James Jones is the prefect among the candidates. In the days when Blairism seemed a winning formula, he looked the most New Labour of the bishops, except, of course, for the beard.

But the earnest public-school manner, combined with an attempt to speak in the vernacular, is very Blair-ish. And when he got the see of Liverpool in 1998, it was after the prime minister had turned down the two candidates offered by the Crown Appointments Commission – supposedly Pete Broadbent and Gavin Reid – and insisted on Jones.

He was relatively young (48) and had zoomed up the ranks since being ordained at the late age of 36, after failing to get into the BBC. He has courage, energy and fluency, but his fatal flaw is something between ambition and exhibitionism. It is difficult to imagine any of the other candidates writing a specially commissioned Easter piece for the News of the World, as Jones did. But if they had, it wouldn't have started: "Religion and sex go together like bacon and eggs. But that's not what most people think!" – or finished (in italics): "Good sex in a relationship of love is like finding heaven on earth".

Like most bishops willing to engage with the press, he is regarded with suspicion by them. But he has charmed the Guardian as well as the News of the World and he is admired, even by opponents, as a man who will speak his mind.

On both the great litmus tests of evangelical attitudes to sexuality he is in the mainstream: very explicitly pro-women priests and anti-gay. He was the first bishop south of the border to come out in favour of Section 28. On the other hand, he was also the first bishop to suggest that Robin Cook's marrying his mistress should have disqualified him from high office.

This last came as a shock to his admirers on the Guardian, who had supposed that when he talked about the family it was part of a general bias towards poor families, not people like us to whom different rules apply. But though his commitment to the poor is real, it is tied up with his prefect's drive to exhort people to live better in all sorts of ways. That is what makes his adventures in popular culture so grotesque. They show him trying to mingle unself-consciously with the fourth form and this is something a prefect just can't do.

He has very good contacts among evangelicals outside the C of E. In many ways, he is the other churches' model of what a bishop in the Church of England should be: a rather posh, simple Protestant. There is no doubt that he speaks for a large community of stably married Christians who feel, without nastiness, that theirs is the state that God intended for the human race, and have a fair amount of scriptural evidence to back them up. What is hard to imagine is that he would, as an archbishop, change anything very interesting about the Church.

Illustration: John Richardson / Funny Business
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