Is the last stained glass ceiling about to come down?

The Church of England needs a clean slate and a fresh pair of eyes, says Michelle Guinness. Is it time for a female Archbishop of Canterbury? 

A few weeks ago, I discovered some scribbled notes I’d written on a potential novel about the first woman Archbishop of Canterbury. They were dated 1990 - just after Margaret Thatcher’s resignation as Prime Minister - and four years before women were ordained.

The book was never written - too busy juggling a senior management job in NHS communications, being a mother, and married to the church. But as the years went by, it seemed clear that the Anglican ship was sinking - out of touch, out of date, weighed down by inadequate leadership, budgets and vision, hidebound by the established way of doing things and generally unfit for purpose. So in 2012, two years before Synod’s decision to appoint women bishops, in sheer desperation at the decline of an organisation I had come to love for its breadth of tradition, its balance, and the apparent safety of its accountability structures, I began to imagine a church reinvigorated from within. Could a woman, a wild card at that, known for her progressive, reformist views ever become Archbishop of Canterbury? When she did, how might she do the job differently, and would she last long enough to make the necessary changes? And so the first female Archbishop of Canterbury was born.