On Justin Welby

Former Archbishop tells BBC: ‘I got it wrong’

Justin Welby, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has told the BBC that he failed to follow up abuse allegations because the scale of the problem was ‘absolutely overwhelming’, adding that this was ‘a reason – not an excuse’.

Welby, 68, has told Laura Kuenssberg in a pre-recorded interview to be broadcast on Sunday that: ‘Every day more cases were coming across the desk that had been in the past, hadn't been dealt with adequately, and this was just, it was another case – and yes I knew Smyth but it was an absolutely overwhelming few weeks. It was overwhelming, one was trying to prioritise - but I think it's easy to sound defensive over this. The reality is I got it wrong. As Archbishop, there are no excuses.’

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The Makin review found that Welby ‘could and should’ have reported the lifelong child abuser John Smyth, whom Welby knew, to the police in 2013. It also criticised the Church of England for failing to do enough to prevent the ‘horrific’ abuse which took place until Smyth died in 2018.

The interview comes after abuse survivors were left ‘disgusted’ at Welby’s December speech in the upper house following his resignation, as the BBC reported at the time.

In the seemingly tone deaf speech, the old Etonian peer appeared to ignore the plight of abuse survivors, made several attempts at jokes, and said: ‘The reality is that there comes a time if you are technically leading a particular institution or area of responsibility where the shame of what has gone wrong – whether one is personally responsible or not – must require a head to roll. And there is only, in this case, one head that rolls well enough.’ He added: ‘If you pity anyone…pity my poor diary secretary.’

Mark Stibbe, who was groomed and repeatedly beaten by Smyth in the 1970s, responded by saying: ‘I object to the use of such a frivolous tone in such a serious matter - a matter that has been, and continues to be, a matter of life and death to some.’

In his interview this weekend, Welby also implies that society and the media are too inclined to judge, and judge quickly, saying ‘there is a rush to judgement’. He says: ‘I think there is a rush to judgement, there is this immense - and this goes back half a century – immense distrust for institutions and there's a point where you need institutions to hold society together. There's an absence, I'm not talking about safeguarding here, there is an absence of forgiveness; we don't treat our leaders as human. We expect them to be perfect. If you want perfect leaders you won't have any leaders.’

Justin Welby is a complicated individual. I knew him a tiny bit while he was Archbishop, travelling to the Holy Land with him, interviewing him, receiving Communion from him and at one point being commissioned to write a biography of him which I aborted after it became clear he would not cooperate.

Welby suffered the sudden death of his daughter and was threatened by gun-toting Nigerian rebels, before facing the professional challenge of his unusual life as he tried to steer the 77-million strong Anglican church through potentially fatal divisions over sexuality and gender since he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013.

Welby, who has spoken of mental health struggles and is said by some to be depressed now, suffered a nervous breakdown following the death more than 40 years ago of his seven-month-old daughter in a car accident in France. The accident and its aftermath, described as a ‘very dark time’ by Welby, sparked the conversion of the then 27-year-old, high flying oil executive from the City to the church.

He was embraced tightly by the controversial, charismatic and evangelical Holy Trinity Brompton [HTB] church in west London, known for its social illiberalism and where the future Archbishop was already serving as a lay leader. Publicly, Welby has gradually moved towards a more liberal and ecumenical outlook, with Welby naming Benedictine and Franciscan orders as well as Catholic social teaching as his main spiritual influence as he oversaw the introduction of women bishops.

But Welby always retained ties with the influential and wealthy leadership of HTB, where he himself is known still to visit. HTB has received generous donations from Paul Marshall, the co-owner of GB News, and owner of the Spectator and UnHerd.

Welby’s establishment past as a ‘goodie-goodie’ at Eton and Cambridge, where he came to faith, and his continuing evangelical connections, are well documented. His great uncle was Rab Butler, the former Tory deputy prime minister and his mother, Jane Portal was private secretary to Winston Churchill. Yet his stepfather is a Labour peer and as a new Archbishop Welby lambasted the state of modern capitalism at the former Treasury select committee chair Andrew Tyrie’s impressive parliamentary commission on banking.

His background is unconventional, however: Welby’s parents divorced three years after his birth in London; his father Gavin, the son of Jewish German immigrants, was an entrepreneur and alleged bootlegger of whisky during the American prohibition who had a fling with Vanessa Redgrave and is said to have introduced Jack Kennedy to one of the former president’s first mistresses.

Welby handed in his notice to the City-based oil exploration company in 1987, telling his dismayed boss that he had been headhunted, not by a rival firm but ‘by God’. He went, as he put it, ‘kicking and screaming’ into training for church ministry before being ordained a decade later and appointed to Coventry Cathedral, where he became director of the International Centre for Reconciliation. Welby continued to wear a cross made from nails found in the cathedral when it was bombed during the Second World War. Welby’s conflict resolution role took him to Nigeria, where he showed his calm under fire as he was bundled into a speedboat, soldiers circling with machine guns in helicopters amid a peace mission for the church. On a separate occasion in 2005, Welby was stormed by the Nigerian army after negotiating with Al Qaeda and coolly used his mobile phone to tell a colleague that ‘in ten seconds’ the troops would take him, leaving his phone on so he could be traced. For two years Welby was repeatedly kidnapped as he sought reconciliation between Shell and the Ogoni people in south-east Nigeria. The role brought him into conflict with the Ogoni militia, who blind-folded Welby and took him by speedboat to the dangerous creeks of the Niger Delta.

That Welby had courage is not in doubt. But as Laura Kuenssberg has pointed out this morning, Welby is the first Archbishop to resign over abuse inside his church in more than 1,000 years. His reign, though he faced the same endless challenges over sex and gender, was in marked contrast to that of his predecessor Rowan Williams, about whom I wrote a long interview-profile for the New Statesman at Christmas in 2008. Where Rowan quietly provided contemporary moral leadership with infrequent but striking interventions, as he showed again with this pre spring statement piece on the pursuit of economic growth at all costs, Welby flitted around from subject to subject – headline to headline – and never quite hit home.

To be fair, Welby occasionally spoke out courageously and against the prevailing British mood on asylum seekers. But he never really developed strong and consistent themes. He could, for example, have become a voice for community cohesion and against selfishness during Covid, but he did not. Indeed, as Marina Hyde wrote of Welby’s time as Archbishop: ‘During the years he knew about many British victims of Smyth, Welby found time to address a vast range of topics. The legitimacy of fear in the Brexit debate, Bake Off, the gig economy, usury, reality TV, credit unions, the iniquities of the global trade system, airstrikes against Islamic State, the broken economic model…All of these things – and so many more – over which Welby had no operational control were given a hose-down of his reflections, while Smyth moved on to abusing at least 85 more boys (at current estimate) in African nations. This was a horror that Welby could have actually done something direct to prevent.’

On a lighter note and by way of a tiny footnote, though his faith is absolutely not in doubt, bizarrely enough another area Welby appeared to avoid speaking about strongly, on one occasion, at least, was the tenet at the heart of Christianity and what it should be all about: The Resurrection. Ironically, Dr Williams, who is wrongly seen as ‘liberal’ on such areas, is in fact a very orthodox Christian for whom there is no messing about when it comes to the fundamental doctrines.

Now he’s gone from Lambeth Palace and we can all have a laugh about the little episode, I can say that last Easter, as a freelance writer, I of all people was kindly asked – perhaps as well as several others – to have a go at ghost writing an article about BBC religion coverage by Welby for the Radio Times to coincide with his 2024 Easter Day broadcast from Canterbury Cathedral. In the end, a piece never appeared. Assuming that he, being evangelical, would appreciate a dose of the uncompromising stuff, I drafted the following, only to be told by an official that it was ‘too full on’, which was quite funny. In fairness, it probably was.

If someone had defeated death and unlocked the gates of eternal life for you, wouldn’t you want to tell the world about it?

That’s how I feel about Jesus Christ and the Resurrection. And it’s why I’m so grateful to the BBC for broadcasting my Easter sermon from Canterbury Cathedral. In doing so, the Corporation is keeping up an important commitment to religious content that goes back some hundred years.

After all, the appetite of viewers and listeners for faith broadcasting shows no sign of receding. Last year, some 18 million people in the UK – and many more millions overseas – watched the Coronation of King Charles, which was at its heart a religious church service in one of our most cherished places of worship, Westminster Abbey. His Majesty was quoting Jesus when he delivered his central message, that he came not to be served but to serve. More recently, many of us with a thirst for life’s meaning have been tuning into the BBC’s Pilgrimage series. In 2017, the BBC confirmed it was retaining the ‘important’ religion slot Thought for the Day on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme after one presenter called it ‘boring’. And even Ambridge, the fictional village in The Archers, has been divided in recent months, with listeners gripped over the controversial adult baptism of the late, villainous character Rob Titchener.

What’s it all about? For me, it’s all about this special time of year, actually the most important point in the Christian calendar: Easter. The reason that I’m so eager to talk about Easter is because it is the ultimate good news. For Jesus not only made it his mission to die an agonising, sacrificial death on the cross to save and redeem us all, out of immeasurable grace and love, from those times we have made mistakes. But on the third day he rose again. And the Resurrection is not just something that happened more than 2,000 years ago. Easter is in our midst, today. The living God holds the promise of life beyond death for us all, if we have faith. And if you do not yet believe, it is never too late to look into any welcoming church or pick up that dusty bible. As the Chinese proverb goes, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

I’ll let you into a secret: I’ve heard of a few very rightly respected church goers, even one or two church leaders, who privately do not have faith that the Resurrection took place at all. I have some sympathy, but in the end I say in all honesty: without that event, we might as well pack up and go home. For as Christianity’s opponents know, the Resurrection of Jesus is the key to the Christian faith, and to doubters I would recommend the book ‘Who Moved The Stone?’ which was written by a British journalist using the pseudonym Frank Morison. Morison was an atheist who set about trying to disprove the Resurrection, and ended up not only converting to the faith while writing the book, but producing one of the most compelling arguments disproving every other possibility. Something massive happened that spring day in Jerusalem, leading to the creation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and millions of churches around the world, and firing up the disciples to spread the gospel to the four corners of the earth.

So when the BBC Radio producer at Canterbury Cathedral presses the red button on my live sermon, I want to do my bit when it comes to spreading this sensational, revolutionary good news. In an age when death is one of the final taboos, and is seen as a terrifying medical failure, I want to try to help show that it is not the end. The reality of the Resurrection is that, as the late Queen so meaningfully said, ‘we will meet again’. This is not some niche, minority interest. Surely anyone who wants to see their loved ones on another, even more beautiful shore should take an interest in the Easter message.

Heaven’s gates are open wide. But what we do on this earth echoes in another place. The Resurrection, then, has implications this side of life, and encourages us to live as ‘Resurrection people’ with joy and grace, and with eternity in mind. So I do encourage you to take a fresh look at faith, not least through the BBC’s admirably consistent religious output. Contrary to conventional wisdom, religion is actually on the rise internationally, which is one of many reasons why the BBC is right to continue broadcasting about it. The truth is irrepressible.

I say to all Radio Times readers, then, take another look at the Christian faith, which offers you a fruitful life on this earth and the promise of life beyond it too. It will help you strike a balance between our dependency, which we are sometimes a bit awkward about in this modern, macho world, and freedom, which we all crave. Above all it will provide you with hope, joy, consolation in hard times, peace and love.

He is risen – and it changes everything.