The 'scoop' about Justin Welby's dad really isn't news - and neither is John Whittingdale's relationship

We need to stop acting as though vicious gossip is in the public interest

Justin Welby and his biological father, Sir Anthony Montague Browne (Rex)

Prurient interest in the intimate details of other people's lives isn’t confined to the tabloid press. We all like a bit of smut and innuendo, don’t we? A week ago, I put down the Daily Telegraph and felt slightly nauseous. To be blunt, I was disgusted with myself for bothering to spend half an hour reading Charles Moore’s ‘scoop’ revealing that the Archbishop of Canterbury was not of Jewish extraction, and did not have a lying alcoholic and conman for a dad, but was the product of a one-night stand between his mother and Winston Churchill’s private secretary. This titbit was billed as ‘the affair that shook the establishment’; I disagree.

Charles Moore and Justin Welby are the same age, were both at Eton and both attended Trinity College, Cambridge. Whereas Moore had a happy childhood, Welby was ‘shy and lonely’, according to his contemporary. Charles Moore writes that he had heard rumours about Welby’s lineage from several sources, and engineered a private meeting. Welby then offered to take a DNA test, which proved the rumour was true.

I don’t care particularly who the Archbishop’s dad was - and neither will the vast majority of his flock. This journalistic stunt won’t change history but it illustrates how - at every social level - Brits love gossip and secrets, especially when they're dressed up as being historically significant.

Charles Moore renounced the Anglican Church when it voted to admit women priests, and embraced Catholicism. Moore has written that ‘gay marriage is a fad, like asbestos…communism and high-rise buildings…anyone who opposes it will look like the people who opposed the slave trade’. Worse, he’s claimed that ‘traditional views of Christianity are being drowned out by a form of gay rights sharia’. You may not agree with gay marriage, but this is inflammatory language - Margaret Thatcher’s biographer reflects a retrogressive, narrow-minded view of the world while opinion polls regularly demonstrate that the British public are far more tolerant when it comes to gay rights.

Justin Welby, on the other hand, was brought up by an alcoholic mother and her hard-drinking husband, and knew about emotional deprivation and anxiety from the outset. The family was forced to move continuously and his school fees were waived for two years. All this makes me admire the Archbishop, even though I despair of the Church of England and its feeble attempts to embrace right-wing believers in an attempt to shore up their declining membership.

Moore’s description of how the Archbishop took the DNA test by brushing swabs around his mouth was creepy - surely the person who emerges from this story as brave and modern is Welby, not his interrogator. And what about the impact on his 86-year-old mother, forced to put out a statement detailing the fact that her son was conceived after a drunken one-night stand with a womanising chap who happened to be Churchill’s Private Secretary? Jane Welby has led an exemplary life, in recovery since 1968, so why should she have to justify her actions to the public?

Worse, what about the impact on Welby’s children, especially as one of his daughters has written about her own battles with depression on the same Telegraph website - an article which has been ‘liked’ by millions of readers? I don’t suppose Moore gave her a second thought.

Charles Moore’s nasty little scoop - which he claimed was important to ‘correct Welby’s biography’ - proved beyond any doubt that shameless prying into the private lives of public figures isn’t the prerogative of reality TV or the tabloid press.

This week, BBC’s Newsnight decided to run a story (claiming it was in the public interest) about the Culture Secretary John Whittingdale’s former girlfriend. Before he occupied his present post and was a backbench MP, Whittingdale (a divorced, unattached middle-aged chap seeking a bit of company) met a woman on a dating website and they saw each other for a few months. Now we know she was a sex worker - to be precise, a professional dominatrix. So what?

There already exists a Register of Members' Outside Interests - do the hypocrites want that to include the names of every person a Minister has ever shagged, in case they can be blackmailed? By running the Whittingdale story as if it was a piece of major news, the BBC is no better than Moore, or the National Enquirer.