064

If a major objective of Just John was to rescue its hero, John Habgood, from the spell cast over the peak years of his career by the woman whom the Left regarded as the wicked witch of Downing Street, then the book sadly fails. For me, the text comes alive never more than in those passages where Habgood, one-time Bishop of Durham and Archbishop of York, has dealings with Mrs T or, more importantly, she has dealings with him.

A cabal of, I assume, Anglo-Catholic extremists against Habgood is hinted at, but the volume tells us little about this powerful group that apparently blocked his path to the Bishopric of London and then to Canterbury, but was, somewhat surprisingly, not strong enough to prevent his going to York. The only description of “the friends”, as the cabal is described at one point, was that it was “very hush hush and posh”.
The author, David Wilbourne, was, at one point, Habgood’s chaplain. He writes beautifully of someone he knew, loved and hugely admired. There is much testimony to Habgood’s “outstanding intellect”: “John was frighteningly clever, one of the cleverest people I have known.” He was, according to one Bishop of Truro, “the greatest churchman I ever worked with, the most competent, aware, intellectually exciting bishop of the last three decades and much more.”