It’s generally my morning habit to leap out of bed at 5am singing the Queen song ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, but on those rare mornings when I sleep in, nothing can be guaranteed to finally get me moving at 5.43am as surely as Radio 4’s Prayer For The Day. One of two things will happen; usually, some wet-wipe in a dog-collar will come out with a mouthful of woke platitudes and I’ll be so cross that I can’t keep still a moment longer. On a few occasions, though, I find the person speaking so affecting that it seems wicked to lie in bed for a moment longer when the Lord’s wonderful world is out there waiting to be experienced afresh. So either way, it gets me going.

One reason our church lost its way is because it attracts mediocre men who want to ‘show off’

I’ve noticed that the best religious speakers on Radio 4 tend to be disproportionately female; perhaps because women were allowed to be ordained only relatively recently, they are more thoughtful than male vicars, who can seem like the most awful shower of self-serving show-offs. I’m thinking, in particular, of Giles Fraser and even more of Richard Coles, the ex-pop singer from the Communards: the one who made even Jimi ‘Mr Potato Head’ Somerville seem sexy in comparison, which was no mean feat and maybe a miracle.

Coles is a highly annoying wazzock who hung up his cassock so that he could spend more time with his media career, only to find himself on the wrong side of BBC radio’s long scythe last year; the one which picks off anyone over a certain age, even if they’ve spent decades contorting themselves to fit the prevailing fashionable stances. He declared himself ‘frustrated and sad’ at getting the old heave-ho, which pretty much sums up the way I’ve felt hearing his hollow, jolly voice on Saturday Live for the past twelve years. Bring back Ned Sherrin! (Yes, I know he’s dead, but it’s the principle of the thing.) Coles now juggles his ‘Canon Clement’ cosy-murder novel-writing career with the obligatory panel shows and podcasts – ‘The Rabbit Hole Detectives’ – and last year added a nationwide tour annoyingly called ‘Borderline National Trinket’. He must be coining it; camels and eyes of needles, anyone?

In an interview with Buzz magazine, he talked about leaving the Church in an astonishingly offhand way. The Lord knows that I’m not the best Christian, but I do keep trying – and I do know that, if I had made a different choice about whether I wanted to be nice or nasty for a living when I was young, no way would I be so flippant about leaving the ministry in order to pursue a full-time gig as a gob-on-a-stick:

‘There wasn’t a defining moment that made me resign…part of it was being a vicar for 12 years and I had done everything I thought I could do. I didn’t want to go anywhere else, so it seemed the right time to make an exit…I don’t have to wake up on a Sunday morning and have to remember to do this and that. I do miss being a vicar and I love being in church and I loved being part of it, but I didn’t really enjoy the responsibility that came with it.’

I understand this to mean that Coles enjoyed performing as a vicar, but not so much the actual religious stuff, the ‘responsibility’ that comes with attempting to act as some sort of interlocutor between a human being and the Almighty. Admittedly there is great responsibility involved in this position, but exactly what did Coles think it would be like?

As I mentioned in my essay on Alastair Campbell, it appears that many people who pretend to be devoted to public service actually want to be in showbusiness; this is as true of vicars as of MPs.

The CofE is addicted to the high that lecturing, hectoring and scolding produces in mediocre people

Looking at Coles’ Wikipedia entry, there seems far more about his entertainment ‘journey’ than his spiritual one. He was a choirboy at his private school, and maybe this is where the confusion set in; perhaps he liked the sensation he got from showing off, and got it mixed up with being a believer. My heart sank with each new morsel of information; he appeared in a film called Revenge of the Teenage Perverts, has played Frank N Furter in a production of the Rocky Horror Show, hosted Countdown – and I can’t stress enough what a minuscule slice of his performing pie this is. He’s certainly got ‘nerve’: in the midst of all this, he was featured in a 2020 BBC show called Winter Walks in which he opined:

‘At the centre of what we do in order to be who we are, we need silence, we need retreat, we need contemplation’.

This is like me saying: ‘In order to appreciate life fully, we must remain sober at all times.’

‘He took up religion in his late twenties’ also stood out for me, and though we do not know who penned these Wiki-words, they seem strange. Does one ‘take up’ religion? My own relationship with faith has been rocky and intermittent, but what has made it the most important thing in my life is partly the sense of being summoned, cell by cell. One ‘takes up’ macrame or pot-holing; one is raised up by faith. To be fair, Coles is aware of spreading himself too thinly:

‘I was once called in the middle of the night to attend a parishioner’s deathbed and I could not because I was in Glasgow doing Celebrity Antiques Road Trip’.

But he still maintains that he has given up being a vicar because the Church of England is becoming less tolerant of homosexuality and moving in a ‘conservative and fundamentalist’ direction rather than having to choose between faith and fame.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been flogging ‘Holy Week Retreats’ at Canterbury Cathedral for £950 a pop (Getty)

There are many words I would use to describe our poor desiccated Anglican church, but ‘conservative and fundamentalist’ are not two of them. I’d venture instead ‘weak’ and ‘totally out of touch with the people it should be serving.’ One reason our church has lost its way – and its congregations – is because it attracts mediocre middle-class men who are looking for a way in which to perform, to ‘show off’ as Coles himself says of his showbiz career. A congregation is a captive audience for an hour or so – but they can, and do, vote with their feet, and the falling away in church attendance numbers over the past century has been woeful.

This is largely because the working-class have been turning their backs on the CofE the way they have turned it on the BBC, or ‘the BBC of E’ as my husband calls the greedy two-headed beast.

Only last year, the CofE commissioned a report which found that the few existing working-class vicars were ‘deeply alienated from a church culture that favours and naturalises middle-class ways’ frequently encountering ‘disapproval and lack of sensitivity towards cultural difference…a culture of privilege amongst many of its ordained representatives who often benefit from elite educations…clergy identifying as working-class often find themselves socially and culturally at odds with the church environment’.

Christianity is now the most persecuted religion in the world

As the Guardian put it recently, ‘The Church of England is being urged to nurture a new generation of working-class clergy and lay leaders amid concerns about an ‘upper-middle-class culture’. The paper reported that the CofE’s ruling body, the General Synod, which met in London this week, would be urged to ‘increase its presence on social housing estates and other economically marginalised communities, and to encourage people from working-class backgrounds to take on leadership roles.’

Good luck with that. Like the BBC – which also keeps promising not to treat the white working-class like a cross between children and brutes, failing repeatedly to achieve this most basic of aims – the CofE is addicted to the high that lecturing, hectoring and scolding produces in mediocre people. Both bodies probably believe that anyone who hasn’t been to ‘uni’ is a half-wit and shouldn’t have been allowed to vote on Brexit, and that the people I come from are racist xenophobes because they don’t believe in open borders, being the social group who suffer the most from social resources being shared out recklessly.

They’d rather get the thrill of ‘converting’ Muslims, like the acid-thrower Abdul Ezedi, than listen to the concerns of the indigenous people as to how the presence of such people affects their native culture, or stand up for their Christian brothers and sisters being butchered abroad. Christianity is now the most persecuted religion in the world, but you’d never think it to hear the silence of the Anglican bishops. They also seem quiet on the topic of the police harassment of Christian street preachers or the young gospel singer Harmonie London, by a force who actively protect protestors screeching about jihad on the streets of London. It’s interesting, by the way, that black-majority churches are flourishing in this country, having none of the doubt that has done so much to make the CofE so moribund.

Bringing me back to what I said about women in religion at the start, the antithesis of the BBC of E is the Reverend Mina Smallman, the Church of England’s first black female archdeacon, for Southend in Essex, from 2013 to 2016. Sometimes, but not often, you can hear her on Radio 4; she is astonishingly good, in every sense of the word. After a life of service, the Rev. Smallman was forced into the spotlight when her daughters Nicole and Bibaa were murdered by a Satanist in 2020; as if this wasn’t enough, it was revealed that the two Met policemen who were supposed to be guarding the scene of the crime took ‘selfies’ of themselves and posted the results to their WhatsApp groups accompanied with messages such as ‘living the Wembley dream…unfortunately I’m sat next to two dead birds full of stab wounds’.

Last year on a Radio 4 debate on the relationship between the public and the police, the Rev. Smallman rejected every invitation she was given to speak in a racially divisive manner; boldly stating that the white working-class also suffers from police brutality, bringing up the grooming gangs as the prime example of this and pointing out that the police demonised the raped and trafficked white children involved, rather than take on their exploiters. This exceptional woman walked the walk, too; when asked to mentor ethnic-minority students, she accepted only on the condition that she would also mentor white working-class boys; the most likely group to fail in education.

But she has retired now, and the church is ruled by mediocre middle-class men. ‘Male, pale and stale’ is not a phrase I like – but it is proving to be the ruin of the CofE. John Sentamu is gone to the House of Lords; you couldn’t have an Archbishop of York these days who, as an African, spoke movingly of his adopted country and criticised multiculturalism thus – ‘Let other cultures be allowed to express themselves but do not let the majority culture at all tell us its glories, its struggles, its joys, its pains’ – let alone accuse the BBC of being cowardly about criticising Islam, as he did in 2006.

There are many words I would use to describe our poor desiccated Anglican church

Michael Nazir-Ali, born in Pakistan to a father who converted from Islam, was once the Bishop of Rochester. Now he has turned to the Catholic Church, after his criticism of Islam – ‘There can never be sufficient appeasement and new demands will continue to be made’ – made him a target for all kinds of cry-bullies, from the Muslim Council of Britain to Nick Clegg. Quite a few Anglican priests have crossed the floor to Rome, including my excellent friend Gavin Ashenden. Once the Queen’s Chaplain, Ashenden resigned in 2017 after criticising a service in a Scottish cathedral at which a Muslim read a passage from the Koran which opined that Jesus is not the son of God.

What’s left? Not a lot. In the middle of Lent, it’s probably not the best ‘optics’ that the current Archbishop of Canterbury has been found flogging ‘Holy Week Retreats’ at Canterbury Cathedral for £950 a pop in the lead-up to Easter. It’s as though the holiest place in England in the holiest week is some sort of Godforsaken ‘wellness’ beano, with possible ‘opportunities to interact’ with the Big Man himself; no, not the Lord – Justin Welby.

No wonder Prudence Dailey, a General Synod member, told the Daily Mail:

‘A sumptuous three-course dinner and a Holy Week retreat do not go together. I can’t get my head around the type of person who would want to do those two things at the same time. It is not what Holy Week is about.’

What a shame the Rev. Richard Coles has retired from the cloth – they could have offered paid-for meet-and-greets with him. Tawdry and empty, yes: but totally appropriate for a church in which the glory of Protestantism enlightenment has been replaced by little more than progressive entitlement.