A LETTER last week questioned the Rt Revd Justin Welby’s assertion at the Cambridge Union that “Makin was wrong” (Letters, 4 July, News, 27 June). Curious, the letter argued sarcastically, that so many of the expert reports commissioned by the Church and critical of its behaviour seem to have got it wrong.

It is indeed curious, until you read the reports carefully, when it becomes more worrying than curious. Some, at least, of these reports were written by people who appear quite out of their depth. Most official reports are written with an eye to expectations of the outcome, even if it’s only obvious when the conclusions are distasteful to us. Yet, if you believe that the Bishops are not up to the task, why should you expect them to hire experts who are any better?

Running all through the Makin report is the claim that, if bad things happen, this can only be because safeguarding was done wrong. But the story that he tells shows that this cannot be true.

John Smyth could not be brought to justice while his victims remained unwilling to testify. And why should they have done? Anyone who remembers the atmosphere of public homophobia in the 1980s — the years of the AIDS panic, of Section 28, and the Sun headline “Pulpit Poofs Can Stay” — can see that, at the time of Smyth’s abuse in Winchester, a criminal trial involving gay S&M among the elite would have been a truly retraumatising experience for the victims, with no guarantee of a guilty verdict at the end of it. If Jeffrey Archer and Brandon Jackson could get away with their offences in court, who can be sure that Smyth might not have done?

Smyth could be kept away from organised contact with young people and potential sympathisers warned off him. This did happen. But there was no legal remedy available in the circumstances of the 1980s.

Makin claims that, if Smyth had been reported to the police when his abuse was first reported to the diocese of Ely in 2013, he could have been stopped earlier, and that this was in some sense Bishop Welby’s fault. This claim fails entirely.

Smyth was reported to the police — and, as this newspaper established, reported in proper form, despite Makin’s claim that this was not done “formally” (News, 29 November 2024). In fact, Smyth was reported on six separate occasions to different British police forces, none of which did anything; neither, of course, did the South African Anglicans to whom he was reported by the diocese of Ely. It was the passage of time and possibly even a smidgeon of remorse which ended Smyth’s career of active abuse after he — presumably — beat to death Guide Nyachuru in Zimbabwe. In South Africa, he was just a creepy old pervert. We know of no further physical abuse there.

So, yes, Makin did get it wrong, both in detail and in his basic assumptions that safeguarding can fail only if it is performed wrongly, and that the Church of England is an organisation, with ranks and a chain of command through which information flows as it is supposed to do.

JANE HUMPHREYS’s lessons-learnt review of the Revd Matthew Ineson’s complaints does not inspire confidence. She treats a clash of evidence in which Mr Ineson’s story is contradicted by every other witness with an unforgettable car crash of a sentence: “If these accounts are not factual, this becomes an incredulous [sic] version of how the survivor, the housekeeper and Trevor Devamanikkam left the vicarage.”

As the ecclesiastical lawyer His Honour Peter Collier KC remarks: “She then goes on to say what she would have done without any reference to any contemporary standards of practice. So she is talking about what ‘safeguarding’ as an abstract concept requires without reference to any . . . law.”

Then there is the Wilkinson report on the fiasco of the Independent Safeguarding Board (News, 15 December 2023), which makes it clear that the three hired experts blew into town as confident as Elon Musk’s DOGE crew, expecting and demanding a level of deference that no mere bishop has received since about 1832.

This fiasco can, in part, be blamed on Bishop Welby, since he pushed through a badly thought-out committee structure, which meant that the experts chosen “adopted confrontational and intransigent positions in disputes, particularly when they refused to meet others when a dispute had arisen”. But it’s easy to imagine that different experts might have made the arrangement work.