An MP who attended at least one of the Christian camps at which serial abuser John Smyth groomed victims has warned that confidence in the Church of England has “collapsed at every level”.
Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice described Justin Welby, who quit as Archbishop of Canterbury this week, as the “worst Archbishop in living memory”.
The Archbishop announced he would step down last week following outrage at a scathing report which detailed how the abuse of more than 100 children and young men was covered up within Anglican circles.
Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice confirmed that he attended at least one of the Dorset camps in the late 1970s. Smyth was a leading figure at the camps and would brutally lash his victims with a garden cane in a garden shed at his home near Winchester.
Mr Tice described how the camps lacked modern safeguarding practices, saying: “There was a very, very high degree of trust without the checks and balances. In all walks of life, that’s great 95% of the time but it can really bite you when someone breaches that trust and those are the lessons that regrettably we have to learn.”
As one of the campers, he was not aware of anyone being groomed and he has no memory of Smyth, who died in South Africa in 2018. But he said that aspects of the camps were potentially “a bit creepy”.
“We were always freezing cold,” he said. “They were austere, cold extensions of boarding school.”
He remembers doing “a lot of sailing” and said a key goal of the events was building “resilience and confidence”.
But, he warned, “if your trust is misplaced then things can go badly wrong very quickly”.
Mr Tice wants safeguarding to be the top priority for the Church of England. He also wants its leadership to spend less time intervening in politics.
The present Archbishop famously denounced Conservative plans to send migrants to Rwanda as an “immoral policy”.
“Confidence in the Church of England has collapsed at every level,” Mr Tice said. “Welby was the worst Archbishop in living memory.”
The MP said people felt “the leadership of the Church of England in the UK has lost the plot”.
He advised: “Focus on running a church. Stop focusing on politics – it’s not your job and it’s not what your congregation expect you to do, so just focus on your core product basically, which is Christianity.”
