Justin welby

Letters: How to support the dying

Life support Sir: If the Terminally Ill (End of Life) Bill is passed into law we will have crossed the Rubicon. As the second reading vote on 29 November approaches, it is astonishing that we are hearing less debate than on the loss of the winter fuel payment. There should be the mother of all debates. The issues surrounding assisted dying are immensely complicated and the arguments for and against are powerful. On the one hand it may shorten and ease a dreadful death and on the other it may put pressure on the dying and be deficient in its application. However, the trite adage that hard cases make bad

Elon’s America, Welby’s legacy & celebrating Beaujolais Day

45 min listen

This week: welcome to Planet Elon. We knew that he would likely be a big part of Donald Trump’s second term, so it was unsurprising when this week Elon Musk was named – alongside entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy – as a co-leader of the new US Department of Government Efficiency, which will look at federal government waste. When Musk took over Twitter, he fired swathes of employees whose work was actively harming the company, so he’s in a perfect position to turn his sights on the bloated federal government. It is, writes Douglas Murray, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strip a whole layer of rot from the body politic. But can he

Charles Moore

Justin Welby shouldn’t have resigned

There is no proper reason for the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. No iniquity was proved against him. It has never been clear why, in the horrendous case of John Smyth, people thought the buck should stop with him. Smyth was never an Anglican priest (indeed, he was refused ordination), nor paid by the Church. When in England, he worked for the Iwerne Trust, an independent evangelical body. Most of the abuse Smyth perpetrated was when he took boys out from Winchester College to lunch with his family in the country nearby. In a hut in his garden, he beat the boys savagely, in the interests, he

Portrait of the week: Justin Welby resigns, interest rates cut and Trump announces appointments

Home Justin Welby resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury, after not reporting to the authorities what he knew in 2013 of the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth QC (who ran Christian summer camps in the 1970s and 1980s and died in 2018). An independent review by Keith Makin found last week that Smyth abused more than 100 young men and boys sexually and by beating. ‘When I was informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow,’ Mr Welby said. Gary Lineker, who had presented Match of the Day since 1999, agreed to stand down at the end of the season.

William Moore

After Welby: what’s next for the Church of England?

It’s taken him more than a decade, but Justin Welby has finally united the Church of England. The petition calling for him to resign over the findings of the Makin Review into the serial abuser John Smyth was set up by three clergymen who would normally disagree: Dr Ian Paul, Robert Thompson and Marcus Walker, the spirit animals of the C of E’s evangelical, liberal and High Church wings. ‘Over any other issue Ian Paul and Robert Thompson would practically be suggesting pistols at dawn across the Synod chamber,’ says one member of the General Synod. Yet they were united in their anger against the Archbishop of Canterbury and in their conviction

Welby resigns: crisis at the Church of England

18 min listen

After mounting pressure, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has resigned. His resignation comes days after a damning report into the child abuser John Smyth who was associated with the Church of England. Welby was apparently made aware of the allegations in 2013, yet Smyth died in 2018 before facing any justice. Since the report was published, Welby and the Church have faced questions about the failure to act and the lack of urgency. The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove joins Damian Thompson to discuss what Damian calls ‘not just a shocking moment in the history of the Church of England, but in the history of English Christianity’.   Produced by

Katy Balls

Justin Welby quits as Archbishop of Canterbury

13 min listen

Justin Welby has announced he is resigning as Archbishop of Canterbury over his handling of serial child abuser John Smyth. In a statement, he said ‘it is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024’. He says he believes stepping aside ‘is in the best interests of the Church of England’. Did he have to go? And who might replace him?  Also on the podcast, the assisted dying bill was published last night, 38 pages long, and will be debated in just under three weeks’ time. Keir Starmer admitted that he hasn’t decided yet which way way he

How liberal bishops are squeezing the life out of the Church of England

28 min listen

Can the Church of England escape from the deadly grip of bishops and bureaucrats who spend their entire time genuflecting to the metropolitan Left? Why does Archbishop Justin Welby wade obsessively into secular political battles when his churches are emptying? And do worshippers realise that eye-watering sums of money are being siphoned off from their parishes in order to fund worthless exercises in social engineering? In this episode of Holy Smoke, the Rev Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London, reveals the scale of the crisis facing the Established Church. His analysis is devastating. Among the subjects he addresses is the cultural cringe that

The remarkable story of how Justin Welby discovered the truth about his father

Jane Portal, as she was when she worked for Winston Churchill, died last week, aged 93. Lady Williams of Elvel, as she much later became, had an extraordinary life. I encountered her story by chance. In 2015, near us in Sussex, I was told that ‘of course’ (people love saying that when telling you a surprise) Jane Williams’s son, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was not the offspring of Gavin Welby, as the Archbishop believed, but of Sir Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s last private secretary. Of course he wasn’t, I said. I made further inquiries, however, and saw letters and heard testimony which began to persuade me. I also noticed

Did Sandi Toksvig think she could change Justin Welby’s views on gay sex?

An urgent ecumenical update: the conclave has taken place. The great community leader has descended from the summit of Sinai, bearing, not tablets of law, but sorrowful tidings. Yes: the Archbishop of Canterbury has ‘grabbed a coffee’ with Sandi Toksvig, following her twee plea for an audience a few months ago on the subject of the Church of England’s attitude to gay sex.  The good news is that the ‘long-promised coffee’ was ‘calm and considered,’ according to Toksvig. The bad news is that Sandi is sad: Justin Welby had to report, unsurprisingly to anyone paying the slightest attention, that any change in the Anglican Communion’s stance on same-sex relations is

The Archbishop of Canterbury has risen to the occasion

Archbishop Justin Welby has done a good job of relating the Queen’s virtues to her Christian faith. This is no easy task. The writers of the New Testament would have been very surprised by the notion that a monarch could be an exemplary Christian. And any sensible Christian leader is mindful that monarchs should be praised with care, lest religion seem cravenly reverent of tradition and worldly grandeur. She was a model of practical virtue In her life, he said in his official statement, ‘we saw what it means to receive the gift of life we have been given by God and – through patient, humble, selfless service – share

Theo Hobson

Justin Welby is missing a trick on climate change

Justin Welby urges us, echoing Deuteronomy, to ‘choose life’, so that our children may live. It is an apt use of scripture, in the face of the climate emergency. But his performance on Radio 4 this morning was far from impressive. The Archbishop of Canterbury spoke of the need for ‘meaningful sacrifices’, but when asked which ones he was making he sounded a bit muddled, as if he was not ready for such an obvious question. His first answer was ‘recycling and all that’, a locution with an air of irritation, like a man too often nagged to take the bins out.  Can’t Lambeth Palace afford daily sausages? Asked about

My phone call with God

Got slightly wrecked over the bank holiday weekend and had hoped to kind of glide through the early part of the week without too much requirement for that bane of the columnist, research – looking stuff up, talking to people, etc. But I crawled downstairs on Tuesday, switched on the laptop and there was a message bearing the address s.fidelis@almighty.com: ‘Hey Rod, I might have something for you. Give me a call x.’ I hadn’t heard from Semp for three or four years, when he was a canny and ambitious junior press officer, helpful, disinclined to panic, never obsequious. Slightly grating Cardiff accent but other than that, a good sort.

Letters: Don’t overlook the Trumpisms

Canterbury tales Sir: Having opened my copy of The Spectator upon arrival in the post, I read your article ‘Welby’s gatekeeper’ with interest (23 January). I was surprised and humbled to discover how much power and influence I have over the political engagement of the Archbishop. Let there be no doubt that the Archbishop sets his own agenda. More fundamentally and crucially, I was disappointed to see victims of abuse and wider issues relating to safeguarding being brought in to play in a politically focused piece about the workings of Lambeth Palace. It is a matter of public record that the Archbishop and his team are ready to meet with

The man behind Justin Welby

In the leafy seclusion of the Lambeth Palace grounds, Archbishop Justin Welby goes for his daily jog. He used to run along the Thames and over the bridges until Canon David Porter, his Chief of Staff, put a stop to it. David Porter grew up in Belfast in the 1960s and he knows how easy a target a lone high-profile jogger can be. As well as being Welby’s physical protector, Canon Porter has taken on the role of his bureaucratic gatekeeper. ‘No one comes to Justin except through David’ — that’s the impression I get from everyone I’ve spoken to who has tried to contact the Archbishop recently. ‘Nothing happens

Why can’t Justin Welby praise a Tory?

Justin Welby is having a holiday and people are unhappy about it. He plans, in May, to take a three-month break and the general consensus is that this is not what Jesus would have done in a time of plague. Yes, Christ did frequently retreat to pray, but he only once spent more than a few days away from his flock — and it’s not much of a sabbatical if Satan’s trying to lure you over a cliff edge. It’s such a strange decision to take time off now that I’ve been Welby-watching this winter. I’ve listened to his Christmas and new year messages, followed in his online footsteps —

The Amazon fires are as much a political story as an environmental one

We do not yet know which 100 citizens will make it to the ‘Citizens’ Assembly’ to be chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury, which will look at ways of preventing a no-deal Brexit. So we cannot yet judge whether the organisers have come up with a system of selection which improves on the representative powers of parliament. But really we do not need to, because we know already that they will not be able to bring the ‘reconciliation at a time of national emergency’ which the Archbishop seeks. This is because the idea that a no-deal Brexit must be prevented is not an irenic proposition around which people can unite,

Justin Welby could be the man to rescue Brexit

So there is more than one Old Etonian hoping to ride to the nation’s rescue. My first reaction to the news that Justin Welby is involved in plans for a citizens’ assembly to find an alternative to a no-deal Brexit was sceptical. Too late for such an initiative. Give Boris a chance to get on with it. Nice idea that the established Church can help us to get beyond political tribalism, but surely doomed to failure. The coming scrap between remainers and the Government is not a place for nice clergymen. Then I remembered: I had the same sort of reaction to the news, over two years ago, that Welby was

The Church of England needs mission

The time has come to disestablish the Church of England. As a deeply partisan Prayer Book Anglican – a churchmanship naturally inclined to support the cause of antidisestablishmentarianism – I say that rather grudgingly. But it pains me to admit the established church and mother church of Anglicanism is no longer fit for purpose. Atheists, militant secularists and those of non-Christian faiths have long supported my newly-held position, yet they often do so for other reasons, namely declining church attendance. They might claim that the Anglican expression of Christianity has little creditability as a state church if, practically speaking, nobody goes to services on a regular basis. And they might have

Kent’s new Rose

East Kent is bracing itself. Its Church of England clergy are enjoying their last quiet months before Rose Hudson-Wilkin arrives as the new Bishop of Dover in the autumn, replacing Trevor Willmott. History is being made — the C of E is to have its first black woman bishop. But some members are clutching their heads in despair at what they see as Justin Welby’s predictably flashy appointment. Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of sighing going on. Rose Hudson-Wilkin is the Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons. Known for her dangly earrings, she is widely loved in the Palace of Westminster and is in her element