Like Talleyrand, the Reverend Richard Coles — author, broadcaster, ex-Vicar of Finedon, and co-founder of the 80s pop group The Communards — is one of those figures who seem perfectly adapted to the time and place in which they live. 

Sometimes it’s hard not to conclude that the Britain of the 2020s was created for the personal enjoyment of Richard Coles. Everything about Starmerite England seems to fit him like a glove: consciously fusty, ostentatiously trad, and with an undercurrent of autumnal brooding. It is a society that loads up on Northern murder “box sets”, and over which someone like Theresa May could establish a brief ascendancy. 

Coles’ pipe-and-slippers manner, his return to mother church after showbiz stardom, may have once seemed eccentric. Now it looks prophetic. The assertive New Atheism of the 2000s, for one thing, is long gone. “I think religion can be really positive for some people, actually.” Carolean Britain doesn’t do glitz, glam, or Ottolenghi — now it wants big fuzzy slippers and electric blankets; quivering puddings and rich cream sauces. Richard Coles — who mops up meaty pan juices with a halved and roasted maris piper, salty and blistered — is well-placed to meet this demand. 

Coles’ moment has come. Now he passes in triumph through the shires and counties of Britain on — judging by his Twitter feed of over two-hundred thousand posts — cheerful tour of book festivals, lunches, prizes, countryside walks, and benevolent visits. Wherever he goes: an amiable audience, a tasty mouthful, a bon mot on the lives of the saints. He was once a sort of rustic Stephen Fry; in the 2020s he is a Cardinal Manning.

So when Richard Coles took the stage last month at St Anne’s Church in Kew, what I saw was a man in his element. The promotional flyer for the event had simply featured a photograph of the former Reverend, giving no hint as to what the evening might hold. I entered the chapel unsure of what lay in wait.

Coles emerged from behind a large oaken door, striding purposefully towards the altar. What first struck me was his voice: a deep baritone. I had taken a diffident place at the back of the chapel, but throughout the evening Coles always sounded like he was standing to my immediate left. This was clearly a vicarly tool of the trade. 

The event, as it turned out, was a sort of extended after-dinner speech in which Coles recounted his life story. This started from his birth “…in Kettering. Exactly.” He attended a minor public school where he was a chorister, but lost his faith at an early age.  Growing up and realising he was gay soon made life in his hometown intolerable. “I had to think of a way of escaping.”

He was then hit by a lorry, the driver having fallen asleep at the wheel, and the resulting criminal injury payout of £2,000 was enough to establish him in London. There he was inaugurated into a life of “intimacy, romance, sex” among the capital’s la boheme. In London he would busk with a saxophone on Hungerford Bridge, and clashed with police (including his brother David) during the Wapping dispute. 

His big break came when his friend Jimmy Somerville — already a musician of some renown — invited Coles to join him on tour with Madonna and Demis Roussos. Coles and Somerville then formed their own band, The Communards, who topped the charts in 1986 with their cover of Don’t Leave Me This Way. “There we were”, Coles says, lowering his gaze a little, “Sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll… and all the rest of it…”

His period of pop star fame seems to have left little mark on him, however. According to Coles, the “most enduring” thing about it was a stout washer-dryer that he requested from the record company when they offered him anything he liked as a gift. 

It was in religion that Coles would find his real métier — first in Roman Catholicism, then in the established church. He describes a “Wesleyan conversion” upon a chance hearing of a hymn from his school days — though in this case to the high church rather than the low, as he’s quick to add.

A string of curacies in prime central London followed. But Coles would eventually take the plunge and become a vicar — first in a tough estate in Boston, and then in Finedon, a village in Northamptonshire not far from his hometown. Did this rural torpor bore him? No: “there was a murder in my first week.” 

Richard Coles’ faith has “never even flickered” since his conversion. But he has little good to say about the Church of England, which he left in some acrimony in 2022. The Anglican church hierarchy in the twenty-first century is a fretful and besieged body, lost in rumination. Like the later Soviet Union, it is now sustained by a huge material arsenal and an ageing cadre of loyalists. 

Coles seemed to take it for granted that the institution is on its way out. Two other sort of neo-trad clerics — Giles Fraser, also a noted broadcaster; and Canon Bouffie Jepson-Biddle of St. Peter’s, Bournemouth — were also in attendance, giving the evening a shop-talk feel. Bouffie, once dubbed the “Boy Bishop of Hereford”, reveals that the villain from the second instalment of Coles’ Canon Clement Mysteries was modelled on him. 

The Canon Clement novels, which are about a vicar-detective in 1980s England, are heavily based on Coles’ tenure in Finedon. Why add crime to the mix? “I wanted to write a murder mystery… like a lot of priests, I wanted to murder my parishioners. And they wanted to murder me, I’m sure.”

I’ve been fascinated by the Canon Clement series for some time now. When the first volume — Murder Before Evensong — appeared I rushed out to buy it, subjecting my friend to a live reading on a long and feverish bus journey from Plymouth to London. 

It’s a striking cultural artefact in that it tells us much about the state of religion in 2020s Britain. The protagonist Daniel Clement is of a traditionalist if not pre-Reform Bill bent: he sticks for the most part to the ancient rites, and he spends much of his time hobnobbing with the local gentry and aristocracy. However Daniel and his allies are portrayed as being very much on the liberal wing of the church; it is his Evangelical interlocutors who are the moral and theological conservatives.

Needless to say this turns much of English history on its head. For centuries it was the high church that was associated with the political Right, the low church with liberal England. Apparently, this old Trollopean set piece no longer holds. Coles has spoken before of a new conservative evangelical wing of the Church of England now in the ascendancy — part of the reason why he resigned his post. 

Historically, the high church faction was accused of laxity. But for Coles this is part of the appeal: the old laxity over incense, decorations, and sinecures should now be matched by a certain laxity over theological questions. “The fuzziness of the Church of England is the best thing about it”. That these old divides — the kind that put Sacheverell on trial and drove Newman and Manning to Rome — have now apparently flipped was news to me, and it’s not something that seems to have yet registered in the culture.

It soon became clear that I was in the presence of the high church party. Of his depiction in Richard’s novel, Bouffie chirped that he had been portrayed as “an evangelical and a murderer. The first of those bothered me much more than the second!” 

This faction has a number of core characteristics. One is royalism, with a special emphasis on the mystic and fruitarian ideas of Charles III. Another is antiquarianism: ironic reverence for the saints, icons, and curios. Another still is a certain Carry On tone. “We first met when I was dancing in a cage”, Giles Fraser reminds Richard. “I was wearing the Orange Boy kit that we all had to wear in those days.”

Coles waits for the laughter to die down. “It’s not so much what you were wearing as what you weren’t wearing.”

These gurglings, the sumptuous surroundings, the high churchmen present, the free-flowing wine. All this put me in the mind of one of those Thomas Rowlandson prints portraying some pleasing scene of Old Corruption. Clerics in powdered wigs sitting around a table laden with bottles of port and great slabs of roast beef, pink and jiggling. 

There was certainly a revelling in the traditional “fuzziness” of the Church of England. At times this can lend itself to a sort of despairing frivolity. Among the Coles wing of the high church tradition, old rituals and old mannerisms can sit alongside helter skelters in cathedrals. There is an over-ripeness here. A studied loopiness. A sugar-induced coma. One cream tea too many. 

Something that also seemed to loom large that evening was Richard’s appearance on Strictly Come Dancing in 2017, where he was eliminated in the second round. Giles and members of the audience asked about this episode in pained and embarrassed tones, as if we were in the presence of some Jeffrey Archer figure who had been felled by scandal. “It was pretty brutal”, confesses Coles. 

Vaunting traditional institutions, but despairing of their ability to survive, especially in an age of Populism

Strictly is not the only institution to have disappointed him. Coles is drawn to all things musty and careworn: church, crown, aristocracy, BBC. Yet he has little faith in these things and is convinced that they are disappearing. “BBC radio… about as close to the Church of England as you can get without being Church of England” — but to Coles both are moribund. With them will pass the old genteel England, and the Canon Clement villains will be at the door. “One of the worst features of how we live now is the erosion of common ground.”

Vaunting traditional institutions, but despairing of their ability to survive, especially in an age of Populism. Is there a better synopsis of the current political moment: in Whitehall, in Downing Street, in Broadcasting House? Coles now styles himself as the “borderline national trinket”, but here he undersells — of the England that Keir Starmer is building, he is the certified national treasure.