Warning: Graphic and distressing content

The Church of England has been rocked to its foundations by a sadomasochistic barrister. The archbishop of Canterbury has resigned for failing to blow the whistle, and more incurious high clerics will follow. So will the reputation of Mary Whitehouse, feted by our evangelicals for her attacks on homosexuals: she brought John Smyth, QC, to Australia in 1984 to expound their beliefs in “muscular Christianity”. That was the name they gave to his perverted beating of schoolboys, committed and covered up with the help of his legal distinction.

Smyth is not a priest, so he cannot be defrocked, but can he, posthumously, be de-silked?

John Smyth was allowed to move abroad in the full knowledge of church officials, where he continued to act with impunity. Credit: Channel 4 News

Smyth’s fame, as Whitehouse’s QC, gave him easy entry to great public (that is, private) schools like Winchester College, where he would select boys he liked the look of for assignations in his nearby garden shed. There, he would require them to confess to the sin of masturbation, and then embrace them naked before assaulting them with a cane until they bled. They were then attended by his wife, who provided nappies they would have to wear so that Matron would not notice the bloodstains. He ran camps for promising public schoolboys expected to rise high in church or state. Most were so traumatised that their lives have never prospered.

For many weeks in 1977, while I was defending Gay News magazine, and again in 1984, when Whitehouse tried to ban a play at the National Theatre, I sat in courtrooms alongside Smyth as he denounced homosexual practices. This was music to his clients’ ears, to the evangelical wing of the church, and to all too many judges of the day. Homosexuality, they had ruled,........

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