40 2GM Saturday May 28 2022 | the timesNewsSaturday interview
enormous pressure in close quarters
and then you’re astonished that it
doesn’t all go terribly well. Well,
dream on, where’s your
understanding of human nature?”
The archbishop will not criticise
Boris Johnson personally. “The
culture of an institution is much more
complicated than saying, ‘Oh, well, it’s
the prime minister’s fault’,” he says.I
n his Easter Day sermon, Welby
attacked the plan to send asylum
seekers to Rwanda, saying the
policy raised “serious ethical
questions” and “cannot stand the
judgment of God”. The prime minister
led the attacks on him for interfering
in politics but the archbishop insists
church leaders have every right to
have an opinion. “The idea that I
shouldn’t be political... is a nonsense.
Everyone is political. People like Boris
Johnson know that perfectly well...
every single person or institution or
group lives within a political context,
every decision we make is a political
decision. You have to [stand up and be
counted], everyone does.”
What about gay marriage? Richard
Coles, the pop star turned priest,
wrote that he was giving up his parish
because churches are “places where‘The suggestion that I, as archbishop,
Justin Welby feels a duty to speak out on issues such
as the parties scandal, migrants and social media,
he tells Alice Thompson and Rachel Sylvester
A
cross the river from the
Palace of Westminster lies
Lambeth Palace, a far
more ancient and
mysterious place, with its
high brick walls, medieval towers,
quadrangle and gnarled magnolias.
This is the home of the Archbishops
of Canterbury and it is steeped inhistory. Its fig tree was planted 500
years ago by the post’s last Roman
Catholic holder, and Thomas
Cranmer wrote the Book of Common
Prayer in a wood-panelled study.
We have come to pray at 8.30am
with the 105th incumbent, Justin
Welby. The service takes place in the
crypt, which used to be a dungeon,then a wine cellar but is now a simple,
candle-lit chapel. Tradition is
intertwined with modernity. A
camera behind the altar allows staff
to join the service by Zoom.
When we interviewed Welby’s
predecessor, Rowan Williams, he met
us pushing a pink scooter along the
vast red-carpeted corridors. The
current ABC is more likely to be
accompanied by his dog Bramble, a
spaniel “known by my staff as ABCD”,
or his daughter Ellie, whom he refers
to affectionately as ABCDE. But the
man who leads 80 million Anglicansworldwide is equally self-effacing,
taking the Tube and the bus to
meetings and walking in his exquisite
garden every morning in his shorts.
At times Welby seems weighed
down by the responsibility of trying to
hold everyone together in an era of
division from which the Anglican
Church is not exempt. The world has
become a more shouty, angry place
since he was appointed archbishop,
before the Brexit vote and the
pandemic. Now he has written The
Power of Reconciliation, a heartfelt
plea to the world to learn to
appreciate each other’s opinions.
“I think we’ve always been divided.
If you look back to the four years
before the First World War, there was
a huge division with society, and in
the Seventies it was the winter of
discontent,” he tells us. “What social
media does is it gives a very loud
voice to people who previously
couldn’t make their voice heard so it
becomes much more evident. You get
these waves going one way or
another. But I think that’s a symptom.
I don’t think it’s the disease.”
He hesitates for a moment —
“trying not to sound too pompous” —
before diagnosing the real problem
as the “radical autonomy” that has
become dominant in the modern
world. There are, he suggests, fewer
shared experiences. “People don’t
know the narratives and the stories of
the Christian faith — the Good
Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Lost
Sheep. When you lose those cultural
signposts, people rely on gut feeling
and it doesn’t really work. There isn’t
a common narrative — what are we
as a country?”
A report this week found that the
Church of England faced potential
“extinction” in Britain within 40
years. Does the archbishop think this
is still a Christian country? “We’re a
country where, to the extent that
there’s a narrative, it’s still a Christian
narrative,” he replies. “I don’t think
we ever were a Christian country...
In the 19th century, there was a very
strong Christian morality, but there
were 80,000 child prostitutes in
London... It’s always been that
tension between how we should
behave and how we do because
people are human.”
Welby worries that the inflation
crisis is pushing more people into
poverty. “I was in Doncaster a couple
of weeks ago with the Archbishop of
York. We were in a church that had
been running a food bank... They
were getting about 40 people a week,
coming in needing help, now it’s 400.”
He welcomes Rishi Sunak’s package
of help. “I think the moves are really
positive about the cost of living —
very brave moves politically.”
But Welby is less complimentary
about the Downing Street parties.
After the Sue Gray report was
published, he tweeted: “Culture,
behaviour and standards in public life
really matter. We need to be able to
trust our national institutions,
particularly in times of great trouble.”
He believes that something has gone
wrong at the top of government. “The
thing that’s very striking is that very
few people said, ‘This isn’t really a
very good idea’. Or even ‘No, this is
wrong, we can’t do this’.”
Welby knows better than anyone
that drunkenness and debauchery in
Downing Street is nothing new. Six
years ago he discovered that his
father was not Gavin Welby but
Anthony Montague Browne, a
personal private secretary to
Churchill. “My mum was working in
No 10 and one thing leads to another.
You put young, bright people underJustin Welby says that the rights of