| Justin Welby is due to step down as the archishop of Canterbury when he turns 70 in January 2026. In 2022, when he was asked about whether he intended to serve until the mandatory retirement age, he said: “It’s not about me, it’s what’s best for the church. I will certainly take advice, and if my health is good and people are happy that I’m still there, then I’ll still be there.” But now, after a long-awaited independent review led by former social services director Keith Makin concluded that it was “unlikely” that Welby knew nothing of concerns about John Smyth (above), the question of what is best for the church looks like a very difficult one. “Welby is under a huge amount of pressure,” Harriet Sherwood said. “He has repeatedly apologised. But for many of the survivors of Smyth’s abuse, that is not enough.” What did Smyth do? The public view of Smyth in the 1970s and 80s was as a crusader for traditional “values”. He was a senior QC who represented Mary Whitehouse in a blasphemy case against Gay News (over a poem about a centurion’s love for Christ) and a gross indecency case over a play that depicted a man being raped. “He was a very powerful and charismatic figure,” said Harriet. The truth about Smyth was horrifically different. Smyth was the chair of the Iwerne Trust, a group that ran Christian camps in Dorset. He groomed boys who he met through those camps, many of them pupils at the private school Winchester college, and violently beat them in the garden shed of his family home. His own seven-year-old son was among his victims, believed to number about 130 in total. One survivor said he received more than 1,000 strokes with a cane on a single occasion; some had to wear nappies to contain the bleeding. This description is only the most superficial account of a years-long pattern of sadistic abuse. “Many of the victims were unsurprisingly deeply traumatised,” Harriet said. “Some tried to take their own lives.” Winchester college cut all ties with Smyth in 1982, but they did not report him to the authorities. With no blemish to his reputation, he moved to Zimbabwe and later South Africa, where he appears to have continued his abusive behaviour. He was charged but never convicted of the manslaughter of a 16-year-old boy who had attended one of his summer camps. After the Channel 4 investigation, the Crown Prosecution Service concluded in August 2018 that Smyth had a case to answer in the UK; he died, of an apparent heart attack, in South Africa the same month. How did the church handle the scandal? In 2012, one of Smyth’s victims reached out to a fellow survivor who was an officer of the Church of England and asked for help. Welby was confirmed as archbishop of Canterbury a year later; by July of that year, a church safeguarding adviser was aware of at least three victims, and possibly five or six others. “That’s the critical point,” Harriet said. “Welby was informed, and so were other senior figures. But they didn’t tell the authorities in the UK or South Africa. And between 2013 and [Smyth’s] death five years later, he continued to present a threat. He didn’t have to face up to what he’d done, and he didn’t face any consequences.” The allegations against Smyth were not made public until three years later. While there is no excuse for Winchester college’s failure to notify the authorities in the 1980s, Harriet said: “It was typical of the time – there was perhaps not a reckoning with the way that people carry abuse and trauma through their whole lives. But that was just not an excuse in 2013. It was widely understood and accepted by then how damaging this kind of abuse could be. “When you talk to survivors – and I’ve talked to a lot – they say that the cover-up, and not being listened to, is as large a part of the trauma for them as the abuse itself.” Why is Welby under pressure? Welby’s connection to the scandal stretches back well before he became the archbishop of Canterbury. Welby was a volunteer at the same holiday camps where Smyth groomed some of his victims in the 1970s, and the Makin review notes two critical claims that he would have had at least some sense of Smyth’s actions. Makin writes that a “contributor to this review” said that in 1978 they had overheard Welby having a “grave” conversation about Smyth with the Rev Mark Ruston, who would later produce a report about Smyth’s abuse for Winchester college. And Welby acknowledged to Makin that in 1981 he was told by the rector of a church in Paris where Smyth brought a group of boys en route to a skiing trip in France that he was “really not a nice man” and that “one of the boys had a chat with me”. Welby insists that he has no recollection of the 1978 conversation and that he put the 1981 warning down to “incompatible personalities”. But the Makin review concludes: | 