Back in June 2011, I negotiated a guest editorship of the New Statesman for Dr Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury. We commissioned coalition ministers such as Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague and a piece from Gordon Brown on youth unemployment.

Then Dr Williams wrote his leader. It was a reasoned and reasonable piece on the shifting tectonic plates of British politics, which in passing noted that “Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is” around issues such as child poverty, access to education and sustainable infrastructure in poorer communities.

It was the line I lifted for the headline: “The government needs to know how afraid people are”. And I showed the page proof to a colleague who looked after the archbishop’s parliamentary affairs, a man whose judgment I much admire. I asked simply what would happen when we published.

He said the proverbial would hit the fan, Lambeth Palace would lose the government front bench and there would be real anger on the Conservative backbenches that the archbishop had said something unsayable. Good, I replied, that’s what we’ll do then.

Angry and abusive letters

My friend was even more right than I expected. Angry and abusive letters were written, by many Conservative parliamentarians who clearly had not read the piece beyond a glance at the headline. Williams was ostracised by the Conservative Party. It turned out to have been what Sir Humphrey Appleby would call “a very brave thing to do”.

Despite or because of all this, Dr Williams wrote to me afterwards to say that it had been a more than worthwhile exercise and had achieved what we’d intended. We’d spoken truth to power, on behalf of “ordinary” people, with a prophetic voice.

The point I want to make is that we knew what we were doing and why we were doing it. We knew what we wanted from it. We were ready for the quite predictable lines of attack and had answers to them. We had sparked a debate that we wanted. We had also made the archbishop’s critics look silly, which we hadn’t intended, but that was fun too.

Compare and contrast that with Dr Williams’ successor Justin Welby’s interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg last Sunday, which has been widely denounced as yet another exercise in self-exculpation, despite Welby’s repeated assertions that he is “deeply ashamed” and “sorry” that he “got it wrong” in failing to respond actively enough to church volunteer John Smyth’s serial child abuse, failings that led to Welby’s almost unprecedented resignation.

What do you want to get out of this?

If Welby still has advisers, what were they and he thinking? The very first question anyone should have asked him as he considered going on the BBC is: What do you want to get out of this? We can only speculate on what his answer that might have been.

He looked defeated. A journalist friend who knows him a bit said he looked “deflated”, like he’d been punctured, slightly slouched in his seat, slack-paunched, only making eye contact with Kuenssberg when he had to.

However much he repeated that it was all his fault, the impression given, intentionally or not, was “poor me”. Once again, he comes over as the victim, rather than focussing exclusively on those countless real victims of Smyth.

Read it all at A Word to the Wise

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest