Justin Welby has given his valedictory speech in the House of Lords, his first public remarks since his resignation. It was quite a sad speech in which the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury didn’t appear to know quite what he wanted to say about his own departure. He started by joking that ‘if you want to make God laugh, make plans’, then added: ‘Well, on that basis, next year, I will be causing God more hilarity than anyone else for many years, because the plans for next year were very detailed and extensive.’ He told peers:
The reality is that there comes a time if you are technically leading a particular institution or area of responsibility, where the shame of what has gone wrong, whether one is personally responsible or not, must require a head to roll. And there is only in this case, one head that rolls well enough, I hope not literally, one of my predecessors in 1371, Simon of Sudbury, had his head cut off. And it was then the peasants, the revolting peasants at the time, played football with it at the Tower of London. I don’t know who won. It certainly wasn’t Simon of Sudbury.
He argued that safeguarding in the Church of England had changed ‘completely’, but that ‘however one takes one’s view of personal responsibility, it is clear that I had to stand down and it is for that reason that I do so’. He moved onto housing, which has been one of his key topics as a peer, and which peers were discussing at that moment.
Welby’s speech was followed by a very moving tribute to him from Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, a Labour peer, who provided a list of his achievements as Archbishop, one that hasn’t really been offered by many in the turmoil that followed the publication of the Makin report. Griffiths reminded the House of Welby’s campaign against loan sharks, his focus on ethical investment, the funeral of the late Queen and the coronation of the King, and his work on housing. Griffiths said the latter was ‘the theme that runs for me right through this particular primate’s life and witness like the word Blackpool through a stick of seaside rock’. He added that he was currently reading a book charting Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ which is called ‘what in me is dark’, and said:
There isn’t a member of this house, not one noble lord or lady who has not had to face the dark at some stage in their lives, and we can only feel with the right reverend primate, now, as he gazes into his, none of us feeling superior as we do so.
Griffiths was clearly trying to balance out what had felt like quite a lost speech with a reminder of what Welby had clearly achieved in his tenure and a sense of regret that this was the last peers would hear from him.
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