UNITED KINGDOM
Christian Today
Ruth Gledhill CHRISTIAN TODAY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
01 January 2016
Senior establishment figures wrote letters to the Crown Prosecution Service and leading police officers in support of disgraced Church of England bishop Peter Ball. They included the former Lord Justice Anthony Lloyd, the late Tory Tim Rathbone who was Prime Minister David Cameron’s godfather and the former Tory Cabinet Minister Tim Renton. Ball, 83, is currently in prison after being sentenced last October for a string of offencs against 18 teenagers and young men between 1977 and 1992. Lord Justice Lloyd wrote to the Chief Constable of the Gloucestershire force, which was investigating Ball, and said: “He is the most gentle upright and saintly man I have ever met.”
The 12 letters were released after The Telegraph and BBC submitted Freedom of Information requests. The law which allows the requests is currently being reviewed due to cost.
Among those who wrote letters to Barbara Mills, Director of Public Prosecutions, was former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton. He was clear that he did not wish to influence the decision to prosecute, but he wrote two letters. In the first, in February 1993, he said his first reaction to allegations of indencent behaviour with an adolescent was that it was “improbable” and that the allegations had caused Ball “excruciating pain and spiritual torment”. In the second, a month later, he expressed concern about Ball’s “fragile health”.
Tim Rathbone wrote to Gloucester Police that it was “literally inconceivable” that Ball would ever become involved with anyone in in the way “insinuated” by “the newspapers”.
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