An oil trader and an Old Etonian with a genius for PR, was Justin Welby the worst Archbishop of Canterbury since Thomas Arundel?
‘I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.’
John 16:33
In the spring of 1974, an 18-year-old Justin Welby decided to climb Mount Kenya. He’d arrived in Africa following a turbulent year at Eton. Distracted by his father‘s spiralling alcoholism, Welby had performed badly in his A Levels, but to his schoolmasters’ surprise, had successfully landed a place at Trinity, Cambridge – a college presided over by his great-uncle, Rab Butler. Welby had a lot to think about on the way up, emerging, after days of hiking, at the summit. We don’t know what time of day it was, or how the earth looked from up there, but according to letters between him and his mother, as he gazed down at the world Welby became violently sick.
Almost half a century later in 2016, Archbishop Welby was approached by Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, who had a secret to share. Moore was convinced that Welby’s father was not Gavin Welby, as previously thought, but a man named Anthony Montague Brown, who had been working alongside his mother for Winston Churchill during the 1950s. A DNA test confirmed Moore’s suspicions and Welby had an important question thrust upon him – who are you? That same question has reemerged in the wake of his truncated career, one which saw him bury a queen and crown a king.
After a while, Welby released a statement on his contested parentage and, having a knack for this sort of thing, settled on a line. ‘I know that I find who I am in Jesus Christ’ he said, ‘not in genetics’. This, though effective, was not wholly true; Welby’s identity also lay in other places, such as the church he oversaw and helped to renovate. Welby’s church was constructed for efficiency, public perception and also, one assumes, God – albeit a somewhat strange version of Him.
As a student at Cambridge, Welby found himself alone in his room, reading chapter three of The Gospel of John, when he arrived at verse 16 – ‘for God so loved the world that he gave His only Son that all those who believe in him should not perish but have eternal life’. The words had a profound spiritual effect on Welby, who suddenly began speaking in tongues. His ‘words of knowledge’ were not recorded, but Welby was understandably confused by the experience and sought the advice of a priest named David Watson, who reassured him.
Watson was a champion of Charismatic Christianity, a movement that emphasises the active presence of the Holy Spirit and subscribes to the idea that God intervenes personally in the lives of his followers. For David Watson, speaking in tongues was not an uncommon feature of spiritual life. Welby now speaks in tongues early in the morning as part of his daily prayer, though, in supremely British fashion, his possession by the Holy Spirit is ‘very seldom ecstatic’ and ‘not something to make a great song and dance about’.
The pews of Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) in Knightsbridge, where Welby was baptised and married, are lined with the wealthy. Russell Brand, Bear Grylls and Miranda Hart show their faces on occasion, and are all part of its orbit. Grylls is an ex-squash partner of the church’s former vicar, Nicky Gumbel; Hart contributes ten percent of her merchandising profits to HTB’s youth employment wing and Brand’s evangelistic conversion — the one we’re all still dealing with today – began when he took one of the church’s introductory programs. At HTB, you’re likely to hear guitar music or attend something called a ‘love lesson conference’. This happy-clappy sensibility derives from HTB’s position as the nucleus of British Charismatic Christianity, a religious umbrella that also encompasses the American televangelists.
While the former Archbishop reportedly rejects proponents of the ‘prosperity gospel’ – where congregants are encouraged to donate in return for divine healing – he remains linked to them by a common theological genus. It’s the same genus that spawned preachers like the ultra-Calvinist Billy Graham, whose legacy continues to shape American Christianity. Graham believed homosexuality to be a ‘sinister form of perversion’ and once told a crowd of 44,300 in Columbus, Ohio that he thought AIDS was the ‘judgement of God’. After Graham died, Welby praised him as ‘an exemplar to generation upon generation of modern Christians.’
HTB helped shape Welby’s religious outlook and, as Archbishop, he and his allies have successfully managed to remould the whole Anglican Communion in its image. The west London sect grew into a behemothic force, slowly displacing the traditional Anglicanism which has dominated English spiritual life for centuries. HTB’s interests are carefully propagated by its supporters on the General Synod, (the Church of England’s legislative body). In the words of the academic theologian Andrew Graystone, its influence has ‘extended into every corner of the Church of England.’
Their ascent as a force in the Anglican Church began in the early 90s, after the international success of its Alpha course, a sort-of introductory Christian faith class. When attendance boomed, HTB’s leadership tried to replicate their success elsewhere, sending curates and groups of parishioners all over England on ‘planting’ missions to revive churches with flagging congregations. After successfully planting 79 churches throughout the country, the HTB-backed ‘Revitalisation Trust’ was rewarded with a major role in the Church of England’s ‘planting’ scheme in 2017, through which it spawned hundreds of mini-HTBs nationwide.
The bankroller of the Revitalisation Trust, was a slightly lesser-known HTB congregant called Paul Marshall, the hedge fund manager and media baron who owns GB News, UnHerd, and more recently, The Spectator. He also financed St Mellitus College, an offshoot of HTB, which now trains over a quarter of all Anglican clergy. The first principal of the college was Graham Tomlin, the former Bishop of Kensington, Paul Marshall’s university friend and ex-folk bandmate. In 2022, Tomlin founded the Centre for Cultural Witness (CCW) with Marshall’s money and Welby’s backing. The CCW is based inside Lambeth Palace, the central London complex which has served as the Archbishop’s London residence since 1200.
On the face of it, the CCW conducts research, provides communication services, and produces a website on Christianity in public life. However, a staffer at Church House, the thrumming centre of the Anglican bureaucratic machine, described the CCW as a more powerful organisation than it purports to be. According to this employee, CCW uses its vast capital to do work that’s supposed to be done at Church House. This, the employee told us, is a problem because ‘the CCW is not accountable to the synod or required to publish its accounts’.
Welby has allowed Marshall’s influence to sweep through the Church of England. This portrays, at the very least, a questionable judgement of character on behalf of the Archbishop. The same could be said for his support of Paula Vennells, the former Post Office boss who was shortlisted to be Bishop of London in 2017 after Welby pushed her application. Last year, in the fallout from the Horizon IT scandal, Vennells had to hand back her CBE after over a million people signed a petition calling for her to do so. According to a Guardian report, ‘Welby declined to confirm or deny that Vennells had been interviewed for the post… saying he was bound by confidentiality.’
But, Welby’s defining failure to understand someone’s true nature happened a long time ago, before he married Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at St George’s Chapel, before he delivered a sermon at the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II – watched by over half the world’s population – before he received the imperial crown the wrong way round, turned it 180 degrees and pushed it onto Charles III’s head.
Welby, crucially, failed to get the measure of John Smyth, one of the most prolific abusers in the Church of England’s history, who he met as a young man in Dorset at the same camps Smyth used to groom teenagers. Welby says he wasn’t part of Smyth’s inner circle, but recalled him as ‘a charming, delightful, very clever, brilliant speaker.’
The death knell to Welby’s leadership came in the form of a 253-page review by Keith Makin which suggested that justice could have reached Smyth – who died from heart failure in 2018 at his home in Bergvliet, South Africa – if Welby had reported the abuse to police when he first heard about it in 2013, just after he took office. In Welby’s defence, three senior police officers later claimed that he actually had referred Smyth to the police. However, the general thrust of Makin’s critique still remained true – Welby had been indefensibly feeble in his pursuit of Smyth. Welby didn’t resign immediately, but a growing call for him to do so amongst survivors and senior clergy left his position untenable. However, many think the Makin review didn’t go far enough.
Graham (not his real name), a survivor of Smyth’s abuse, thought the review ‘could have been much more forensic in its examination of why the August 2013 disclosure was never acted upon.’ He said that ‘while the Review mentions some detail about the Archbishop’s historical knowledge of and engagement with John Smyth, it fails to draw it all together, and explain why the mention of the name Smyth in 2013 should have sounded enormous alarm bells.’
Graham was also critical of some of the report’s omissions. He points to an LBC interview immediately after the original Channel 4 exposé (which made the Smyth allegations public) in which ‘the Archbishop stated there had been a “rigorous inquiry” and that he “kept in touch” with the case. Both of these appear to have been wishful thinking… and it is disappointing that Keith Makin did not specifically refer to these “incorrect assertions.”’
On 6 December, mired by scandal and savage headlines, Welby rose in the Lords Chamber to make his farewell speech. He likely wasn’t prepared for the fallout. The outgoing Archbishop barely mentioned Smyth’s victims, instead imploring the chamber to ‘pity my poor diary secretary’ who had seen months of work ‘disappear in a puff of a resignation announcement’.
*
Those who had applauded Welby for his progressive reforms, attacks against government austerity and opposition to the Rwanda scheme were taken aback by this glaring lack of empathy. However, anyone who has closely examined the ex-Archbishop’s life will be familiar with this streak. After meeting him as a student, Welby’s stepfather, Baron Williams of Elvel, was instantly impressed by the young man’s ‘ruthless’ nature. Welby’s iron tendency emerged at various intervals, from his days as an oil man in post-colonial Africa, to his reluctance to meet with Smyth’s victims and refusal to bless same-sex civil marriages. To understand this streak, you have to understand Welby’s life, his past trauma and inherited privilege.
Welby was born into a broken home. Even his school housemaster understood this, writing in his final report that ‘many a boy would have been driven off the rails completely by the problems which Justin has had to face.’ At three years old, his parents divorced and Justin had to live with his father, Gavin Welby, a strange, difficult man. Gavin lived a life steeped in high society glamour, one the Telegraph said could ‘rival that of the Great Gatsby’.
At 19, Welby Senior set sail for Prohibition America where he bootlegged alcohol with the Mafia. When the repeal of the 18th Amendment put him out of a job, he got into supplying the liquid needs of the upmarket hotels and bars of Manhattan, and from there, ended up organising balls for the offspring of New York’s Upper East Siders. After returning to England at 28, he made his fortune investing in whisky. President John F. Kennedy, whose sister he was briefly involved with, said he ‘looks like a playboy, but he’s conservative underneath’. The pair became friends in 1953, when Gavin set the future president up with a 21-year-old Swedish aristocrat.
Gavin was from a reasonably comfortable background, but in marrying Jane Portal – then Winston Churchill’s private secretary – he had spliced himself into a family of governors, peers and politicians. Justin was born in Hammersmith on 6 January 1956, only for his parents’ marriage to collapse two years later — Gavin won custody after the divorce, which his mother would come to regret. Gavin tried to get himself in order by wedding the beautiful young actress, Vanessa Redgrave, but she called the engagement off after friends and family intervened. After that he began to decline.
One Christmas, a biographer writes, Gavin ‘refused to get out of bed, so Justin spent the day by himself looking out of the window and searching for food in an empty fridge.’ At the age of eight, Justin was sent off in preparation to board at St Peter’s School, Seaford, where he spent his introductory nights listening to other boys ‘stifling their sobbing as the lights went down’, then he was packed off to Eton. In 1970, his headmaster was dismissed, for, among other things, an exposé detailing his ‘pleasure at beating boys’. Welby recalls being beaten for bouncing on the bed.
Welby tolerated a lonely existence at Eton and, at the same time, the burden of his increasingly volatile alcoholic father who, he later found out, had defaulted on his last two years of school fees. Eton seemed to leave a lasting impression on him. During his sojourn to Kenya in 1974, Welby was volunteering at a school when a student hung themselves inside the compound. Welby had to cut the body down with fellow volunteer Phil Kelly. The student’s name was Bosco Karumba. As they cut Karumba down the pair sang the Eton Boating Song: ‘Swing swing together, with your bodies between your knees,’ a detail Welby tends to omit during interviews.
Gavin died in 1977 as a result of alcohol abuse. However, the apex of Welby’s trauma occurred six years later when he relocated from France to the UK for work. Welby had gone ahead with the removal van while his wife followed behind with their 7-month-old daughter, Johanna. The car swerved and Johanna was thrown from the back seat in her carrycot. As she was dying in the hospital Welby called out to God. ‘That was prayer at its rawest,’ he recalled, ‘because it’s the prayer of just, ‘Oh God, help! Oh God, where are you? What’s going on? Are you going to do something or aren’t you?’ After that, Welby often referred to the world as ‘broken’ in his writing.
You could argue that Welby, having endured all that, surviving probably the worst pain someone can experience, was well equipped for a life of spiritual contemplation. You could also argue that such experiences would emotionally rupture almost anyone, changing them for good. We can’t say exactly how the events we have described affected Welby but the Archbishop has gone public with his depression, his ‘self-hatred, self-contempt, real, vicious sense of dislike of oneself.’
However, the post of Archbishop of Canterbury has many requirements, not all of them emotional, or even spiritual. The Church of England employs over 20,000 clergy and holds a commercial land portfolio – 15% of which is in London’s West End – estimated at over £10 billion. In some ways, the ideal Archbishop is a calculated, unflinching manager, one who understands PR and image handling. It is in these attributes that Welby excels and is more qualified for the role than he likes to let on.
As Archbishop, Welby approached the church as if it were a corporation, bringing words like ‘goals’ and ‘strategy’ with him to Lambeth Palace. In interviews, he speaks about religious ecstasy with the flat, considered cadence of a financial analyst explaining bond yields to viewers on the BBC Six O’ Clock News. After a pointedly muted inauguration, Welby initiated a complete overhaul. He replaced structures, rearranged departments and in typical managerial fashion, pared back costs in the process.
Welby rationalised the way the Church was managed, centreing its administration around ‘the Lambeth seven’, a group dominated by evangelists and close acquaintances including Chris Russell, the godfather of his child, and Mark Elsdon Dew, his cousin-in-law and the former head of communications at HTB. Only one of these appointments was carried over from the previous administration.
Contemporary reviews of Welby’s 2017 book, Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope, would have you believe Welby’s societal blueprint is a vital manifesto by a maverick thought leader, but it reads closer to an anodyne think tank press release. The Reverend Robert Thompson, the priest who started the petition for Welby to resign, told us that since Welby’s takeover, ‘the Church has been really opened up to the forces of the market – which is a great irony,’ Thompson says, ‘because the whole thrust of his book on money is an anti-capitalist one.’
This corporate approach may have improved the balance sheets, but it did nothing to halt the steep decline in numbers attending church – under Welby average weekly attendance fell from over a million to 685,000 worshippers. To be fair, it’s uncertain whether he could have helped this, just as it’s uncertain whether the newly anointed Archbishop could ever have stopped his corporate sensibilities from poking through; he was, after all, a company man. His favourite newspaper is the Financial Times, a paper that likely reminds him of his first job – a placement with a French state-owned oil company, Société Nationale Elf Aquitaine (ELF), which he landed with no discernible experience in finance, through his stepfather’s contacts in Paris.
ELF’s influence in Africa was a malign one, acting as both an oil company extracting natural resources, and a coercive arm of French post-imperial diplomacy. Welby’s placement was extended to five years in the finance department (whose members were referred to as ‘sharks’ by their colleagues) securing ELF’s international projects. In 2013, an investigation by the Mail on Sunday unearthed a picture of Welby during this time, leaning back on his chair, a rakish figure with cherubic facial features, biting his thumb to show off his designer watch. Around the time this photo was taken ELF were going to unsavoury lengths to protect their interests in Africa, intimidating, bribing and embezzling as they pleased.
In the early 80s, Welby was assigned to a project named ‘Bonny LNG’. According to the Mail, the plan aimed to deter Nigerian leaders from nationalising its oil industry by, convincing them that ELF and other major oil companies were ‘poised to invest £6 billion in an energy project that had scant hope of being realised.’ Welby travelled to meetings in Nigeria multiple times during this period, but insists he was unaware of the project’s motivation despite his former boss suggesting, ‘Yes, of course he was.’
The scale of ELF’s malpractice didn’t come to light until the 90s, but led to one of the longest corruption investigations in France’s history. Executives were accused of paying bribes to foreign governments and siphoning at least £200m from the company for their jewellery, artwork and multi-million pound Corsican villas. According to a subsequent inquiry by the Nigerian government, ELF had played a role in human rights abuses – including torture and extrajudicial killings.
The French investigation led to the conviction of 31 out of 37 of those on trial, including André Tarallo who was known as ‘Mr Africa’ around the office during Welby’s time there. ‘That was all handled by people high up who were doing this stuff.’ Welby said of the scandal, ‘I knew nothing about it.’
Welby left the oil industry two years after he had a spiritual calling catalysed by John McClure, a visiting preacher at HTB who had left a similarly lucrative job in 1970. But the oil industry never really left him. He continued to harbour a soft spot for big business. In 2013 he spoke up against the public’s ‘lynch mobbish’ attitude towards individual bankers following the financial crisis. ‘I’m not sure I would have been very different.’ Welby also retained a crude sense for PR.
Over the years people have been struck by Welby’s extraordinary aptitude for crisis management. The journalist, Andrew Brown, first noticed this after an investigation found the Church had invested in a financial backer of Wonga. ‘Instead of adopting the traditional vicarish tone of sounding apologetic even when making assertions…’ Brown noted, ‘he managed to sound assertive, even while apologising.’ However, there’s a paradoxical problem with a well-controlled image. Once the public knows it’s there, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to trust its sincerity. This isn’t a problem for politicians, for whom insincerity is fundamental, but, however naively, people want religious leaders to speak, as Matthew implores, from the heart.
Welby sometimes publicly related his doubts that he might be ‘the worst Archbishop in history.’ Affective self-deprecation aside, this probably isn’t true: unlike some of his predecessors, like Thomas Arundel, Welby is yet to burn anyone at the stake for heresy. However, his fall from grace will eclipse much of his legacy. It’s a legacy he’d likely prefer was accounted for in liberal reforms, such as his overseeing the ordination of women bishops but one that will more likely be remembered for its dramatic failure to fulfil its central mission – halting the flow of congregants out from his church.
Now Welby is approaching the foot of the mountain, the shadow of his own aborted achievements stretching out ahead of him, shading the rest of his life. If he were to turn and behold the heights where he once stood he’d see that, in fact, it was never a mountain at all, but rather a volcano which has now erupted into the Church of England’s greatest crisis in modern times. ‘The sense you get from many in the Church,’ religion journalist Tim Wyatt observed, ‘is a feeling that the whole hierarchy, not just the man at the top, is complicit and tainted.’
Despite his public reflections on his own mental health, Welby remains a difficult man to read. People have speculated as to how he feels about everything that’s transpired but for now, those details remain strictly between Welby and his God. Recently, Graham, the survivor we mentioned earlier, travelled to Lambeth Palace alone, expecting an apology. He told us what he saw that day. ‘He was a broken shell of a man, slumped in his chair,’ Graham said, ‘throughout the meeting he never once used my name, rarely met my eye, and there was no handshake when he left the room.’
