Justin Jellyby

If you have read Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House, I am sure you recall the character of Mrs. Jellyby. If you are not acquainted with this figure of Dickensian satire, then allow me to introduce her to you.

Mrs. Jellyby is a very wealthy woman, but a stupidly selective philanthropist. She devotes her time and energy and her husband’s resources to establishing a mission to the poor in Africa, whilst ignoring the needs of her family and neighbourhood. So generous is her foreign aid, she ends up bankrupting Mr. Jellyby. Her eyes, though “handsome”, are aptly described as having “a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off… as if… they could see nothing nearer than Africa!” If she were real and alive today, she would no doubt be cancelled for her full-blown case of ‘White Saviour Syndrome’, after a David Lammy-led Twitter/X pile-on.

Looking at her surname, I am sure you would agree that it bears a remarkable similarity to the last name of the disgraced Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. The resemblance does not stop there, however. Welby too, is afflicted by the same Weltanschauung from which Mrs. Jellyby suffers. He is the man whose gaze keenly stretched back in time and across space to the horrible tragedies of the transatlantic slave trade, and with righteous indignation at the Church of England’s alleged investment in it, authorised a £100 million reparations fund. Yet many of his parish churches cannot afford urgent repairs to church buildings, overworked and stressed-out vicars are paid on average a Bob Cratchit-like pittance and cathedrals are having to charge entry fees to stay open.

But that is not all. While pontificating from his seat in the House of Lords on subjects of an international scale, such as Brexit, the Rwanda Scheme, airstrikes against Islamic State and the global trade system, Welby was busy overlooking his moral obligations within his own backyard. According to the recently published Makin Report into the decades of abuse perpetrated by the Anglican lay reader John Smyth against boys and young men, Welby knew at least by 2013 of this abuse and yet failed to act on this information. Despite promising to, he has never met with the victims of Smyth, whose depth of sadism makes Messrs Creakle, Squeers and Thwackum look like a bunch of child-doting liberals.

Welby initially resisted resigning but eventually did so after enormous pressure from within the Church and the media forced his hand. That was tactless enough, but Welby has managed to add to the suffering of the victims he has betrayed with a spectacularly insensitive resignation speech in the Lords last Thursday. What he managed to serve up to his fellow parliamentarians was a light-hearted farewell without any proper acknowledgement of Smyth’s victims. If you have the fortitude, you can listen to him prattling on here.

With a supercilious rhetorical style reminiscent of the saponaceous Reverend Chadband (another caricature in Bleak House), Welby opened with the joke that, if you want to make God laugh, make plans for the future. He riffed further on the theme of his plans interrupted by his resignation, saying that “If you pity anyone, pity my poor diary secretary”, whose work organising 2025’s appointments has gone up in smoke. Was the Archbishop really suggesting that he ought not to resign after all because it will prevent him from doing all the nice, virtuous stuff his poor, hard-pressed secretary once had in store for him? You would be forgiven for thinking so. None of these gambits provoked more than restrained laughter from a few in the sparsely attended chamber. The most appropriate reaction was the face-palming shame of the Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally, palpably discomforted by her soon-to-be ex-boss’s gross levity.

He then compared himself to one of his predecessors, Simon of Sudbury, who, in 1381, was beheaded by rebels during the Peasants’ Revolt for his role in introducing the Poll Tax, and with whose head the rebels played football. Why such a comparison? To reinforce the point that “whether one is personally responsible or not… there is only, in this case, one head that rolls well enough”. In other words, Welby thinks his head had metaphorically to roll, not because it is unequivocal that he was guilty of neglecting abuse victims, but because someone had to pay the price for the abuse scandal, and he was the convenient scapegoat. What he should have said is what Smyth’s victims know extremely well: that he is personally responsible for failing to ensure justice was done, that he oversees an institution that has not carried out its safeguarding duties with regard to Smyth, that he is deeply ashamed of this and that his resignation is the right response.

Since giving the speech, Welby has issued an apology. But he has issued so many apologies about the Smyth case and his sins of omission concerning it that they have become meaningless. With Dickensian precision, he has become the caricature of the clerical hypocrite. For was it not Welby who, in 2013 – the same year he learned about the flagellant, flagitious Smyth – lectured on the notion of justice at a Tackling Poverty Conference, where he said that the problem of justice for the weak is that it is all too often subverted by the powerful? He also stated in that speech that justice cannot be replaced by “religious observance or pious comment”:

Indeed, your Grace, indeed.

It is time this entitled Etonian took a lesson from the eremites of his faith, retired fully from public life and devoted himself to charitable acts. Yes, he could do a ‘John Profumo’ and do the washing up for an East End charity. Whoever replaces him needs to be and sound like a person of faith, not a third-rate public relations technocrat. That person needs to have a good track record in dealing with abuse cases within his or her diocese, and be prepared to entrust safeguarding in the CofE to a truly independent body. Someone like Helen-Ann Hartley, the Bishop of Newcastle, methinks?

Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020). First published on the New Conservative.