Archbishop Justin Welby and his naughty mum

Did you laugh when you heard about it? I confess I did, just a little bit. The thought of a deeply religious man like the Archbishop of Canterbury finding out that his mother had been having a bit of how’s-your-father with a man other than her husband when the Archbishop was conceived, must have prompted the odd  small smile,  if not a yelp and roar of “Ah ye boy ye!”

But I suppose if you’re going to find your da was not your da and your mother put herself about a bit, so to say, isn’t it fortunate that your real da was a well-connected man who worked as Winston Churchill’s private secretary? Yes, the beast-with-two-backs put in an appearance outside the bounds of matrimony but no, it didn’t pop up outside the bounds of privilege and class. The archbishop presumably wouldn’t have been shocked if his real da had turned out to be a drunk – after all his supposed father was one. But how awful if his real da had emerged as a drunk who stumbled around the locality, muttering and taking swigs from a brown paper bag!

The oddest thing of all, though, is that his mother is said to have been totally shocked to discover the boy’s father wasn’t the man she had been married to. The English upper crust aren’t always known for their intelligence, but you’d think little Justin’s mum might have been able to see the connection between her dalliance with Sir Anthony Montague Browne and the arrival of little Justin nine months later.