The Prince, Privilege and Public Life

I wasn't going to watch the Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. Not out of a sense of propriety: there was more entertainment to be had on other channels that night.

But then I read some social media posts. And commentary in next morning's papers. I realised that bigger matters were at stake than mere royal titillation. So I sat down, logged on to the BBC iPlayer and started paying attention.

I don't want to speculate. I don't know whether the Prince was telling the truth or not (or at any rate the whole truth). I don't know what to make of his having "no recollection" of meeting Virginia Giuffre or having sex with her. I can't make any more sense of the notorious photograph of them together than he apparently can. I don't pretend to understand his memory of a precisely datable evening in the Pizza Express in Woking, or the clinical pathology that inhibits perspiration. I don't know how to evaluate his demeanour and body-language during the interview.

And I'm not clear whether the Prince's readiness to submit to this intense interrogation was courageous or foolhardy though the consensus is the latter. Others are experts: they must judge. All I'm competent to say anything about are the words he spoke, on the record, taken at their face value. And what these words mean when someone in public life speaks them, someone who is at the very pinnacle of the establishment by virtue of his being a senior member of the Royal Family.

In a modest way, as a clergyman, I've been in public life for most of my adulthood. I've learned a little about how exposed you are in a leadership role, how your words and actions are placed under an unforgiving spotlight you are never quite prepared for until you find yourself there. I've discovered, sometimes the hard way, how your behaviour is calibrated against the values of the organisation you serve (in my case the Church of England) and against your own professional and personal values, whether they are stated or implicit. ("Would Jesus have said or done this?") In a sense, you have no private life. You are not your own any more.

So watching the interview was a profoundly uncomfortable experience. I could all too easily imagine myself sitting across the table opposite Emily Maitlis for what I would probably remember as the most uncomfortable hour of my life. I could imagine myself perspiring (unlike the Prince) under her scrupulously courteous yet relentlessly forensic examination. I might persuade myself that I could bluff my way through it by turning on the charm, or rely on clever formulae rehearsed in coaching sessions. But I know I would not be capable of maintaining any pretence for more than a few minutes. An hour is a long time in the dock. The truth would out in the end. If it were me.

I don't know about Prince Andrew. Only he knows the full story. But let's make the presumption that his truth was told too, all of it, or at least all that was relevant to the scope of the interview. What did I make of that as I imagined myself in his shoes?

My answer is that if it were me, I would reckon that I'd already rendered myself unfit for public office. Both on the basis of what I hadn't said as well as what I had.

It's what the Prince didn't say that was most culpable. Jeffrey Epstein's record is not a matter of conjecture. He was a convicted sex offender. He procured ("trafficked") women and underage girls for sex with himself and others. The Prince's close association with him and the inevitable collusion with his lifestyle and behaviour would already have posed grave reputational risks. But for him not even to hint in the interview that he understood how Epstein's abuse of women and girls would have created victims who would be damaged for life is beyond culpable. Not to express the slightest care for or sympathy towards them, not to deplore Epstein’s behaviour would be incredible if we had not heard for ourselves this sound of a gaping royal silence.

As for what he did say, his only acknowledgment of any misjudgment, the only hint of having made a big mistake was in respect of visiting Epstein after his release from prison in order, he said, to terminate his relationship with him. That gives the game away: in that admission, the Prince was acknowledging that his relationship with Epstein was altogether toxic, hence the need to end it. There was a mysterious reference to "honour" in doing this face to face rather than through a phone call. Let us suppose so. But there's something oddly self-regarding about invoking your own sense of honour when the entire conversation has been about what most people would regard as at least flirting with serial dishonour. The register of self-justification hardly matched the narrative. It felt dislocated, out of context.

You'd have thought that the Prince would have been advised by his coaches to adopt a seriously contrite approach to this interview. Maybe to have said something like this. Yes, I've messed up badly. My behaviour has been at best self-indulgent, not to say unforgivable. And worst of all is the plight of the women and girls who were victims of my friend's predatory abuse with which, by my silence in not condemning it, I've colluded. How can I ever put right that terrible wrong done to them? How can I show them that the damage they have suffered will go on weighing on my conscience for the rest of my life just as it will forever haunt theirs? As it was, he came across as entitled people often do - not guided by the same moral compass most of us invoke when placed in ambiguous or compromising situations.

I'm trying not to speculate about things the Prince either denied or was silent about. I'm going only on what he said in front of us all. He must make up his own mind about what he does next. But if it were me, what would I do?

I was asking myself that question all through the interview. But it's really not that hard for me to answer. I'd have had to admit to a sense of shame that events had brought me to this point. I honestly do not think I could continue in public life in the light of it. Not with honour. I'd be too compromised by my past, and I'd risk in turn compromising the institutions in which I held a public role. If I said I'd be too ashamed to continue in office as a public leader, I'm not overstating it, I think. I recognise that it may feel different for a member of the Royal Family. But I'm also questioning whether it should be different. Honour and trust come into everything we do and are in our public roles. Leadership that is worth anything collapses if they are forfeited. So I would have to say that if it were me, I'd now have reached that point, and it was time for me to retreat back into private life with as much dignity as I could muster. Not because my reputation had been damaged beyond repair. Not even because of the harm I had done to my family, my associates and my institution. But because (I hope) I’d want to do the right thing as a matter of principle: taking responsibility for my behaviour and acting with integrity in the light of it.

In my leadership roles I've learned a lot from the Seven Principles of Public Life that people holding public office in appointed or elected roles are required to sign. These roles include health and education, the police, the courts, the civil service and national and local government. The Principles are: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and the example we set in leadership. We are right to prize such ethical standards and measure our behaviour in the light of them. We are right to expect that our leaders and representatives in public life will try at all times to live up to them.

I wonder what answer Emily Maitlis would have got if she'd put them to the Prince?

Child Sexual Abuse - what does the church do about shame?

It's been very painful to follow the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) hearings which have scrutinised the Church of England, and in particular the Diocese of Chichester. The Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday: "I have learnt to be ashamed again of the Church. You can't read the transcripts, you can't read the evidence statements without being moved, at least, you shouldn't be able to...You can apologise and apologise to survivors, and I would want to put on record again - I don't know how to express it adequately - how appalled I am and ashamed I am of the church for what it did."

He speaks for all of us who care about people, especially children, the young and all those who are vulnerable to the abuse of power by people who hold positions of leadership and responsibility. We have failed those who trusted us. We need to take on ourselves the shame of our institution, feel it as ours, carry it as our own burden. Justin Welby is right that our church must not only learn from the past but institutionally repent, change its mind, rigorously examine our practices, abandon the collusive, deferential patterns of behaviour that our church has perfected so well and that both disguise and perpetuate abuse.

Many who know far more than I do about sexual abuse in the church have provided first-rate commentary on the IICSA hearings. I've valued the contributions of Linda Woodhead (via her Facebook page) and Stephen Parsons (Surviving Church) in particular. They empathise with the survivors whose voices we have heard, and whose entire lives have been terribly damaged by their abusers. But they are also shrewd observers of the church as an institution and grasp the systemic brokenness that has vitiated, sometimes fatally, so much of its ministry. I can't add to what they are saying about the hearings and their likely consequences. But I can speak about my personal experience of handling abuse in the church as a leader.

I have had four experiences of being shamed in the way the Archbishop describes. Three were to do with actual incidents of abuse with which I had to deal at the time; the fourth concerned historical abuse that had taken place several decades before my time but which came to light during my incumbency. Although two of the four quickly got into the public domain, and in all four cases the statutory agencies and safeguarding teams were fully involved, I don't think it's appropriate to write about them here, even if I were to anonymise the places and people concerned. It's their legacy that concerns me as I look back on them: their effect on the cathedrals I served at the time, their effect on me personally as a Christian leader.

What I learned is what the Archbishop was describing at the hearing. It's that shame has both a collective and a personal aspect. When the church as an institution has to say sorry for awful wrongs committed by those who were its trusted officers, there's an unsaid implication that we are both sorry and ashamed. You can't admit to grave offence unless you're prepared to go on and say: we did this, or, we allowed it to happen or, it happened on our watch, and in each case, it is to our shame. We now hear the word sorry said by institutions in a way we didn't always in the past. We hear about guilt and wrongdoing. But I'm not sure we have heard enough of shame.

It took me by surprise to feel ashamed during these incidents. But it was particularly strong when my colleagues and I were dealing with historic abuse. I felt something like this. This cathedral is such a good, wholesome place where I see people caring for one another and flourishing in their own human lives and Christian discipleship. How could something so terrible, so damaging happen among us? How could our innocent, vulnerable children become victims to a perpetrator of abuse who was not only trusted but admired in his day? How could this happen and we did not know about it? How could we not have noticed that something was amiss? Those were the questions I kept asking myself in the night watches. It wasn't about them, those who were the cathedral's leaders four or five decades ago. It was about us now, today. The first-person pronouns testified to the power memory has to bind us into a community that transcends time. It was impossible to separate myself from the past, to distinguish then from now. We were all implicated. The tenses of historical shame were not past but present.

Theological and psychoanalytic studies make a clear distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt is a forensic reality with an objective character, even if it has to do with thoughts I've entertained as well as words I've uttered and deeds I've committed. Saying sorry for something I'm guilty about, what we call repentance, can often deal with the objective nature of guilt: it can be remitted, put away by appropriate words and acts. But shame is different. It has more to do with what I am or have become, and the effect this has on my sense of self. Because so much of shame is experienced subjectively, it is much harder to address than guilt (and that's hard enough by itself!). By saying sorry, I may be able to lighten the burden of my guilt. But it may not touch my shame. Looking back over my lifetime, I can vividly bring to mind things which I am no less ashamed of today than I was fifty or sixty years ago. I said sorry for them, and believed I was forgiven and reconciled at the time. Guilt doesn't come into it any more, except when I have a hunch that someone I once wronged may still be hurting. But shame has taken root in my psyche. That's its power. I may not be haunted by it to the extent I once was. But it never fully goes away.

I've spoken about corporate shame in relation to sexual abuse. Where is that shame actually felt? I've come to the view that it is the duty of leadership to bear shame, its vocation if you like. When you lead an institution, you are its visible representative, the walking embodiment of its goals and values. When your institution fails, whether spectacularly in some public arena or in more hidden ways, you feel it deeply yourself. That's nothing to do with being personally responsible for what has gone wrong (if it's your fault, it's easy - you know what you have to do about it). I'm talking about when the institution fails around you, either because of the sins others have committed, or because secrets were kept and the truth was not told, or because vital knowledge wasn't acted upon by being disclosed and named, or because of the collusions and cover-ups that happen when an institution tries (as it always does) to protect itself. In all these ways, it is the human beings who were not only the victims of the original abuse but have now become the victims of the institution too. That also is a form of abuse and an occasion for corporate shame.

I think this is what we were seeing Justin Welby express at the IICSA hearing when, it was reported, he seemed "close to tears". He was, to quote the suffering servant song in Isaiah 53, "bearing the sins of many". And as I said earlier, this does seem to belong to the vocation of leadership. To me, the Archbishop's demeanour felt real in a way some others' had not. This is where the seeds of metanoia lie, that "change of mind" that is the seed of true penitence and healing. Perhaps this was a moment of real hope, amid the grimness of what we had heard. If the church could cultivate the gift of tears, not for the sake of public perception but because we feel for survivors, because we are ashamed of our past wrongs, because we want things to be different in the future, that can only be good. The desert fathers spoke of tears as a kind of baptism. That's what we need right now.

If we've learned anything in the past three weeks, it's that the Church of England must change. This belongs to its metanoia. It will be evidence that our tears are serious and life-changing. We must acknowledge that by not addressing abuse properly, we not only fail our victims, but we fail also to be accountable for living according to truth rather than falsehood. Our shame as an institution, and the way it is felt by our leaders, can drive us to recognise that we need to do things differently from now on, perhaps radically so.

One obvious way to demonstrate metanoia would be voluntarily to submit to independent, external oversight of the church's safeguarding procedures. I am surprised that the Archbishop didn't offer it at the hearing, because it's highly likely to be one of the Commission's clear recommendations. It would be so much better to volunteer it now than for it to be required later on. I don't say that it would deal with our institutional shame, so keenly felt by Justin Welby. Shame casts a very long shadow, and perhaps that's no bad thing. But I think it would help restore the church's credibility at a time when levels of trust have sunk so low. Can the General Synod not press for that to happen as soon as possible?

Here is a sonnet by Malcolm Guite that I shall be quoting in my Holy Week addresses next week. It speaks with uncanny insight into the predicament I've been reflecting on in this blog. I am making it my prayer for the church this week.

When so much shepherding has gone so wrong,
So many pastors hopelessly astray,
The weak so often preyed on by the strong,
So many bruised and broken on the way,
The very name of shepherd seems besmeared,
The fold and flock themselves are torn in half,
The lambs we left to face all we have feared
Are caught between the wasters and the wolf.

Good Shepherd now your flock has need of you,
One finds the fold and ninety-nine are lost
Out in the darkness and the icy dew,
And no one knows how long this night will last.
Restore us; call us back to you by name,
And by your life laid down, redeem our shame.

**Update: This Guardian leading article on the IICSA hearings was published on Friday 23 March 2018.

Europeans who Live in Britain. Europeans who Love Britain

Last night I went to a meeting with nationals of other European Union countries who are living in our part of Northumberland. We gathered in a café at Hexham's independent cinema. Others in the room were looking forward to the evening presentation - Hidden Figures, maybe, or Fences. There was the happy atmosphere of expected enjoyment.

But our gathering was not for entertainment. On the night before The Queen was due to sign off the legislation paving the way for Article 50 to be invoked and the Brexit process triggered, this group of fifteen or so was contemplating what their destiny could be after the United Kingdom had left the EU. For as we all know, the UK government has failed to offer any undertakings to non-UK citizens of EU nations about remaining in this country once Brexit is a reality.

In this fascinating, articulate group of people many nationalities are represented: German, Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Greek, French, Swedish and Italian. They had lived in the UK for many years, decades even. Some were retired, some in employment. They were entirely indigenised. Their English was fluent. Their children had known no other life but in Britain. They paid taxes and social security in the UK. They owned property and had put down roots here. Most had long since ceased to feel they belonged anywhere else. Some had all but forgotten what it was like to live elsewhere.

You'll realise why I felt that my presence at this gathering was under somewhat false pretences. I am not facing their anxieties. I don't have to fear for the future of my family's or my own life in Britain. But I do know something about what it means and even how it feels when your future is not secure and you don't feel safe. Regular readers of this blog know that my late mother was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who came to Britain in the late 1930s. Her parents escaped with their lives because they had been taken in and cared for underground in German-occupied Holland. Books of German poetry, 19th century Jewish prayer books, some pieces of china, a seventeenth century map of Edam on in our entrance hall and an old Dutch cupboard in the living room symbolise that story and help keep it alive as it recedes in time from the present.

I'd been invited to attend as a known champion of the EU in Tynedale. A few knew about Christians for Europe which I co-convened during the Referendum campaign (and where a still active Twitter feed @Xians4EU can be viewed if you are not on Twitter yourself). A couple of other people from continental Europe had acquired UK citizenship. But most had not. They had assumed that in a United Kingdom that was an EU member state, there was no need to worry about national citizenship because now, after a terribly destructive war, we were at last Europeans together. Why shouldn't they make that assumption?

I heard a lot that helped me to empathise with the predicament of these good people. "We love Britain. It's our home. We belong here. We've worked here for years. We contribute to its wellbeing. We make a vital contribution to our locality here in Northumberland. We do not want to live anywhere else. We are all Europeans now - or thought we were." In all this, there was a striking lack of bitterness or self-pity. Yes, there was a lot of anxiety, together with puzzlement and hurt that their host country had not offered any undertakings about staying in Britain after Brexit when it could so easily have done so.

Indeed, I think it was the not-knowing that was the worst thing. Some said that British friends and neighbours had tried to reassure them by telling them that they wouldn't have to leave, even if they would have to wait to be told. Nobody said they had experienced hostility from locals; indeed they spoke of the warmth and friendliness of Northumberland people. (As a southerner blown in from London, I could identify with this.) But wonderful though this all is, anyone can see why it isn't enough.

Listening to the members of this group, I couldn't but feel a sense not only of profound sympathy but of shame. Many of them spoke about what it was like to contemplate being treated as "bargaining chips" in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations. They believed it would not have cost the UK much to take the generous, moral high ground and offer unconditional undertakings to long-standing European citizens from other countries who have made their home in these islands. They spoke about Britain's famous traditions of welcome to people from overseas (not simply continental Europe of course).

I didn't think I should say too much as a native Brit, but I did want to tell them that many of us, even some Brexiters I'd spoken to, were completely on their side. We understood their fears. We wanted to do all we could to help. And many of us were, I also said, ashamed that our country had treated them so badly, not just because of all they were contributing to the UK but, more basic even than that, because they are our fellow human beings and as the Hebrew Bible says, we have a responsibility to care for the stranger in our midst. Only they aren't strangers any more. They are our friends. And that makes it all the more shaming.

I understand the arguments about UK expats who live in mainland EU countries. A number of them have become friends through our regular visits to France. They too are anxious about their future after Brexit. I sympathise very much with them too, not least with those who have lived long enough outside Britain not to have qualified to vote in the Referendum (a particularly mean attitude on the part of the government, I thought). But two wrongs don't make a right. I believe that if the UK had behaved in a principled way and given the undertakings our fellow-European friends needed, it would have created a more propitious environment within which to negotiate a good Brexit deal. Generosity begets generosity: the other 27 EU nations might just have felt more inclined to behave generously towards Britain as a result.  This country badly needs friends abroad right now. So it would have been an act of enlightened self-interest to say to my conversation-partners last night, "Yes, of course you must stay in Britain. This is your home, and we wouldn't have it any other way".

But we didn't say that, despite the best efforts of some in Parliament. And to that extent, Britain has shown itself to be a less kind, less generous and less fair nation than I thought it was. With less heart, you become less great. This is why I am ashamed. Aren't you?

So I'm going to show solidarity. I'm sure many others will do the same. We must change this situation, and give back to our friends with whom we share this continent, our brothers and sisters, the future they want in our midst and have a right to expect.