The Pope, in Australia this week-end, is playing a clever hand in his cautious, long-range intervention in the Anglican row. Apart from his ecclesiastical status, he also heads a secular state which has its own international diplomatic corps. It shows.

By warning off disaffected Anglican clergy, annoyed by women bishops and by male bishops who prefer to go to bed with a man rather than a woman, he knows what he is doing. No one likes those who jump ship.

Ex-colleagues, staying behind to ride out the storm, regard them as traitors. Those on the new craft they seek to board are embarrassed. The rest of us, looking on from afar, wonder what their previous conviction was worth to be cast off so easily.

In effect the Pope, far from holding open his door to welcome the malcontents, has told them to sort themselves out and make peace with their fellows, male and female. To show he means business, he has dispatched no fewer than three cardinals to convey his message to this week's Lambeth Conference of 600 Anglican bishops at the University of Kent.

Pope Benedict and Archbishop Williams of Canterbury get on well. Both are theologians. This is a big plus. But the odds remain against Anglican peace; for the question is not whether the loose worldwide federation of 38 provinces will split: the core issue is how it is to handle the split which has already occurred.

As long ago as 2005, when the Primates worldwide met near Newry, Co Down, 19 — more than half of those present — refused to attend the Communion service because North American Episcopalian liberal clergy were present. It may be brutal to say it, but the current decennial gathering in Kent is a bit of a sham; for it no longer can be said fully to represent the Anglican Communion.

More than 200 of its bishops are not there — because they insist upon staying away. The largest body of absentees are those of the conservative Afro-Asian grouping who call themselves the Global South. Its main component is the powerful Anglican Church of Nigeria, led by Archbishop Peter Akinola.

The Global South said it would not be coming to the Conference unless the American Church's gay Bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire — and those who consecrated him — are disciplined.

Williams has excluded Robinson from the conference in a vain bid to placate the conservatives, but Robinson (who abandoned his wife and children for his current male partner) has made it his business to be in London while it is on, thus exploiting the thirst of the media for rows in high places.

The focus of the battle is Robinson's Episcopal Church of the USA, not large, but commanding disproportionate social prestige and great wealth.

Two years ago in Lagos, Akinola consecrated Martyn Minns, the conservative Episcopal rector of a small town in Virginia, as the first Bishop of the new Convocation of Anglicans in North America, which now provides a refuge for those opposed to the Robinson-type liberals.

This week supporters of Robinson flocked to a London church to hear him preach. But in the congregation was a posse of conservatives, one of whom stood up and harangued the controversial bishop when he rose to speak.

When he sought to go on, the conservatives began a slow hand-clap. A hymn was quickly announced while stewards ushered them to the door.

Archbishop Williams, of course, would prefer that Robinson keep quiet. That is the way it used to be, for homosexual clergy are no new phenomenon.

But they used to be discreet. A handful of the current Anglican bishops are known homosexuals, but they do not flaunt it. The problem is that today's homosexual lobby is not content with mere legality. For the Anglicans the tragedy is that the collision has been upgraded into an institutional clash.

The Church of Ireland, under fire from the homosexual lobby for teetering along the top of the fence, refuses to ordain practising homosexuals, the line laid down at the last Lambeth Conference in 1998. But the issue is not as clear-cut as the majority might wish. History discloses that same-sex unions took place in Ireland, with all the normal marital symbols — and the participation of a priest — in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.

In our own time are numerous tragedies. Alan Turing was the ultimate computing genius of Bletchley Park, solving the puzzles that laid bare the secrets of the Germans' Enigma codes and probably contributing more than any other boffin to winning the Second World War. But Turing faced a court appearance on a homosexual charge in 1954 and chose, at the early age of 42, to eat an apple he had injected with cyanide. Apple Macintosh's logo survives as the modern industry's tribute.