THIS day last week, between 3.30 and 4.30pm, the House of Commons ran the Church Appointments (Repeal of Discriminatory Provision) Bill through all its stages and passed it on to the Lords.

It didn’t attract much attention here, though you might have thought it would.

It cleared away what the Conservatives called an “anomaly that needed correcting” (though they did nothing about it), whereby it was illegal for a prime minister who is a Catholic or a Jew to advise the British monarch, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, on the appointment of bishops and the deans of some cathedrals.

It actually wasn’t an anomaly, because it was a deliberate feature of the 1829 Catholic Relief Act, generally called Catholic Emancipation, and of the Jews Relief Act 1858.

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It didn’t seem to occur to anyone in the 19th century that there could be a prime minister who was an atheist or who professed a faith other than Christian or Jewish.

However, by the 20th century prime ministers who were atheists, and by the 21st century Hindu, could advise the monarch on episcopal appointments but Catholics and Jews could not, since theirs were the only faiths specifically mentioned in the 1829 and 1858 acts.........

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