Here Eye goes again

her we go again, again

When Welby resigned and Ian Hislop published a gloat about snubbing him I wrote to the Eye to complain. They published a short version of the letter, and told me I was the only reader to take Welby’s side. Sure enough there were four or five letters condemning him above mine. All of them took for granted that he had covered up guilty knowledge which would have enabled Smyth to be stopped if it had been revealed. I know Makin says or implies as much, but it simply isn’t true.

In the aftermath of the interview with Laura Kuenssberg, the Eye had another go. It claimed that

“The briefing from the then bishop of Ely, Stephen Conway, in August 2013 detailed multiple victims and was corroborated by four sources. This raises the question of why Bishop Conway, who had access to even more information than Welby, still remains in post.”

This bears all the marks of Graham’s campaign against Stephen Conway, and it’s just nuts. For one thing, the briefing — presumably the letter from Conway to the Bishop of Table Bay, cc:ed to Lambeth — does not “detail multiple victims”. It gives a detailed account of one of them — the vicar of the Iwerne Church in Cambridge, who had been manoeuvred by Graham into disclosing his abuse. Others are mentioned or implied, but with no detail at all. The four sources corroborating the facts of Smyth’s abuse appear to be John Thorne’s memoir of Winchester, the memoir of Henry Olunga and — well, only those two.

All this is perfectly easily checked by anyone who reads the Makin report, where the whole letter is reproduced in the appendices. Why does the Eye writer not do this?

As usual in this campaign, the accusation completely ignores the question of what more Conway could have done than he actually did. This bring us back to the repeated allegation that Welby and Conway “could have stopped Smyth”. This is separate from the claim that they could have “brought him to justice”, which I think is disproved by the repeated refusal of the British police and the South African authorities to act on the information that was repeatedly passed on to them.

We run up here against one of the more ghastly truths of the whole story. The physical abuse — the beatings — which made Smyth infamous seem to have stopped after the murder of Guide Nyacheru. When he surfaced in South Africa again he had reverted to being the kind of creepy old man he had first appeared to be in Winchester decades before — one who took a morbid interest in the sex lives of adolescent boys but who never carried this forward to the point of touching them. The two things are both wrong but only one is criminal and to call them both “abuse” blurs the really important distinction between them and serves to conceal, as it is meant to do, the central fact that neither Welby nor Conway knew anything about the beatings while they were taking place and that neither man had ever been in a position to stop them.

The one man who really could have stopped Smyth, it seems to me, was Jamie Colman, whose wife Sue was for a while the safeguarding officer at HTB. The Colmans were absolutely at the heart of the HTB/Iwerne network, whereas Stephen Conway had never heard of the Iwerne camps when Smyth’s abuse was reported to him. The Colmans subsidised Smyth’s operations in Zimbabwe and it appears from the Coltart report that they had been told what he was up to there, and chose not to believe it. Indeed they made every effort to exculpate John Smyth. For instance, this passage from the report, before the murder of Guide Nyacheru but after months of effort by concerned Christians — including Smyth’s own brother in law — to get the camps shut down.

It really is extremely odd to blame Stephen Conway for any of that.

Private Eye does noble work but it does also have a history of deranged attacks on named churchmen. Back in the mists of time it had a gay alcoholic correspondent called David Johnson who had a column under the pseudonym of The Devil which specialised in attacking other priests as gay, alcoholic, or both. That was shut down after a libel suit, and Johnson’s own ministry came to an end after he fell, dead drunk, into the grave of a parishioner whose funeral he was conducting. I only met him once, when he stationed himself behind me in the press gallery at Church House where he then worked (for he had been a promising young man at Oxford Cambridge¹) and supplied a running commentary on every speaker that made me feel like Hamlet’s father, with poison dripped endlessly into my ear.

Then there is AN Wilson’s vendetta against David Jenkins who he repeatedly and quite untruthfully claims to have said that the Resurrection was just a conjuring trick with bones.

The attacks on Welby, and on Conway, seem to belong in the same lineage. There is another story in this week’s issue about the case of Phil Aspinall, a paedophile priest in Coventry, who was exposed by Nick Davies of the Guardian in 1998. It’s worth reading Nick Davies’s story as an example of the sort of detailed, careful, and utterly damning reporting so conspicuously absent from contemporary church coverage.

Aspinall, now 73, has just been sentenced to 23 years in prison for offences committed more than 25 years ago, when he was a non-stipendiary minister in Coventry. Private Eye has lifted up the case again, and illustrated it — but of course — with a picture of Justin Welby, whose only connection with it is that he was a patron of an organisation for Christians in Secular Ministry with which Aspinall worked after the Bishop of Coventry had — too late — removed his PTO.

1. Thanks for this correction to the reader (known unto God) who sent me this extraordinary obit from the Church Times.