The new Archbishop of Canterbury was today hit with a backlash from churchgoers over plans to spend £100million on slavery reparations.

Dame Sarah Mullally was accused of helping to ‘mislead the public’ and ‘putting out the fire with gasoline’ by pressing ahead with the plans.

It was also claimed that a report claiming the Church of England has historical links to the slave trade was ‘fundamentally flawed’ – something it has strongly denied.

The revolt broke out on the fringes of a meeting in Westminster of the General Synod, the Church’s rule-making body and her first as leader.

It comes after a group of Conservative MPs and peers wrote to her last month urging her to scrap the reparations plan, also known as Project Spire, branding it a ‘legally dubious vanity project’.

Professor Richard Dale, an Emeritus Professor of the University of Southampton and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, sat on the panel of the fringe gathering attended by around 100 worshippers this afternoon.

He said: ‘Up to this point, the Church Commissioners [who commissioned the Project Spire report] and their advisers, faced with evidence of fundamental flaws in their research, have closed ranks, reiterated their ill-founded claims and refused to engage with their critics.’

He added: ‘History matters and what is certain is that such a scheme should not be launched on the back of a false historical narrative…this narrative is demonstrably false.

‘The Church Commissioners’ historical advisers have misled the Commissioners, the Commissioners have misled Church leaders and Church leaders have misled the public at large.

‘Because there is incontrovertible evidence that Queen Anne’s Bounty’s [a Church of England fund established in 1704] investments earned not one penny from the slave trade.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever come across such an elementary error with such far-reaching consequences because this historical falsehood is going around the world.’

He claimed that researchers commissioned by the Church Commissioners, the CofE’s financial arm, had mixed up the South Sea Company and South-Sea Annuities when poring over historical financial documents.

The former invested in the slave trade but most of Queen Anne’s Bounty related to the latter, which did not, he claimed at the fringe meeting.

Read it all at the Daily Mail