Here we go again

on Justin Welby's TV interview

I have no idea why Justin Welby decided to give a farewell interview to Laura Kuenssberg or what he thought it would accomplish. All it has achieved is to cement the false narrative that he was somehow responsible for John Smyth’s abuse and in some sense complicit in it.

To take the reasonably neutral Guardian coverage: “The independent review by Keith Makin – in which he highlighted significant failings and proposed recommendations to improve safeguarding practices in the church – concluded that Smyth could have been brought to justice had the archbishop formally reported allegations to the police a decade ago.”

This is almost true, but the important point is surely that Makin was wrong. He was wrong both in the rather tortured claim that Smyth had not been reported formally to the police, when in fact he was to be reported to six separate police forces in this country and wrong in the underlying assumption that he could have been “brought to justice” if a report was made.

But the whole story depends on the pretence that the Church is an organisation in which the Archbishop has real power over people; as Laura Kuenssberg’s own writeup puts it:

“For more than 10 years he was the leader of the Church of England, the moral guide for a community of more than 80 million worshippers worldwide. His job was one of the most influential and important jobs in our country, stitched into the fabric of our national life, into the Royal Family, Parliament, and small-p politics.”

“The moral guide for a community of more than 80 million worshippers worldwide” – so many falsehoods fitted together in only thirteen words. He’s not a moral guide; there are not 80m Anglican worshippers but possibly half as many at a stretch; half of them are in formal schism, and they do not form a community.”

The Independent’s editorial was strikingly unfair and pompous: “The former archbishop has to live with the fact that he failed to stop the child abusers, failed to secure justice for hundreds of victims and survivors, and left the Anglican Church in an even weaker state than it was when he took over in 2012.”

“Failed to stop the child abusers” – but all the cases causing scandal are historic. They had all stopped by the time he took office, and the measures he took to prevent such things happening again seem to have been entirely successful. “Failed to secure justice for hundreds of victims and survivors”. He’s not part of the criminal justice system and it is never stated in these sweeping allegations what justice he, or any Archbishop, could secure. If he’s to be criticised for anything in that line it is that he failed to secure justice for the memory of Bishop Bell but instead behaved with as little balance as the journalists now persecuting him.

There is what seems to me a straightforward lie in the next quote: “Under invigilation by Ms Kuenssberg, he remains uncomfortable about the fact, freely admitted, that he had known, and known of, at least some of the allegations made against Smyth before and after he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013.” This sounds very damning until you give it a moment’s thought. Again, the effort is made to suggest that he had guilty knowledge that he should have acted on. But he did not. He had been given an extremely vague warning long before his ordination that Smyth was to be avoided. He did not know anything about the allegations in detail until the Channel Four broadcast.

No one of course will ever criticise Channel Four for failing to inform the police of what they knew for years about Smyth, nor for trying to bring him only to trial by television and not to the dreary unfilmable rigours of the law.

Then of course there was the inevitable survivor to claim that Welby had traumatised him more by inaction than Smyth had by flogging him. I know which I would rather suffer.

James Marriott, in the Times, was merely snide. Welby, he said, was a mediocrity with a shapeless paunch and no experience of real life. Welby has several times been held up at gunpoint by men prepared to kill him. I know this can’t compare for horror with being asked to see your boss for a little chat about your expenses and the other hazards of a leader writer’s life, but even so.

Only the Daily Express struck a note of realism: “BBC fans fumed for Laura Kuenssberg to "move on" today as one interview took up half of the time on her Sunday morning show [when] she interviewed former Archbishop of Canterbury.