The Makin review has finally been published - over six years since it was promised and 11 years since the Archbishop of Canterbury was told about the abuse.
What Keith Makin and his review team found during their investigations was truly horrific and readers should be aware that some of the details are deeply distressing. The eminent QC John Smyth, described by one victim as ‘a charismatic personality… the blue-eyed boy, he was Mary Whitehouse’s lawyer, he was in the public domain, everybody knew about him’ was arguably the most prolific serial abuser with links to the church, and accused of abusing as many as 130 boys across five decades in the UK and Africa. The review describes him as ‘a skilled and determined narcissist, who derived pleasure from the sufferings of others’ with abuse of some boys starting when they were as young as 13 years old.
Reading the review is shocking, not just in its detail of the abuse of so many boys, but also of how Smyth spared no-one. He abused two of the godparents of his children. And it is now known that he seriously physically and psychologically abused his own son from the age of seven. Smyth died in 2018 at the age of 75, and the report by Hampshire Police showed that he was ‘never brought to justice for the abuse’. Despite his horrific abuse being first identified as far back as the 1980s, and an ‘open secret’ in evangelical circles for many years, Smyth was able to keep on abusing children late into his life, moving away from the UK to Africa to do so.
Boris Johnson blames the Church for UK obesity - is he wrong?
Advent is finally upon us. In just a few weeks we will celebrate Christmas, with all the fun and feasting …