Justin Welby is in a corner over the case of George Bell

It is quite unnecessary and truly sad that the Archbishop of Canterbury has painted himself into a corner over the case of George Bell, the heroic, long-dead Bishop of Chichester. Last week, several historians who have studied Bell wrote to him to say that the Carlile report (which the Archbishop had himself commissioned) had clearly shown that the church’s procedures in finding that Bell had abused a girl in the late 1940s were shockingly deficient. Archbishop Welby replied to them this week, emotionally, but without answering their point. He compared the case of Bell with that of Peter Ball, the former Bishop of Gloucester, who had many powerful defenders who thought they knew him well, but was rightly convicted of abusing young men and sent to prison. There is no similarity, because the evidence against Ball was huge, and that against Bell is negligible. The Archbishop says how important it is to take accusations of child abuse seriously.