Boris Johnson should be ashamed of Savile slur, says bishop

Paul Bayes, retiring bishop of Liverpool, calls for an end to ‘rancid and dangerous’ political culture in Britain

Today’s political culture is “rancid and dangerous” and Boris Johnson should be ashamed of telling a lie that led to street violence, a senior Church of England bishop has said.

Paul Bayes, the bishop of Liverpool, said the UK was facing a “struggle between those in whose interest it is to fragment society and those who want to sustain the common good”.

Speaking on the eve of his retirement, Bayes also said church law should change to define marriage as between two people regardless of gender – a highly controversial move that would overturn centuries of traditional biblical teaching.

Bayes said Johnson should take “serious stock of his position” after he told parliament that Keir Starmer had failed to prosecute the paedophile Jimmy Savile. Two days later, Starmer had to seek refuge from a mob accusing him of being a “paedophile protector”.

Bayes said: “I do not believe that was an honest statement, and I think [Johnson] should be ashamed of it. And the folks who trotted out to say ‘it’s not really a problem, it’s all part of the rough and tumble of politics’ should share that shame …

“The parallel in my mind is Donald Trump. [Johnson] is showing us who he is, and people seem to want that in politics. And I regret that. We need a politics that doesn’t have room for lies told in the House of Commons that might produce street violence two days afterwards.”

However, if Johnson resigned, the political environment would still need to change, Bayes said. “It’s not about individual bad apples. It’s about the culture.” The culture of politics was “adversarial, scratchy, exhausted” and “rancid and dangerous”.

This was the case “right across the west”, he said. “You see clear illiberalism in eastern Europe, you see the rise of the extreme right in France, and you see what you see in the United States … Basic decencies have been lost.”

People who suggested that bishops should not express political views were mistaken, he said. The church has “a place in the public square” and “there are values that we can express clearly that will have political impact. As long as that platform is there, it behoves us to stand on it.”

Within the C of E, Bayes has increasingly spoken out about the urgency of LGBTQ+ equality, an issue that has caused bitter divisions for many years.

He said: “I want to see a church where, if a congregation and its ministers want to bless and marry same-sex people or trans people, then they should be free to do so without stigma. And those who don’t want to do so should be given freedom of conscience not to do so. I want to see gender-neutral marriage canons, that simply say marriage is between two people.”

Related: C of E bishop backs prosecution of those who defy ‘gay conversion’ ban

Bayes said he expected this to happen, “100%”. The church needs to listen “to God who never changes, and to society which is changing all the time. Over slavery, over abortion, contraception, women’s ministry, long and agonised debates have resulted in a church that has made room for these things. And I think, in the end, that will happen [with LGBTQ+ equality].

He didn’t expect such change imminently, but “I hope and pray it will happen in my lifetime”.

Bayes, who has been bishop of Liverpool since 2014, was introduced as a member of the House of Lords in November, just three months before his retirement. “I would have been there for five or six years but there was a [C of E] rule that women bishops should take precedence. I support that rule, but it means I’m the shortest serving member of the House of Lords for decades. But that’s cool.”

After his retirement, he will swap his eight-bedroom bishop’s house in Liverpool for a two-bedroom workman’s cottage in the West Country. He may write a book, but first “there’ll be a lot of snoring for about six months, and remembering how to be a grandfather”.