Welby set to be Archbishop of Canterbury Bishop of Durham Justin Welby, an Eton and Cambridge-educated former oil executive, looks set to be named as the next Archbishop of Canterburyreplacing Rowan Williams, who has held the post for a decade. While Downing Street and Lambeth Palace have not yet announced Bishop Welby's appointment, bookmakers stopped taking bets on him earlier this week and suspicion was aroused when he pulled out of a BBC appearance at short notice. The Bishop worked in the oil industry for 11 years and since joining the church has become a strident critic of banking culture and corporate excess. He is in favour of women bishops but against gay marriage and it is thought that he would bring in a more conservative Anglicanism after the more liberal example set by the current archbishop. While Bishop Welby has been a clear frontrunner for the job in recent months, his appointment would still be surprising given his relative inexperience in high office. Consecrated into the Durham diocese last October, he has been a Bishop for only a year - while other contenders for the Archbishopric such as John Sentamu and Richard Chartres have both been consecrated for nearly two decades. His business background also sets him out as an unusual choice. Having worked previously at Elf Aquitaine and Enterprise Oil, he decided suddenly to leave and pursue a religious path. His dissertation at theological college addressed the issue, "Can companies sin?," and this summer he became the only cleric appointed to the parliamentary commission on banking standards, which is examining professionalism and culture in the wake of the Libor-rigging scandal. Bishop Welby has also turned his mind to business matters within Durham, and is patron of a local newspaper jobs campaign that aims to create 1,000 apprenticeships in the Darlington region within the next year. His uncompromising verdict on the financial services industry emerged last month during an address to a conference in Switzerland. Accusing the pre-2008 financial markets of being "exponents of anarchy," he said the City's "wild and frantic activity" had "no socially useful purpose." "The industry was referred to as financial services, but in fact it served nothing," Bishop Welby told his audience. The task of all those involved in... the financial markets is to find that once in a generation leap of imagination that does not simply seek to repair what was destroyed in 2008, but to replace it with something that is of lasting value.