Many are still questioning the enthusiasm with which newspapers have implicated Archbishop Justin Welby, as a young man, in the abusive activities of a Christian camp leader for whom he was working. This line from the Daily Telegraph is typical: ‘Archbishop Welby is said to have gained much of his early grounding in Christian doctrine from the Iwerne holiday camps, where boys were recruited for John Smyth’s sadomasochistic cult.’
The Roman historian Tacitus (d. c. AD 117) was a master of this sort of insinuation, in which ‘is said’ (as used above) exculpates the writer from responsibility for the statement, and the relative clause ‘where…’ associates the young Welby with a cult of sadomasochism as if ‘recruitment’ to that ‘cult’ (note the religious implication) were the camp’s real purpose. Consider how Tacitus wrote about the death of Augustus, the first Roman emperor.
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