Maybe I should have agreed to take the job of controller of BBC One when Bill Cotton offered it to me. I do feel a wimp; I would have been the first woman in the job.What do you consider your greatest achievement? I don’t really claim credit, I hope, for helping to launch Childline and the Silver Line and Silver Stories. It is an achievement that they all exist, but that is down to their amazing teams.

Too many things to mention.

Nothing. Without my past I wouldn’t be who I am today.

My surname. You have no idea how many versions I’ve read and heard. It was especially irritating during my Abba years. You can imagine someone calling our hotel and saying: “I’d like to speak to one of the guys in Abba.” Who do you think the receptionist called, Andersson or Ulvaeus?

Ultimately, it’s a man who was teaching us English Literature in what we call matricula, the last 2 years of high school. He really was quite extraordinary. When he spoke of a Shakespearean play, you almost thought that he grew up with Shakespeare! He was very good, yes. A black guy who was fantastic and gave us a deep love for literature.

We received death threats, yes, but you see when you are in a struggle, there are going to have to be casualties, and why should you be exempt? But I often said, “Look, here, God, if I’m doing your work, then you jolly well are going to have to look after me!” And God did God’s stuff.

It is that you know that you are standing out in this crowd because you are being carried on the shoulders of others. You know, you may have the capacity to articulate their aspirations. That is maybe something special you might have. But what is a leader without followers? I mean you would have all of these interviews and people will not — would not necessarily want to follow. No, I am a great believer in the fact that everything is corporate. Everything is corporate and you — as a leader you are one who can coax the best out of others.

I used to be “Mister Disinvestment.” Now I would like to be Mister Investment and say, “Come! Come and be part of an exciting, exhilarating process. Come in! Come in on the ground floor and see a people do something that’s probably never happened before, people seeking to become something radically different from what their antecedents would have made us believe they were likely to become.

There will always be so many who might say, “Ah, he’s a politician masquerading as an archbishop.” Politics is so all-pervasive, and in my theology, obviously, all of life belongs to God, and you don’t have compartments, this is your economic life, this is your political life, this is your religious life. Religion encompasses all of those. But yes, I wouldn’t myself have said I was setting out to be a political animal.

I stopped being a teacher when the South African Government introduced a deliberately inferior education for blacks called Bantu education, and I felt I wasn’t ready to collaborate with this apology for an educational system. Our children, the 1976 kids who revolted against apartheid in Soweto, called it “gutter education,” and it was gutter education. I left teaching. Of course, I didn’t have too many option, and mercifully, the Bishop of Johannesburg at that time accepted me for training for the priesthood. So I came to the priesthood, as it were, by default.