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?

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, might have been legalised, but that did not mean it was acceptable. Smyth dredged up the blasphemy law, which had not been used for 50 years, to convict an editor for publishing a poem suggesting that gays could go to heaven.

Smyth conducted the trial in a tub-thumping, gay-bashing way. The poem, he explained (which had a verse envisaging a Roman centurion embracing Christ on the cross), “attacked the three fundamentals of the Christian faith – that Christ is without sin, that homosexuality is evil and that there cannot be sex in paradise”. He went on to describe this as “so vile it would be hard for the most perverted imagination to conjure up anything worse”. This, from a barrister given to slobbering over naked schoolboys before grievously assaulting them, takes some beating when it comes to perverted imaginations.

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The accolade of being “Mrs Whitehouse’s counsel” gave him the status that helped defray suspicions, as it was greatly enhanced when he was appointed a Queen’s Counsel – reportedly at the insistence of Lord Dilhorne (the former Tory attorney-general Reginald Manningham-Buller) in recognition for his prosecution of Gay News. Smyth became the youngest silk in England, although his practice at the bar did not deserve it. It made him untouchable: he was given the run of Winchester to select victims, and of curious camps designed to groom boys from the 30 “best” private schools.

But by 1982 his time was running out – his depredations were outlined in a report to senior evangelicals. That did not deter Smyth from masterminding the next Mary Whitehouse attack on homosexuality – on the National Theatre, no less, for staging Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain.