Welby’s big mistake was believing that his flock behaved like Christians
I had just written what I thought would be the final sentence of these Jottings. It read ‘there can be no decision for him to make other than to resign’, when Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby bowed to the inevitable and announced he was off.
In his statement Welby said ‘having sought the gracious permission of His Majesty the King I have decided etc etc’.
What a scene of extreme hand wringing that must have been, two men of a certain age and class and both with form in the business of looking the other way when reports of abuse by clergy rear their ugly head. More on that later.
It is a sad end to Welby’s otherwise hugely successful career both in and out of the Church. I came to meet him in 2002 when he was a canon at Coventry Cathedral and in charge of its International Centre for Conciliation. His most pressing task was to bring peace to the Niger Valley where locals were at war with the Shell oil company.
He asked me to get coverage for his efforts and, thanks to an assortment of friends who had moved on to The Times (Danny McGrory and Michael Evans), and the Telegraph (Gordon Rayner), I did just that. What made the story interesting was that Welby had spent 11 years in the oil industry with Elf Aquitaine before ordination.
We were introduced through my friendship with his mother Jane and stepfather Charles Williams, biographer of Beaverbrook, among others. Justin came over as rather shy but determined and I had to haggle over my fee. He had clearly learned a lot from his days as a businessman.
Later, when Archbishop, we worked briefly on a Veterans’ charity with meetings at Lambeth Palace, one of the great Tudor houses with its 10 acres of gardens bang in the middle of London, across the river from Parliament and a short bus ride from the grime of the Elephant and Old Kent Road.
His immediate surroundings at Lambeth and Canterbury were more in line with his childhood privilege than the Old Kent Road. Mother Jane was niece of Lord Portal, Marshal of the RAF and Churchill’s wartime Chief of the Air Staff, and also of R A Butler, Tory Chancellor in the 1950s. After the war Jane was Churchill’s secretary and she told me that when the Beaver came to visit, as he did often, she would run the other way feigning an errand of great urgency.
The problem with Justin and many decent people like him is that they want to believe all Christians are, well, Christians. They are profoundly not, as the history of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland illustrates most tragically. So too the Anglican Church, as the case of the appalling paedophile sadist John Smyth now demonstrates. The Makin Report, released last week, exposed just how close Smyth and Welby were.
The pair stayed together ‘multiple times’ at (so-called) Christian summer camps in the 1970s and where many of Smyth’s savage beatings took place and where he joined boys in the shower. If Justin didn’t know it at the time, and you must make up your mind if he did or did not, he certainly did by 2013 but failed terribly to act on that knowledge. Dereliction of duty, pure and simple. That is what has brought him down in disgrace because he did nothing when he so patently should have.
I referred earlier to the King ‘Defender of the Faith’ having form in such matters. He certainly does as shown by his friendship with Peter Ball, the Bishop of Lewes from 1977-1992, who was jailed for the sexual abuse of 18 young men while bishop. An extraordinary campaign on Ball’s behalf was led by an unnamed royal, Tory cabinet ministers, a lord justice of appeal and public school headmasters. The Establishment in full cry.
When Ball was released from jail he was given a house in Somerset to live in for the rest of his days. The benefactor? Why, dear Prince Charles on whose Duchy of Cornwall estate the house is.
John Smyth and Bishop Ball, wicked child abusers with Friends in High Places.
*****
While on the subject of the Duchy of Cornwall, hats off to the Sunday Times and Channel 4 for their brilliant five-month investigation into the murky finances of the Duchy and that of Lancaster. Cornwall is now controlled by Prince William, and Lancaster by his father. In total they own 5,410 properties throughout the UK. From the 6,664 acres of Dartmoor to a lonely scout hut.
Most of the land was seized down the centuries by previous monarchs and never returned but inherited by the royal family. Under previously secret deals, neither duchy pays tax on their corporate profits from this 180,000-acre empire. Nor do they pay capital gains or have to comply with property laws such as compulsory purchase orders.
But what really offends is the fact that every property owned by the two duchies charges rent, including to the Army for use of training grounds. But aren’t our forces there to defend King and Country? And it’s not only the land: Charles and William own many rivers and the waters around us including the shores.
You may not know it, but we live in a fiefdom.
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So the Duke of York blinked first. Suddenly he has found the £1million (and the many millions needed in upkeep) to keep him and his ridiculous former wife in the 30-room Royal Lodge plus a cottage in the grounds. Luckily he won’t have to ask his nephew William for help now that William is campaigning to end homelessness.
But sometimes when one has accumulated dodgy foreign oligarch pals over years of a questionable ‘business career’ one may as well make the call. And Andy obviously made it.
ALAN FRAME
13 November 2024
