The inability to understand, let alone to defend, democracy is only one aspect of this archiepiscopal trahison des clercs. As an Oxford don in the 1980s, Dr Williams was a Left-wing activist, campaigning against Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who was warned about this "subversive". More recently he has cultivated a special affection for one faith in particular. Unfortunately it is not his own. He wants us to stop talking about the Good Samaritan and instead say "the Good Muslim"; to embrace "the Other" (meaning the Muslim), even if this means domesticating sharia. St Paul's injunction to Christians to be "all things to all men" may be used to justify not merely toleration, but appeasement of the intolerant. That is the trap into which Dr Williams falls.

His is not the voice of one crying in the wilderness, but that of Pontius Pilate, washing his hands of responsibility and asking: "What is truth?" In him, the voices of the Anglican establishment and the liberal establishment have become indistinguishable. No wonder Dr Williams prefers the magazine editor's chair to the throne of St Augustine. When he interviews the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, about the Arab Spring, they both see Israel as the main obstacle to peace. Like a previous Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, who recently wrote in The Times that the "most democratic" state in the wider Middle East is now Turkey, Dr Williams ignores Israel's achievements. That is the conventional wisdom of our day.

But it is the same story at home. When have we heard the Archbishop speak up for the victims of abortion, euthanasia or eugenics, of forced marriage or female genital mutilation, for those with no voice? When has he defended family values, which are also biblical values, against a celebrity culture that sets them at naught? 

I once heard Dr Williams set out his critique of the West before an audience at the British Academy. He denied the existence of a "dictatorship of relativism". Afterwards, I challenged him: "Nobody is as absolutist as a relativist. And nobody is as relativist as an archbishop." Dr Williams positively beamed: "I think we agree!" No, Archbishop, I don't think we do.