DR Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has announced his retirement and, from his recent writings, he sounds like what my dad, an old Second World War RAF man, used to refer to as “demob happy.” In other words, knowing he is coming to the end of his term of office, he don’t much give a damn what he says.

I should like to record that I rather like Rowan and that I have had agreeable correspondence with him over the years. He is a thoroughly decent and humane man. It’s just a pity he is such a chump.

He is said to be a notable academic. Well, if that were not sufficient condemnation, when you come to his scholarly output, you find it unreadable. He wrote a big book on a vivid and inspired philosophical theologian called Origen. Rowan’s book is the best thing to get you off to sleep if you’re having insomnia.

Rowan is said to be a poet, but his verse drags along like a lump of dead meat. He is said to be the master of 11 languages. So why can’t he say anything sensible in any of them?

He has said some barmy things over the years, not the least of which was his implication in his turgid little monstrance Writing in the Dust that the 9/11 atrocity was not to be blamed on Muslim fundamentalist psychopaths but that it was somehow our fault.

Then, remember, he said we ought to try to incorporate into our legal system a little bit of Shariah law. Why?

His most recent criticisms have been directed towards eminent clerics, such as the former Archbishop Dr George Carey and the notably courageous Bishop Michael Nazir Ali, for their saying that Christians in this country are suffering from a secular aggression amounting to persecution. Dr Williams suggests these men are rather over-egging the pudding.

Well, only last week four persecuted Christians in Britain decided to take their cases to the European Court of Human Rights. Nadia Eweida is appealing against having been sent home by British Airways for wearing the cross while on duty. Shirley Chaplin was moved to a desk job by the NHS for the same “offence”. Gary McFarlane was sacked by Relate for refusing to counsel homosexuals. Lilian Ladete was disciplined after she declared she was not willing to conduct same-sex civil partnerships in North London.

I wish the four of them well, but I honestly don’t hold out much hope for their causes.

A Christian appealing for justice to the secular ECHR is as if a follower of Jesus Christ should ask fairness from the Roman Emperor Diocletian who was notorious – he’d be celebrated these days – for his persecution of believers.

As Orwell prophesied, everyone is equal – only some people are more equal than others.

The pretense is individual freedom. The reality is that this freedom extends to everybody except traditional English Christians.

So the faith which did so much to create the social, moral, cultural and political life of our nation for more than 1,500 years is now, as it were, the faith that dare not speak its name.

Why this toleration of all manner of versions and perversions, but this intolerance of Christianity? What have Christians done to be singled out for this most selective disdain?

How odd to discover that the Archbishop of Canterbury plays down the persecution of Christians – but you wouldn’t catch him in million years having anything but the utmost respect for Islam.

  •  Peter Mullen is the former Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.