RICHARD KAY: Downfall of the woke Archbishop and one-man opposition to the Tories who noticed 3,000 church buildings shut on his watch

In the end, there was no divine intervention, just the crushing reality that his position was untenable: the first Archbishop of Canterbury in living memory to be forced to resign.

Instead of a legacy that might have included his resolve in ending the prejudice against female bishops, Justin Welby will be remembered for his failure to act in one of the most egregious cases of sexual abuse in Church of England history.

For days he had tried to cling on, insisting he would not resign. But yesterday he finally accepted that he must take the ‘personal and institutional’ responsibility for the scandal, bringing to a full stop the rise of a man who had become so adept at plunging into controversy that it impacted his ministry.

Here was a cleric who had a view about everything, from slavery and colonialism to payday loan companies, welfare spending and internet shopping.

Some of his utterances were plain silly, such as his claim that the European Union was mankind’s greatest achievement since the fall of the Roman Empire.

Yet in the years since he became Anglican leader, more than 3,000 churches have closed and congregations have cratered. Some are bound to wonder if this neglect was his fault. His response? To recommend that the impecunious church should pay out £100 million in reparations to atone for its links to slavery.

He became the woke archbishop, a one-man opposition in the years of Tory governments. But for someone who considered such interventions instinctive, his catastrophic handling of serial abuser John Smyth will for ever haunt him.

In the hours before his dramatic announcement that he would be stepping down, the absence of any support for the increasingly isolated Welby spoke volumes.

When Prime Minister Keir Starmer pointedly refused to back him, he had nowhere to turn.

Significantly, the Archbishop of York, number two in the church hierarchy, said the resignation was the ‘right and honourable thing to do’.

At 68, Welby could have expected to continue in his post until 70, the age at which all archbishops must stand down. By then he would have completed 13 years, one of the longest-serving of recent times, and have the prospect of a seat in the House of Lords where he could continue to air his liberal views.

Today, as he surveys the wreckage of a turbo-charged career that saw him vault from parish priest to archbishop in 20 years, not even that peerage can be guaranteed, such is the stain on his record.

For an earnest Old Etonian who began his career in the oil business, Welby was thin-skinned. Figures close to him say he was stung by criticism. ‘He took things personally and would ask if he’d done the right thing and if he should resign,’ said one associate yesterday.

This will be little consolation to the victims of John Smyth, the Christian barrister who sexually, physically and psychologically attacked as many as 130 boys over 40 years. For had it not been for Welby’s negligence, Smyth might have been brought to justice when a report was first handed to the archbishop over a decade ago. Yet, on this occasion, he would not countenance resignation.

One survivor characterised Welby’s handling of the allegations as a ‘dereliction of duty’.

After the otherworldly and bookish Rowan Williams, Welby’s elevation to Church CEO was seen as a breath of fresh air. He was, said his supporters, self-deprecating and less scholarly than Dr Williams.

His background, too, was surprisingly colourful – though it was to be another five years before we found out how so.

He was an oilman who had given up a six-figure salary and executive lifestyle to become a priest. His Damascene conversion was positively Biblical.

After Cambridge, where he met his future wife Caroline, he spent years climbing the corporate ladder in Paris at oil giant Elf.

For all the material success that came his way, there was tragedy, too. In 1983, the young parents endured the death of their seven-month-old daughter Johanna in a car crash. The experience, the father-of-five would later say, ‘brought us closer to God’.

As for his own vocation, his explanation for the fundamental switch in his life is simply to say: ‘I was unable to get away from a sense of God calling.’

In 1989, aged 33, he entered Cranmer Hall theological college in Durham. By 1992, he was a curate. (Amusingly, the late Bishop of Kensington, John Hughes, when approached by Welby, said: ‘There is no place for you in the Church of England. I have interviewed a thousand for ordination, and you don’t come in the top thousand.’)

He claimed his oil company training taught him decisiveness. But could there have been another reason why he was motivated to pull away from Mammon and turn to God? In Paris, he had worked as a finance project manager for Elf Aquitaine during a period when, it later emerged, some of the senior executives at its palatial offices near the Champs-Elysee were running fraud rackets involving corrupt African dictators, compliant members of the Gallic establishment and a vast network of criminally-minded middlemen.

Secret dealings went on relentlessly in which executives effectively used the firm as a private bank, with hundreds of millions spent on art, villas, women and political lobbying. One figure used company money to finance his multi-million-pound divorce. It was one of France’s greatest scandals.

A lawyer involved in the scandal said: ‘The effect on innocent young employees like Justin Welby when the truth emerged must have been enormous. No wonder he couldn’t get away fast enough from big business.’

He served in provincial parishes before being appointed Dean of Liverpool, where he abseiled from the cathedral roof, encouraged the bell-ringers to chime John Lennon’s Imagine (the lyrics of which are regarded by some as sacrilegious) and gave his blessing to a ‘Night of the Living Dead’ service at which a man rose from a coffin to represent the Resurrection.

None of this harmed his upward trajectory as he moved seamlessly on to becoming Bishop of Durham. It was not the oil industry that shaped him but a turbulent upbringing as he transcended a chaotic childhood.

For most of his adult life he believed his father was a bootlegging whisky salesman and alcoholic called Gavin Welby, who was briefly married to Welby’s mother Jane. Gavin’s, too, was a vividly colourful life: he had an affair with a young Vanessa Redgrave which ended because of the fierce opposition of her family, who considered him ‘a rotten piece of work’, and he is said to have introduced a youthful John F Kennedy to a 21-year old Swedish mistress just weeks before the future president married Jacqueline Bouvier.

The archbishop had been devoted to his father but, in 2016, it was revealed that Welby was actually the love-child of the late Anthony Montague Browne, a former private secretary to Sir Winston Churchill. The revelation prompted Welby to take a DNA test, which suggested a 99.9 per cent probability that Browne, who died in 2013, was his father.

Welby’s mother Jane admitted she’d had a brief liaison with Browne before her marriage, although she described the news as ‘an almost unbelievable shock’. For his part, Welby described it as ‘a story of redemption and hope’.

It also opened another unexpected chapter in Welby’s life. He recently discovered that his biological father was descended from a slave owner called James Fergusson. He issued an apology for this ‘ancestral connection’ and said he had made a trip to Jamaica, where the Fergusson family held their estates, to confront this terrible legacy.

One is tempted to wonder how much this personal voyage of discovery influenced his insistence that the Church ‘address past wrongs’, which he said was needed to tackle ‘our shameful past’.

As Archbishop of Canterbury, he could not resist the lure of speaking out, fuelling an apparent desire to weigh in on political issues, including Brexit, which he said had ‘divided the country’.

He described austerity as ‘crushing the weak’ and blamed Conservative cuts to benefits for a surge in the use of food banks. These were not matters on which archbishops traditionally became vocal.

Welby also attacked energy companies for raising prices and accused Amazon, the online giant, of ‘leeching off taxpayers’.

He derided payday lending sites only to be accused of hypocrisy when it emerged that the Church‘s pension fund was linked to one such site, Wonga.

He even intervened in the controversy over Prince Andrew, suggesting that ‘forgiveness really does matter’ and claiming that the duke was trying to ‘make amends’ following his public disgrace. Unfortunately, he was unwilling or unable to provide any evidence of princely atonement.

Inevitably, of course, Welby had strong views on immigration. In an Easter sermon he thundered from the pulpit at the last government’s plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, a policy that he declared could not ‘stand the judgment of God’.

In the same breath, here was a leader who had also declared that Paula Vennells, disgraced former Post Office chief, was ‘someone who had shaped my thinking over the years’.

The most damaging of his secrets went back to the 1980s, when he was associated with the Christian camps for public school boys where John Smyth brutally assaulted young men.

Welby was yet to be ordained when all this started, but he was well within the circle of trust that kept the secret of Smyth’s vile behaviour from leaking out.

Last week’s, independent review by Keith Makin said it was ‘unlikely’ Welby knew nothing of what went on. And the extent of his knowledge at that time may never be fully uncovered.

But what did for Welby was what happened after he became archbishop in 2013. Greeting him on his desk were the full details of his friend’s disgraceful crimes.

That dossier and his failure to act on it will now surely be what Justin Welby is remembered for.