Andrew White is the ultimate loose canon. This may be stereotyping, but I generally think of Anglican churchmen as thin, balding men with an interest in cricket. White is large, voluble and stylishly dressed. He is also carrying several mobiles on which he is receiving e-mails from the US State Department about the latest atrocities in Iraq and talking to someone at the Pentagon.
White wears several hats, metaphorically speaking. The hat that has attracted most attention in the UK is his role as Anglican vicar of Baghdad (strictly limited at present to the international zone — his church, St George's, is just a kilometer away from the high-security area). But it is his other job that accounts for the contact with the Pentagon and State Department — as head of the Foundation for Reconciliation in the Middle East, a free-ranging role that allows him to act as the link between US power-brokers and the region's indigenous movers and shakers.
His current preoccupations are attempting to find common ground among the religious groups in Iraq and providing humanitarian aid in Gaza, and he divides his time between Iraq, Israel and Gaza and the West Bank, with monthly trips back to the UK and bimonthly visits to the US. An absurd schedule, especially for someone who for 20 years has had multiple sclerosis and walks with a stick.
Is it really fair that he has to deal not just with Iraq but Israel-Palestine too? “I occasionally wonder why on earth I do this, and why I don't just have a little parish in England somewhere. Then my wife reminds me there's no way I'd cope with a little parish in England, and probably no parish would cope with me either.”
After the Iraq war, before the full extent of the insurgency was clear, he considered bringing his wife Caroline and two young sons out to Baghdad to live with him. She sensibly demurred, and I wonder now how he can bear to be parted from them for so much of the time. “If I stay at home any longer, they complain,” he says.
White is now more diplomat than churchman — the foundation, though it has a Christian ethos, is independent of the Anglican church — but he may be the least diplomatic diplomat in the world. I ask him about one recent remark — “I've got no time for trendy, lefty peaceniks.” He is more than happy to amplify: “I can pretend to like them, but I find it very difficult. You don't get through to problems or understand the situation by standing in front of tanks. Going into a situation that puts British embassy personnel in danger or puts themselves in danger is not the way forward.”
He doesn't like “woolly liberals,” either. When he was parish priest in Clapham, London, in the 1990s, he combined pastoral care with being a Conservative councilor.
He still takes what politicians like to call a robust line with liberals, especially in the church. “I can cope with anything,” he says when I ask him where he stands theologically. “I can cope very well with orthodoxy… . I can cope with Anglo-Catholicism, evangelicalism, charismatics. I just can't cope with the woolly liberal bit in the middle that doesn't believe much.”
It is in Baghdad and Gaza — among the believers — that he clearly feels most at home. “I love the Middle East,” he says. “I love the people, I love the way they express their faith, I love their food. They're not woolly liberals. I have never found any woolly liberals in the Middle East.”
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