Arron Reza Merat

The Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation last month, five days after the publication of an independent review into the Church of England’s handling of half a century of testimony concerning the sexual sadism and spiritual abuse by a lay Church officer, John Smyth QC. The Makin Report, commissioned in 2019, describes a culture of ‘abuse hidden in plain sight’ and ‘active cover-up’ by the Church. It found that Justin Welby had ‘acted within the policies in place within the Church of England at the time’ but had not fulfilled his ‘moral responsibility’ to pursue the truth of the allegations. Welby continues to maintain that he had no ‘idea or suspicion’ of the abuse before August 2013 though the report says that Smyth’s crimes were an ‘open secret’ in ecclesiastical networks.

At the ExCeL exhibition centre in Canning Town, 1700 companies were displaying their wares. British soldiers – ‘military escort officers’ – looked after delegations from all over the world. They took them to their hotels and they took them shopping. One escort told me that the Angolans were on the hunt for helicopters and the Egyptians were after surveillance equipment. A delegation from the UAE lingered at the stall of the Italian firm Cristanini: a woman in a camouflage cocktail dress and knee-high boots stood in front of a display of decontamination equipment, for use after chemical or biological attacks.