Giles Fraser, a canon at London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, has resigned his job and given up his church residence in protest of the plan to forcibly evict the Occupy London protesters camped in St Paul’s Square.
It may have been that accessibility to the media and willingness to be outspoken, together with his instinctive sympathy for the anti-City protesters setting up camp outside St Paul’s, that led him to ask the police to back off when the protest began.
He will also have realised, as some of his colleagues did not, how the cathedral chapter’s attempts to close the camp down – and their over-reaction in closing the cathedral – would play in the outside world and how it would make the church appear: scared, cowed, out-of-touch and pro-establishment – the very things he consistently preaches against in sermons and broadcasts.
Giles Fraser: the St Paul’s Cathedral cleric who prefers jeans and a T-shirt