Oxford dons devour feminist Dean who crushed conservative Bishop
by Jules Gomes, Rebel Priest:
Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences. Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, is getting his just deserts. At his Oxford high table, fellow-dons pass crystal decanters of vintage port, Château Haut-Brion claret and scoops of calumny with the ice-cream, as they conspire against their dean.
These fiendishly clever chaps at Oxford have their own droll games played around the season of All Hallows. The “Night of the Long Fangs” is a vigorous sport where spunky dons dress as vampires and sink their teeth into the jugulars of fellows who don’t fit in. Spirited dons have played “Grill the Reformer” since they barbecued subversives at stake in the hallowed precincts of the venerable university. Remember the reformers Nicolas Ridley, Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer?
Now the long knives are out for the Very Reverend Professor Percy, who is facing claims of “conduct of an immoral, scandalous or disgraceful nature incompatible with the duties of the office or employment”. A formal complaint was lodged against him after he sought a pay review for college staff under gender pay gap rules. Reports say this could have led to a pay rise of up to £10,000 for Percy as well as a salary hike for a senior female staff member.
“I say there, Percy, old chap. You don’t exactly have to make a living on a curate’s wage, do you?” For all its pious prattle and virtue signalling on one of its pet themes of income inequality, the fat cats in the Church of England are paid obscenely large sums of money compared to plebeian clergy who do the domestic work of parish chimney-sweeping and digging in diocesan coal pits.
Dean Percy, it seems, was holding out his silver snuffbox for another £10,000.
Poor Percy is paid a princely sum of £90,000—a walloping twenty-five grand more than the Archbishops of Canterbury or York. Sure, Percy performs a double role as dean of the college and cathedral, because Christ Church’s chapel is also Oxford’s cathedral, but try and pit him against rural clergy who run nine churches until they drop dead from an aneurism! Percy, it seems, is holding out his silver snuffbox for another £10,000—which, I’m sure, he will cheerfully dole out to the Jayne Ozanne Foundation, as a member of its Council of Reference.
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