Justin Welby has discovered who his genetic father really was – isn’t uncertainty better?

A few things come to mind as a result of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s bombshell revelation that his father was not, after all, Gavin Welby, but the late Sir Anthony Montague Browne – a discovery he made by dint of Charles Moore, of this paper, and his conversations with members of Sir Anthony’s family.

One reaction is something like admiration for his mother, Jane, who, at the age of 86, has had unexpectedly to enter an entirely new world, that of the self-exposure which is endemic in her grandchildren’s generation but most certainly wasn’t in hers. She has, she says in her riveting piece in the Telegraph, had to clarify the circumstances of her son’s conception because of his present position. So, we can only imagine the effort it took for a member of the reticent generation to write the following:

‘Although my recollection of events is patchy, I now recognise that during the days leading up to my very sudden marriage and fuelled by a large amount of alcohol on both sides, I went to bed with Anthony Montaue Browne.