Delaying independent safeguarding shows the Church is still an old boys’ network - David Behrens

It would be comical if it weren’t so appalling. The nomination form (the small print reveals it was created on an app for “AI-powered surveys, quizzes and polls”) is couched almost entirely in HR jargon and proclaims the Archbishop to be “a key leader”, as if he were the area manager of a firm of estate agents.

It goes on to ask only two salient questions: what hopes do you have for the next incumbent and what qualities, skills and experience should he have? It doesn’t actually use the pronoun ‘he’ but it’s ingrained in the subtext.

In the space for nominations I considered the usual suspects: David Attenborough or perhaps the winner of Bake Off; but chose instead to leave it blank because I think the Church should do likewise. They should let the post go unfilled.

I had been of this view for some time but it was reinforced on Tuesday when the Church’s medieval parliament, the General Synod, voted to reject a fully transparent system to safeguard young people in its care. It was a final abdication of its responsibility as the nation’s moral guardian and may in time be seen as the moment the archbishopric was condemned to history.

Here is the context to all this: Welby was forced out because he failed to report to the police acts of horrible brutality by the barrister and Christian camp leader John Smyth, five years before his death. Instead, and despite the lifelong trauma caused to Smyth’s victims, the matter was institutionally covered up.

Separately David Tudor, a priest at the centre of a second abuse case, was twice reappointed to a senior role during Stephen Cottrell’s time as Bishop of Chelmsford and remained in post nine years after Cottrell was first told about him. In yet another case, Cottrell is said to have bullied members of a committee to appoint John Perumbalath as Bishop of Liverpool despite sexual assault and harassment allegations against him. There have been blanket denials of impropriety but painfully few acts of contrition.

Denial is not what is needed from the Church right now, especially when it hinges only on the supposed absence of “legal grounds” to act, which is what Cottrell is saying.

Even the most junior HR official – the type that conceived the token online poll – could have advised him to take Tudor aside at the first opportunity to negotiate an exit strategy that would have been legally sound and morally just. Someone should have the same chat now with Cottrell himself.

Yet those were not the noises coming from the Synod on Tuesday. Philip North, the Bishop of Blackburn who led a motion which delays indefinitely a system of fully independent safeguarding, said he had acted to avoid “making promises to survivors, to the nation, to the Church, that we couldn’t then deliver”.

Forgive me but what is hard about delivering a promise not to abuse anyone – especially if you’re supposed to take the moral high ground on exactly such matters? Almost anyone else could give such an undertaking without even having to think about it. Yet the Church acted simply to protect itself, in the process laying bare the old boys’ network it still is.

This business of taking the most straightforward of issues and complicating them with arcane protocols and precedents is the Church’s undoing. Bishops invoke divinity to excuse the need to be seen to act correctly. That sets them apart from the rest of society and explains why society has separated itself from them.

And this, by the way, has nothing to do with faith but with an obsolescent instrument of faith: a ministry cloaked in cant and sanctimony.

The Church may not recognise that it has become a law unto itself but that is increasingly how it is seen and it’s a position impossible to reconcile with the role of the 26 Lord Bishops who help make the laws that govern the rest of us.

It was a final affront to the victims of this culture that Welby, a man who sought to cast himself as more sinned against than sinner, was this week allowed to remain in the grace-and-favour luxury of Lambeth Palace until summer as a sort of sitting tenant. It confirms the view that no-one – and I mean that literally – would be a better Archbishop of Canterbury than he.