TO MARK Safeguarding Sunday, 17 November, George Orwell wrote in his weekly column: “One favourite way of falsifying history nowadays is to alter dates. Sometimes you can give an event a quite different colour by switching its date only a few weeks. But it doesn’t matter so long as we all keep our eyes open and see to it that the lies do not creep out of the newspapers and into the history books.”
Technically, this was published on 17 November 1944, but it certainly has a timeless ring to it when you are trying to apportion blame on the basis of who knew what and when. Once the narrative was established that “the Church of England” had covered up John Smyth’s abuse, the villains automatically became anyone still alive who was mentioned in the report, and the more senior the better. Janet Eastham, in The Daily Telegraph, was an egregious example: “The Telegraph can disclose that dozens of church leaders, including several bishops, could now be removed for their role after an internal review of the case. Despite knowledge of Smyth’s abuse at the highest levels of the Church, Hampshire Police only opened an investigation in 2017 after Smyth was the subject of a Channel 4 News report.”
Hampshire Police had, in fact, been handed a copy of the Ruston report in September 2014, before any bishop, or even Andrew Graystone, had seen it. They did nothing with the information for three years. But, of course, this is the fault of the Archbishops.
Similarly, she repeated the claim of one survivor that “If a single person is responsible for the failure of finding and stopping Smyth, it is [the Bishop of Ely] Stephen Conway.” This is absolutely ludicrous, and, in a different context, probably libellous.
A friend who used to work there blames the Telegraph’s journalism on what he calls “the list line”: the one-sentence summary that can be taken by the section editor into the morning conference. Naturally, this is made as simple and punchy as possible. It has to compete for interest and news value with all the other pitches made at conference, and the section editor is judged every day on their performance.
THERE were two good bits of reporting last week. Harriet Sherwood had an excellent Guardian scoop: she, or Matthew Weaver, with whom she had a joint byline, had noticed the part played by Canon Andrew Cornes, still a member of the Crown Nominations Commission, who had been told of the abuse in 1982, two years before Orwell published his ground-breaking novel.
Mr Cornes’s only reaction then was to say that he was unsurprised that Smyth had homosexual tendencies. It is no longer shocking to learn that he made no move to report the abuse, but the discovery that a man with those attitudes sat on the CNC is the most shocking news in the whole Makin report — everything else was already known, or less surprising.
The other praiseworthy piece came from South Africa, from Jane Flanagan, in The Times. It is illustrated with a low-quality contemporary snapshot, in which Smyth mugs for the camera as he places a huge wreath at the grave of Guide Nyachuru, the boy whom he was accused of killing.
IT WOULD take a certain bravery this week to argue against the assisted suicide of the Church of England, when so many stand ready to assist it, inside and outside the Church. Only Charles Moore, in The Spectator, and David Aaronovitch, on his Substack, defended Archbishop Welby against his critics. Neither is an Anglican.
Sherelle Jacobs, one of the Telegraph’s libertarian columnists, reflected on the economic consequences of assisted suicide with refreshing candour: “Assisted dying will leave society financially better off. The NHS spends most of its resources on palliative care for people in the final six months of their life. What if those funds could be redirected towards investing in drugs that could slow the advancement of dementia, for instance, in others — drugs which are currently deemed to be too expensive for the NHS?
“Assisted dying will also help people protect their family wealth. Those who are being forced to spend savings and sell assets to pay for end-of-life care will at least have an alternative option. For many the ability to leave a parting gift to their family . . . is more precious than another few months in a hospice bed. Society may soon be faced with a large number of very old people eking out miserable and painful lives. If the wishes of some of these people to die are not heeded, an unreformed NHS will almost certainly collapse.”
Forget all the guff about freedom being a moral value with which she decorates this analysis. Those are the calculations that the healthy will make about the sick, and the rich will make about the poor, when it comes to the crunch — and they will be seen as entirely moral.
How fortunate the country is to have in the Church of England an example of real moral depravity on which to fix its eyes as it votes on assisted dying.