Trying to make sense of what is going on

A casual reader could be forgiven for being totally confused and beginning to lose the plot over Christ Church Oxford and the travails of its Dean.  What started as a falling-out between a group of disgruntled dons and the head of their Oxford college, has grown into something far more substantial.  This blog piece is an attempt by an outsider to look at the substantial amount of new available information and try to make some sense of the facts that we are being given.  It may also help my readers to have this more recent material presented in a summarised, bite-sized version.  Some of the material is complex so setting out succinctly and, I hope, accurately, some of what is now in the public domain, may be helpful to a reader.   As we shall see, the complete story has yet to be told.

Back in 2018 a group of Christ Church dons made a complaint against Martyn Percy, their Dean and Head of College, accusing him of immoral conduct.  This complaint was made following the procedures available to them by the College statutes.  After a massively expensive enquiry, a retired judge, Sir Andrew Smith, threw out all twenty-seven charges and the Dean was re-instated.  The college appears to have spent over £2 million of their charitable funds in bringing their complaints forward and Dean Percy was forced also to employ legal support costing him £400,000.

Earlier this year the same group of complainants approached the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Team to bring a further complaint against the Dean connected with safeguarding issues.  This complaint procedure is on-going.  Once again Dean Percy is forced to employ legal help as the NST have, in response, set up a quasi-legal Core Group to investigate the complaint.  This is where the situation becomes complex and the subject of procedural and legal arguments. 

• A major issue yet to be resolved in the case is this.  Dean Percy wears two hats in his unusual double role.  On the one hand, he is a Dean of a Cathedral where Church safeguarding rules could come into operation if required.  On the other side he is the head of a college at a university which has its own set of protocols and guidelines.  A similar situation would exist for a school, prison or hospital chaplain.  While they are working in their respective work environments, chaplains have to work according to rules set by the institution that employs them.  In cases of safeguarding, Church and State have differing standards and regulations.  The Church has rules which talk about ‘vulnerable adults’.  All other non-church organisations, including universities, adhere to regulations which speak of a category referred to as ‘adults at risk’.  The precise definitions of these two expressions do not concern us at this point, but suffice to say, they are not the same.  It is hard to see how Dean Percy could be expected to operate according to two distinct sets of guidelines simultaneously.  It is clear anyway that all the safeguarding complaints are to do with episodes of college life, i.e. in areas of his responsibility where the Church has no obvious role or access.

• The case seems to be full of potential conflicts of interest which make it almost impossible for the Core Group to work with an adequate level of independence.  There are just too many personal ties that exist between the Dean’s accusers and the publicity companies and legal firms who have now become involved in the case.  We obviously do not have all the facts of who knows whom, but there is a miasma of suspicion about the process which makes it hard to see how there will ever be a calm dispassionate examination of the facts. The two non-church organisations prominent in the case each have a lot of history and involvement with both Christ Church and the Church of England central structures.   One is the public relations firm, Luther Pendragon.  They have already been working for the complainant dons in their earlier case against their Dean in 2018.  They also do work for the Church of England and several of the dioceses.  Alongside Luther Pendragon is Winckworth Sherwood, a firm of top end London lawyers.  They are extensively involved with church work at the national level and also with the Provincial Registrar and the diocese of Oxford.   WS, as we shall now call them, used to be run by the Rev John Rees, who now works for the national Church at a senior level.  The letter sent to Martyn telling him that he faced investigation by the NST was written in the name of Melissa Caslake, the director, but it appears to have been drafted by another senior lawyer with connections with WS, Alex McGregor.  He is a priest lawyer who used to be chancellor for the Diocese of Oxford.  The WS Oxford office was also drawn in to issue the letter from the Bishop of Oxford to George Carey, removing his PTO. 

• Given the close personal and professional ties that can be seen to bind all the individuals within these firms with the national church and with members of Christ Church, we would have expected to see a number of recusals from the Core Group. It is surely impossible for members of such a small network to regard themselves as independent in regard to this investigation.  In actual fact, 13 out 14 members of the Percy Core Group are believed to have personal or professional links with WS.  Two of Dean Percy’s accusers sit on the group while no one represents the interests of the Dean himself.  Further, Alex McGregor, the member of the Church’s legal team and who reputedly drafted the letter to Martyn, is an alumnus of Christ Church.  He can be expected to have continuing social and other contact with some of the dons involved in the case. 

• The minutes of the Christ Church Core Group, which met on March 13th 2020, have not yet been released.  The various conflicts of interest that would appear to be in operation, in bringing together such a group, need to be fully explored.  The group that is claiming to seek justice for the Dean needs to explain how they feel able to do this with any degree of integrity while these apparent conflicts of interest are neither acknowledged nor examined.  There is also something less than healthy when committee proceedings are apparently wrapped up in secrecy.  The Carlile report, which scrutinised the processes in the case around Bishop Bell, called for all such Church core groups to carry representation of the interests of the complainants and the accused.  That, clearly, is not happening in this case.  The impression is being given that the whole process is an expensive and dishonourable exercise in trying to wear down the Dean by litigious-type activities.  To their shame, the Church of England has allowed itself to become party to a what appears to be a thoroughly shameful process.  The NST has been manipulated to become part of something so toxic that it may itself be destroyed by this involvement.

• The reputations of two organisations are being severely damaged by this episode.  Christ Church dons have already seen twenty-seven accusations against the Dean rejected by a retired judge.  The repeat of the attacks on the Dean with a completely new set of accusations, while using another legal structure, seems foolish and even reckless.  The reputation of the Christ Church college has been muddied and brought low by this case.  At the same time the status of the Church of England is taking an equally heavy battering.   The Church, with the connivance of its top legal officers has allowed a church legal process to be used in a dispute within a wealthy Oxford college.  It is surprising that the advice of the Church’s own publicity machine and its reputation managers was not there to check this appalling waste of human and financial resources.  At a time of financial anxiety for the parishes and cathedrals of England, congregations are witnessing the expenditure of tens (even hundreds) of thousands of pounds of church money on this case.  This is money that properly belongs to the Church.  Quite apart from the evident flakiness of the case, the Church of England has allowed one of its structures to be used, abused and, arguably, totally discredited in pursuing a case which appears ultimately to be beyond its remit.  Let us hope that General Synod at its meeting in two weeks time will be able to do something to reverse this terrible train crash.