SO Cherie Blair is attended by a person with the title "style guru".

Well, I can imagine such a person being employed by Kylie Minogue, but the idea that a senior barrister like Cherie Blair - who aspires to be a high court judge - should go in for this mad mixture of witchcraft, superstition and modern fad beggars belief. What, the wife of the Prime Minister away with the fairies? It has even been reported that Tony himself takes advice from this style guru from time to time. I hope she says: "Stop telling so many lies - about immigration, transport, education and the NHS, etc - or your nose will grow as long as a cucumber."

Can you imagine what earlier Prime Ministers would have been advised by their personal gurus? "Oh dear, Mr Churchill, I don't think you're showing your best image when you smoke a cigar before you get out of bed in the morning, and drink champagne with your breakfast. I've consulted the Feng Shui arrangements and today is definitely not a day for fighting them on the beaches."

Or the Duke of Wellington: "Do try to reveal more of your right hand brain and your feminine side. Couldn't you be just the teeny-weeniest bit nicer to Napoleon - especially since he suffers so from indigestion?"

But it gives you pause when you think that the occupant of Number Ten is in thrall to astrologers and horoscopes. Is the style guru advising the Prime Minister on Iraq and the war on terrorism?

But speaking of astrology, I attended a carol service last week which used one of the modern Bad News Bible translations and the wise men who came to the manger were described as "astrologers". What sense do the loony revisers think that version of events will make to people of today? They won't be thinking of Babylonian natural scientists - which is what the original wise men were. They'll simply think of their daily horoscope in the morning paper and imagine Gypsy Petulengro or Jonathan Cainer turning up at the Bethlehem stable.

When it came to the lovely bit which says: "And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes..." the Bad News Version had "She wrapped him in strips of cloth." What and hung him out to dry? This damn fool literal-mindedness enlightens no one. Do they think we don't know what swaddling clothes are?

There's a lot of this sort of idiocy around. I remember when the New English Bible was being prepared by a tone-deaf, tin-eared committee of translators. The aim of these sorts of scholars is iconoclastic: it is to expunge from public consciousness every trace of the traditional Christian faith and replace it with something which they deem more "meaningful".

They came to the parable of the Prodigal Son and to the wonderfully tender conclusion when the naughty lad repents of his wild ways and goes home saying: "I will arise and go to my father." And his father meets him with kisses and kills the fatted calf. Now that spelt real trouble for the moronic translators: they couldn't bear to include a phrase so vivid and memorable as "fatted calf". So guess what they did? In a rare moment of inspiration they asked a Yorkshire farmer "What do farmers these days call a fatted calf?" And the farmer replied: "We call it a fatted calf!"

Our alderman told me yesterday that he had attended a carol service that was even more bizarre. The vicar had worked in the City before ordination and he filled the church with flip charts and overhead projectors. No so much going to the manger as going to the manager, eh?

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's Church, Cornhill, in the City of London and chaplain to the Stock Exchange.