How ‘woke’ Welby was undone

Archbishop of Canterbury, who resigned on Tuesday, started his tenure well but secrets he brought to job proved damaging

Fat Pope, thin Pope. That is the adage. It means that you choose your next leader on the basis of how they differ from their predecessor. And Justin Welby was certainly very different from the bearded, scholarly Rowan Williams. Rowan was not really a company man. He preferred books to meetings. He led in poetry not in prose.
And Welby was something else entirely. A man of God, of course. But a CEO. His God was more earnest, more procedural. Under his tenure, the Church of England came to be centralised, run through top-down initiatives, the parishes understood as mere outposts of the will of the diocese and the archbishop’s central team.
He spoke of Paula Vennells, the now-disgraced Post Office chief executive, as someone who had “shaped my thinking over the years”. His supporters would say that the grown-ups were now in charge. What an irony then that it was a failure of the centre, a failure of proper procedure, that brought him down.
He started well. In the wake of the Occupy movement, a man who had sat on the 2012 Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, and who knew his way around a boardroom, seemed more suited to the times than an otherworldly scholar. Installed in March 2013, within a few months he had banged heads together sufficiently to push the women bishops legislation over the line. The church breathed a huge sigh of relief that this matter had finally been sorted.
But Welby came to Canterbury carrying secrets. First, that of his parentage. It was only in 2016 that he discovered Gavin Welby wasn’t his father, and that his mother had had a brief relationship with Churchill’s private secretary. Welby never even met this man, but it was through him that he was to be linked with historic slave owning in Jamaica.
Welby received much praise for the brave and open way he dealt with discovering his family history – but divided opinion for the way in which he went about tackling the church’s historic links with slavery.
“Woke” became an unexpected tag that began to follow him around, though he was never really any sort of Left-wing radical. Earnest, yes. Roundhead not Cavalier, certainly. But he wasn’t political in any sort of strict ideological sense.
But the most damaging of his secrets went back to the 1980s, when he was associated with the Christian camps for public school boys where John Smyth brutally assaulted young men. Etonian and conservative evangelical, Welby was yet to be ordained when all this started, but he was well within the circle of trust that kept the knowledge of Smyth’s repulsive behaviour from getting out.
The explosive Makin Report said it was “unlikely” he knew nothing of what went on. And the extent of his knowledge at that time may never be fully uncovered. But what did for Welby was what happened after he became archbishop in 2013. Greeting him on his desk were the full details of his friend’s disgraceful crimes.
Welby should have known that his personal connection with Smyth made him vulnerable, and, morally, he must have appreciated how serious this matter was. But Welby did very little about it until Channel 4 blew the lid off the whole thing four years later. In this period, young men continued to be abused. Had Welby acted sooner, many would not have continued to be abused. This was why he had to go.
Why did he not act sooner? One bishop said to me recently that it is hard to appreciate the volume of workload that bishops have to deal with and the fullness of their diaries. This may seem a generous reading of what happened, but it is not really. Archbishops often have their heads turned by the glamour of foreign visits, of which Welby has made many.
They enjoy being feted by thousands of adoring churchgoers within the worldwide Anglican communion. Their egos are massaged by behaving as statesmen on the world stage. And they prefer all this to dealing with angry victims of abuse in a little church in Stockport.
In the end, the very considerable needs of the Church of England have to take second fiddle. Ordinary hard-pressed vicars feel massively under-appreciated. Long before Makin, Welby had gained a reputation for not caring enough about the bread-and-butter issues of the parish church.
Welby may still be remembered for some of the good he did. He held the nation together during the Queen’s funeral, for instance. But in the end, it was his failure to attend to the detail and not care enough about people who were crying out for something to be done for victims of abuse in the church that did for him.
On the logic of thin pope, fat pope, this is the most vital thing that the next archbishop will have to address. We need an archbishop that is able to connect with the basic spiritual (and not political) instincts of the English people, who should be his – or her, perhaps – first priority.
It is the tragedy of Welby that he failed to do precisely this. And because of it, when the assisted dying legislation came before Parliament, for instance – a matter of deep concern to the church – our bishops were in hiding from the press. Welby’s failure will have lasting consequences for our nation.