I am sure the bishop would not be so stupid or crass as to suggest that these poor people mattered less because they were not black, or because this wickedness happened 950 years ago: can there be a statute of limitations on evil? If demolishing a cathedral is considered too extreme an expression of solidarity with the oppressed of ages past, the bishop has an entire chantry chapel at Ely in memory of one of his predecessors, John Alcock, a crony of Richard III when he had his two nephews murdered in the Tower. Should it be demolished because of his associations with a child murderer?

Or what about demolishing the cathedral’s western transept, built under orders from Bishop Geoffrey Ridel, who helped orchestrate the persecution of Thomas Becket in the 1160s and was rewarded with the bishopric? Or failing that, has Conway investigated all the numerous funerary monuments in his cathedral, and indeed in the churches of his diocese and all the chapels of Cambridge University, so that today’s zealots can start stripping them bare of all trappings and adornments with associations to people of whom we would not now approve? The magnificent 15th-century tomb of John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester – known as “the Butcher of England” for his habit of ordering the hanging, drawing and quartering of Lancastrians – will have to go; as will the fine monument to William Hodge Mill, the first principal of Bishop’s College, Calcutta, and an arch imperialist.

At the consistory court, Conway asked: “Who owns our history?” We all do: he and those fools who think like him have no unilateral right to erase our past, because what they find compatible with Christianity differs from the views of earlier generations. He is licensing not just vandalism, but the perpetuation of the sort of ignorance in which he participates himself. If such conduct were only the private grief of the Anglican Church, that would be bad enough. But when it is imposed on all of us through defilement of our common heritage, it’s abominable.