The passing of great men, makers of our recent history, leaves a hollow that we fail to see filled by younger generations of leaders in whichever field. We are wrong of course, great men and women of the future are possibly being born every day, but it is easier to look back than forwards and the past has a romantic glow, the rough edges knocked off by time, which we cannot see in our difficult present, especially as we get older ourselves.The passing, last month, of Field Marshall Manekshaw was greeted here with gilded obituaries in all the papers, and a most attractive figure they presented too of the man who survived major wounds early in his career in the colonial army and went on to call Mrs Gandhi “sweetie”. I am happy to have my own fleeting and rather improbable memories of the Field Marshall and his several encounters with various of my five children that resulted in the remark, “I would rather command the Indian army than that lot, my dear.”

Our acquaintance had begun on an aeroplane when Jamie Loyd, aged 7, on being told that the gentleman with the remarkable moustache was the most famous general in the Indian army, engaged the Field Marshall in a conversation lasting most of the way from Delhi to Mumbai about the merits of the various Power Rangers. Power Rangers was a Japanese/American television animation of the time (and still going, I believe), about children who, morphed into fighting figures, saved the world on an almost daily basis. The programme’s product offshoot was a series of plastic toys that were every small boy’s dream possession. Field Marshall Manekshaw was somewhat puzzled by Jamie’s revelations of the extraordinary abilities of the Power Rangers, and asked where they had come from. To this, the even more surprising answer was “Hoggosaurus”, the name of the local toy shop in Wiltshire.

Ninety-four seems a long enough life for one who cheated death as a young man and at 85, Charles Wheeler, the greatest television journalist of them all, also had a pretty good run, such that we find it hard to imagine a major world event without his steady presence on the television screen reporting on history being made. His knack was in appearing to become part of great events himself as he always seemed more engaged than reporters are necessarily supposed to be and perhaps, like the Power Rangers, morphed into a figure able to influence world events through the clarity of the pictures he created of living history and his obvious feeling for right and wrong, polished during a 60-year career.

In the end, we regret the loss of leaders in any field, not least because the echelons of power at the moment seem sparsely populated by great or even good men and we cannot see into the future or, at the moment, beyond the cost of oil and a growing depression in the financial markets. Yet again, our now seriously beleaguered prime minister, who looks increasingly tortured when he appears in public, has been accused of not taking the lead, this time over MPs’ allowances, a red rag to a public staring relative impoverishment in the face.

MPs do not get particularly high salaries as compared with those working comparable hours in business, a fact that discourages the best from entering politics in a time when few young men and women have the wherewithal to support themselves and their families on private incomes. The system of allowances provides them with the necessities of accommodation in both their constituencies and close to Westminster, a system that the public in general see at best as open to malpractice and subversion of public monies. This week, MPs voted to keep salary increases below the rate of inflation but to hang on to the allowances, a highly unpopular move, also to Gordon Brown himself, except that he failed to get to the House of Commons to vote, apparently fearing the ensuing defeat and leaving himself open to further accusations of cowardice and weak leadership.

Someone has suggested lightheartedly that a London hostel should be built for all MPs, providing the accommodation they require to work in Westminster and presumably leaving their families at home in their constituencies. As it is, many families do stay at home as costs in London even with allowances are often prohibitive. In the end, the only solution, as it has always been, is to pay MPs a salary commensurate with the hours they work. These days, at least all night sittings in the House require only the most unusual circumstances but conscientious MPs work most weekends in their constituencies, and need to be paid at a rate that covers their time and their costs, and negates the requirement for the complicated and publicly unappealing allowances known as the ‘John Lewis List’ after a well-known chain of department stores, where about-to-be-marrieds lodge lists of hopeful wedding presents to kit out the new family residence.

As Gordon Brown skulks miserably in Downing Street, other leaders here have their problems. The Anglican Church, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Very Reverend Rowan Williams, is threatened with schism over the issues of homosexual and, most of all, of female bishops. It seems perfectly apparent that once the battle had been won for women priests, it was a natural progression for there to be female bishops, and the anti-gay argument in an age when most people, thank god, do not adversely judge homosexuality, is neither here nor there, except to a large and deeply conservative minority who are proposing to get into bed with the Roman Catholic church instead, historically a far more extreme event. I doubt Rowan Williams, who appears, whether it is the case or not, to be a weak man caught in a cleft stick, will manage to persuade the African bishops, in particular, about homosexuality. It is not entirely clear where he stands himself. It seems unlikely too that he will hold the ultra-conservative, anti-feminist Conservatives here in the fold without splitting the church into female and no-female zones, liable only to weaken a weak organization still further.

Most of the female priests or parish vicars I have come across seem to get it about right, and are at least as good pastoral leaders in the communities they serve as their male counterparts, often better. I am not a churchgoer, but I like going to a church for the Christmas celebration where the vicar looks as if she is celebrating in a pair of flashing earrings with her surplice. I like the vicar at the church built by my husband’s ancestor, where he is still a patron with a hand in choosing new vicars, who rejoices in the Harry Potterish witch’s name of Ysmena Pentelow and positively bounces round the church with enthusiasm for her job, quite apart from looking about 15 and very pretty, which may have brought a few erring male sheep back into the flock. I couldn’t care less really about the church from a religious point of view, but where it works well as a moderate and moderating community institution as it does in Ysmena’s parish, it can remain a force for a good that is not supplied by social services and other government departments.

I cannot imagine, in an age of so-called equality, why women should not be church-leaders as well as servants, and the archbishop would do well to stick to his guns in their support. Nonetheless, it is worth hoping that he will also keep an eye to the past history of the Church, if he believes the greater Anglican community to be worth more than its consummate parts. He should remember the doctrinal compromises that somehow forged a strong Church from warring and alternately persecuted factions of extreme Protestantism and those former Catholics leaning still towards Rome in the post-Reformation days of Elizabeth I. It takes a woman, of course....