Ever since he retired as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002, Lord Carey has held himself in readiness to assist his successors with suicide. Over the weekend his intervention in the debate on assisted dying had a seismic effect. In an article for the Daily Mail – which is strongly opposed to a change in law, but puts a good story above principle – Carey announced that personal experience had led him to abandon the traditional position. The church must not "promote anguish and pain", he argued – that was the opposite of the true Christian faith.
In church politics it is the equivalent of Nixon going to China. Carey has, up until now, stood for a reliably conservative and authoritarian platform on matters of personal morality. No more than any other opponent of Lord Falconer's bill did he actually want anyone to suffer unnecessarily, but this seemed less important than the maintenance of the principle that doctors should not kill people.
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