When he was appointed in 2013, he was meant to be a managerial kind of Archbishop, someone whose earlier career as an oil man would help him handle the tricky politics – around historic abuse, gay marriage and female bishops – facing the church in the 21st century.

Instead, Justin Welby, 68, is neck deep in scandal, his reputation destroyed by his association with the worst abuse case – and subsequent cover up – in the history of the Church of England.

On Monday the Bishop of Newcastle, the Rt Rev Helen-Ann Hartley, added her name to a growing list of Church figures calling on Welby to resign, saying his position was untenable. Hartley, who sits in Parliament as one of the Lords Spiritual, told the BBC: “I think that it’s very hard for the Church, as the national, established Church, to continue to have a moral voice in any way, shape or form in our nation, when we cannot get our own house in order with regard to something as critically important [as abuse].”

She echoed comments by other prominent figures. Over the weekend, three members of the General Synod launched a petition calling for his resignation: the Rev Ian Paul, the Rev Robert Thompson, and the Rev Marcus Walker. By Monday afternoon the petition had more than 5,000 signatures.

“I was surprised by how quickly [the petition] has gathered momentum,” Paul tells the Telegraph. “This isn’t a witch hunt, and this isn’t just tokenism. Some have said that [Welby’s] resignation wouldn’t solve the problems. The three of us realise that, but nothing can happen before he resigns. At every meeting of the Archbishops’ Council [of which Welby is joint president] we sign off millions of pounds addressing issues of safeguarding. It is impossible for us to do that with credibility while Justin stays in post.”

Over the weekend, calls for the Archbishop’s resignation were trending on social media with the hashtag #welbyresign. The Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie, the vicar of Charlbury with Shorthampton and author of Touching Cloth, wrote an open letter urging Welby to go “for the love of God, and Him alone”.

Welby’s crisis has come via the Makin report, which has detailed the way the Church of England covered up its worst ever abuse case. John Smyth, a barrister, physically abused more than 100 schoolboys and young people at evangelical Christian camps, run by the Iwerne Trust, during the 1970s and early 1980s.

After the abuse was reported to senior figures – including Welby – in 2013, Smyth moved to Zimbabwe and set up a camp for young boys. “Church officers knew of the abuse and failed to take the steps necessary to prevent further abuse occurring,” the report said. The Daily Telegraph and Channel 4 broke details of the abuse in 2017. Victims said Smyth would invite them to his home in Winchester where he would order them to strip naked and cane them on their exposed backsides. One said he could feel the blood spattering on his legs; another had to wear an adult nappy afterwards. Smyth died in South Africa in 2018, having abused at least 115 young men and children.

Welby has denied knowing about the abuse before 2013, but the Makin report finds this “unlikely”.

“[Welby] may not have known of the extreme seriousness of the abuse, but it is most probable that he would have had at least a level of knowledge that John Smyth was of some concern,” it says. “It is not possible to establish whether Welby knew of the severity of the abuses in the UK prior to 2013.”

Last week, Welby acknowledged that he had been warned to “stay away” from Smyth in 1981, decades before Smyth’s abuse became public. It emerged in 2017 that Welby had come across Smyth when he volunteered at the summer camps at which it later transpired that abuse had taken place. Welby said in 2017: “As I recall him, he was a charming, delightful, very clever, brilliant speaker. I wasn’t a close friend of his, I wasn’t in his inner circle or in the inner circle of the leadership of the camp, far from it.”

Giles Fraser, a London vicar and the former canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, was an early supporter of Welby’s candidacy for Archbishop of Canterbury following the resignation of his predecessor, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, in 2012. But he has also now called for Welby’s resignation. In a piece for Unherd on Monday, in which Fraser detailed the abuse he suffered as a child, he said that the Makin report was a “watershed moment” for the Church. “As a victim of cruel abuse myself, I am finding it increasingly difficult to be a public representative of a church that refuses to find it within itself to do the right thing.”

A decade ago, Fraser interviewed Welby while the then Bishop of Durham was being touted as a frontrunner to replace Williams. “There is quite a lot on which I would disagree with the Bishop of Durham. But with regards to being the archbishop, he would get my vote,” Fraser wrote at the time, later describing him as “a good man” who “will, I expect, make a fine leader of the church.”

For Welby’s critics, the Smyth case is all the more shocking for Welby’s apparent hypocrisy. Since he became Archbishop of Canterbury, he has been notably tough on safeguarding issues. In 2019, he suspended the Bishop of Lincoln, Christopher Lowson, over a historic safeguarding case. (Lowson returned to work in 2021 before retiring.) Last year Lord Sentamu, the former Archibishop of York, was suspended from active ministry after a report found he had failed to act on disclosures that a vicar had raped a 16-year-old boy. Rank and file clergy, meanwhile, must adhere to the strictest of safeguarding standards, such as displaying the details of safeguarding officers on the front page of their websites.

“It reveals a massive double standard within the Church of England, where ordinary clergy are treated very harshly when there is the most minor safeguarding infraction imaginable,” says the Rev Jamie Franklin, a priest at Holy Trinity Winchester. “Clergy live in fear of being hauled up for some inadvertent safeguarding infraction and having the book thrown at them. So [this case] is perceived among clergy as an attempt by the higher-ups to cover their own backsides.”

Born in 1956, Welby was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. It was at Cambridge, on October 12 1975, that Welby was praying with a Christian friend when he “felt a clear sense of something changing, the presence of something that had not been there before in my life”. Despite this, he did not rush into the ministry, but instead spent 11 years as an oil executive, during the Thatcherite 1980s. During this time he attended Holy Trinity Brompton, the evangelical Anglican church in west London popular with young professionals.

He is married to Caroline Eaton; the couple have five children. The couple lost their first child, Johanna, in a car accident in 1983, when she was seven months old.

Welby was ordained a priest in 1993 and rose quickly through the ranks, becoming Dean of Liverpool in 2007 and Bishop of Durham in 2011 before he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013, after Williams failed to secure the support of the General Synod, the Church’s parliament, for female bishops.

“It was very clear that whoever followed Rowan Williams was going to have to be an evangelical and was going to have to be business-like,” says Fergus Butler-Gallie. “Welby is of that managerial caste. He has said he views himself as running a great department of state. He believes himself to be on a par with the Home Secretary or the Chancellor. There isn’t any meaningful sense of the Church as a spiritual organisation. Back then, there was an argument for that.”

Theo Hobson, a theologian and author, says Welby has been a “useful placeholder” as Archbishop. “We needed someone who was pretty conservative on the gay issue and has allowed people to move a bit towards reform. He has allowed that culture of slow, thoughtful, nudging towards a more open evangelical culture. He has also been reasonably traditional in terms of a vague liberalism. That doesn’t get you much praise. But he has been a good follower to Rowan Williams in resettling the Church as the vaguely liberal national Church.”

But Hobson believes that Welby risks that perception by failing to act on allegations involving the evangelical wing of the Church he has sought to “protect his own.”

“There was a point when the report came out when [Welby] could have gone with a degree of integrity,” says Butler-Gallie. “Now it looks like he is being forced out kicking and screaming. I don’t see how he can take the peerage that is customarily given to Archbishops of Canterbury. I can’t think of an Archbishop of Canterbury who has done this level of damage to the Church of England, probably since the Reformation. There have been controversial or lazy ones, but there’s nobody who’s done the structural damage Welby has done. You can’t point to any precedent of an archepiscopal career ending in such ignominy.”

Welby has repeatedly dug in his heels over the Makin report, saying he will not quit and reiterating that he did not know about the scale of the abuse. A Lambeth Palace spokesman says: “The Archbishop reiterates his horror at the scale of John Smyth’s egregious abuse, as reflected in his public apology. He has apologised profoundly both for his own failures and omissions, and for the wickedness, concealment, and abuse by the church more widely. As he has said, he had no awareness or suspicion of the allegations before he was told in 2013 – and therefore having reflected, he does not intend to resign.”

Welby’s intransigence is the more surprising because he was widely expected to announce his retirement soon anyway. Church of England bishops are required to stand down at 70, the age Welby will turn in 2026.

Whether Welby lasts his full term, or is gone sooner, it will be under the darkest of clouds. It will be no comfort to John Smyth’s victims or the thousands of clergy trying to repair faith in the Church. Appointed for his managerial savvy and politician’s nous, Justin Welby is discovering the truth of an old maxim: unlike religious lives, all political lives end in failure.