The Safeguarding Machine

What lessons might the Martin Sargeant debacle have for a panicking Church of England mired in crisis?

Hello! I’m dropping into your inbox unusually on a Thursday with a one-off piece I’ve been mulling for a while, trying to draw some of the threads together from the Church of England’s agonies over safeguarding and abuse. Your normal newsletter is coming tomorrow morning, but for paying subscribers only here is a bonus post.

Long-time Critical Friend readers may recall that almost a year ago I published a lengthy investigation in The Fence magazine into an astonishing scandal in the Diocese of London. A senior official, Martin Sargeant, had for years been pilfering money from the diocese - a total of more than £5m in the end.

But while he was defrauding dozens of parishes, Sargeant was also a deeply malign presence at the heart of the diocese: a bully, a gossip and a liar. These antics over many years culminated in him drawing up an infamous list of 42 vicars and their supposed peccadilloes, secrets and vices. And this list led to a disastrous safeguarding investigation which ended in an innocent priest’s suicide.

A friend recently wondered if the Sargeant fiasco might shed some light on more recent abuse stories: Justin Welby and John Smyth, Stephen Cottrell and David Tudor, or even John Perumbalath and Bev Mason. And so, prompted by him, I’ve been doing some thinking about what lessons the C of E might draw from the Sargeant saga, to help it stop making the same mistakes again.

This post is for paying subscribers only - but you can join that elite club right here, right now, for the pittance of £5 a month.

If you want to dive back into the full details of my Sargeant investigation, you can remind yourself from this post last year. But in a nutshell, Sargeant inveigled his way into the diocese and rose up the ranks to become the Head of Operations for the Two Cities of London and Westminster. He was a money man, a buildings development bod, an all-purpose fixer and almost a right-hand-man to the then Bishop, Richard Chartres.

All this time he was corruptly diverting money won in grants for crumbling churches into bank accounts he controlled, and all this time he was collecting gossip, innuendo and smears on the very clergy he was ostensibly working to support. He would throw his weight around, threatening vicars if they didn’t back his projects. He became indispensable to the diocese - if you wanted anything to do with buildings or money you had to go through him and effectively pay his price.

When Chartres retired, Sarah Mullally was appointed as the new Bishop of London, with an unspoken brief to try and modernise the diocese. Chartres was a throwback and had cultivated a medieval court around him. Mullally had a career in high-level NHS management before getting ordained, and was seen as an expert in professional bureaucracy.

Her beady eye quickly landed on Sargeant, who had a job nobody quite understood and who answered to no-one (even his salary came from the bishop’s personal fund). She eased him out of the diocese, but on his way out he conducted an infamous exit interview with the Archdeacon of London Luke Miller. It was this interview which spat out what became known as the ‘brain dump’, a rambling list of the gossip and lies Sargeant had accumulated over the years.

This ‘report’, naming 42 vicars and all the scuttlebutt Sargeant could drum up about them, was then bizarrely handed over to the diocese’s safeguarding team as though it was a formal disclosure of allegations. The safeguarding professionals combed through it and highlighted one entry in particular - the allegation that one now retired priest, Alan Griffin, used “rent boys”.

This prompted a convoluted and botched investigation by the diocese into Griffin, and because he had post-retirement joined the Catholic Church, a second inquiry by them too. For over a year Griffin, a lonely and vulnerable man, did not even know what the allegations against him were. The diocese also stupidly passed on the fact he was HIV positive to their Catholic counterparts. This was a tidbit Sargeant had prised out of Griffin very reluctantly and something Griffin was desperate to keep private. Eventually, the toll of the never-ending investigation - with its harsh focus on all his personal struggles - became too much for Griffin and he killed himself.