The fiasco over the protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral has been a PR job for the Church of England roughly on a par with that of Rowan Atkinson’s befuddled vicar in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Presented with an opportunity, right on its doorstep, to re-state Christian values in a 21st century context, the good clerics of the cathedral blew it. They got bogged down in health and safety issues, closed the cathedral doors, agonised over whether to invoke the law, then seemingly gave it all up as a bad job and started resigning in droves.

First Giles Fraser, the Canon Chancellor, quit last Thursday, fretting that an eviction of the protesters could result in violence. Then Fraser Dyer, a chaplain, left, irked at the Church’s decision to push for legal action against the protesters. Then the Right Rev Graeme Knowles, Dean of St Paul’s, resigned, deeming himself "no longer the right person to lead the Chapter of this great cathedral". All these Christian soldiers so eager to fall on their own swords – it almost makes you admire those politicians who cling to their positions so doggedly in the face of controversy.

At risk of being an armchair cleric, it’s obvious how the Church should have responded to the Occupy protest. The churchfolk should have shaken their new tent-dwelling neighbours warmly by the hand and offered moral support. Yes, capitalism does look like a busted flush, they should have said. Yes, greed has been our economic downfall. Yes, the banks have a lot to answer for. And, yes, ordinary people are paying an unfair cost for that.

The clergy could even have supplied the answer to that oft-seen banner: "What would Jesus do?". Jesus would have reminded us all that "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God".

And having given their moral support to the Occupy protesters, the clergy should have told them they were free to wave their banners for a few days, after which they should re-pay the cathedral’s courtesy by pushing off and taking their tents with them.

For one thing was certain: however idealistic and well-meant this gathering was at the beginning, in the media glare it would become a magnet for every fun-seeker and fancy dress merchant with too much time on their hands.

The protesters have a right to make their protest. They don’t have an open-ended right to sequester a large chunk of central London and thereby deny enjoyment of it to the wider public. And if this all ends up in some Dale Farm-style ruckus, it will be the fault not of the Church, the City of London Corporation or the police, but the protesters themselves. The clergy should stiffen the sinews, man up and stop their hand-wringing on that question.

The rootless future is here

Years ago, on a brief study visit to the University of South Carolina, I was told about the media office of the future. Instead of having a desk to call our own, we would all work on lap tops, with wi-fi allowing us to "hot-desk" wherever we could find a spare seat – a rootless existence a little like spending your entire working day as a customer in Starbucks.

The future is here right now! The BBC’s MediaCityUK is full of hot-deskers. When you are not hot-desking, you can go to a "thought pod" – a covered two-seater enclave designed for brainstorming (and isn’t it sod’s law that the last place you will have a decent idea is somewhere specifically designed for that purpose?).

Best of all, these hot-deskers are denied a personal waste paper bin because, according to Peter Salmon, director of BBC North, this "makes people move round a bit more, collaborate a little bit more and get to know their colleagues".

Really? Or will it make the average hot-desker feel like a victim of social engineering every time they trudge across the office to dispose of a sandwich wrapper?

Clear and courageous

For years, there has been a misapprehension that the law was more likely to favour the burglar than the householder defending his home. This idea was stoked by the media - which made an unlikely hero of Norfolk farmer Tony Martin, jailed for shooting dead a burglar – and by politicians, who smelled votes in this subject.

But the time-honoured legal concept that we may use "reasonable force" against a burglar - never needed changing.

It simply needed to be applied clearly and courageously. Hats off, in that regard, to Chief Crown Prosecutor for the north west, Nazir Afzal. In his first few months, he has had to rule on three separate cases of men whose encounters with intruders each ended with the intruder’s death.

In all three cases, a speedy police investigation has been followed by a clear ruling that reasonable force was used and there should be no prosecution.

Wednesday whinge

After tortuous negotiations, and with the eurozone on the brink, a deal was struck for banks to take a 50 per cent loss on Greek bonds and for Athens to receive a 100bn euro loan.

In exchange, the potless Greeks would cop for some serious austerity.

Then what does Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou do when he gets home? He decides to let the people decide on the deal in a referendum. Perhaps, while he’s at it, he may want to ballot turkeys on the issue of Christmas.

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