I arrive at Picture, a likeable English mezze restaurant round the corner from Broadcasting House in London, at the same time as the Reverend Richard Coles. He’s trailing a suitcase, and it’s tempting to believe he is carrying all his disparate lives inside it. Coles is a man of many hats. Formerly one half of the Communards – with Jimmy ‘Don’t Leave me This Way’ Somerville – Coles took full advantage, for better and worse, of all the unrestrained hedonism of 1980s pop stardom, before finding God in 1990. He is now a Church of England vicar in a parish near Kettering. He is also the presenter of Radio 4’s Saturday Live, a regular on the QI panel, a vivid and unflinching memoirist, and – lately – a celebrity MasterChef.
After some very hard times – periods of suicidal depression and being strung out on drugs and grief for friends who died from HIV/Aids – he now wears each of these lives with cheery intelligence. His latest volume of memoir, Bringing in the Sheaves, gives anecdotal insight into his crowded spiritual year; now musing on 700 years of parish records, now recalling the divine excesses of Alexander McQueen’s funeral, over which, as the most likely example of a turbulent priest, he was invited to preside.
When we sit for our Friday lunch the suitcase is prosaically explained. Coles gives the end of his week to the BBC, and he’s off to Morecambe on the train when we are done to make a seaside postcard episode of his radio show overnight. Unusually, he doesn’t have to be back at church for a wedding service tomorrow afternoon. “But I really like those shifts in gears,” he says. “Generally on a Saturday I come home wreathed in media glamour having interviewed a former Krankie or someone, and suddenly I am back in the world of orange blossom and bells.”
As his semi-finalist showing on MasterChef suggests, Coles is an enthusiastic foodie. He talks with heroic pride of his efforts to please Greg and John with his devilled kidneys and “wild redefinition” of tatties and neeps; less so of losing out to EastEnders’ Sid Owen and not-so-little Jimmy Osmond. “If you ever doubted the possibility of miracles,” he says, “I did make it to the semis. I thought I was a pretty good cook but, like most of us, it turned out I was a pretty good cook of about seven dishes. Suddenly, you are faced with a lobster … Some good things did come out of it, though. I now know how to blanch an artichoke.”
Coles eats at Picture often on days he is at Broadcasting House. The chefs – who mix Levantine flavours with precise British classics – gave him some tips on the difference between how he cooked and how they did: “Basically, use salt, use butter and concentrate on preparation.” He recommends the earthy beef bites as a starter and suggests three small plates each: broccoli, ravioli and the chicken for him; ravioli and a beetroot salad and the stone bass for me. We share some chips and a modest carafe of pinot blanc and talk at first about his book – which acts as a New Testament to Fathomless Riches, his confessional of his years of energetic sinning.
The lucky thing is, he says, as a writer you can’t do anything vicarish without sounding at least a bit like Alan Bennett. Proving this point he recalls a meal he had on a recent holiday in Cyprus. “We rented a jeep and went up into the mountains. As night fell we thought we should get something to eat. We sat down at this little place with tables outside. The family bustled out and brought us lovely things to eat and drink one after the other. At the end we came to pay and they looked puzzled. It turned out it wasn’t a restaurant at all – we had just sat down on their patio and they obviously thought they had better bring us some food to get rid of us …”
Coles also does his best to maintain a Bennettesque humour in the face of the church’s more absurd triangulations about what, he says, “we are invited to call ‘issues in human sexuality’ – which always sounds like a euphemism for premature ejaculation to me …” He lives in a same-sex partnership at the vicarage with his long-term love David Oldham, who is also ordained. Cohabiting celibacy is the current edict of the church and this is the relationship Coles insists they keep, while fighting the good fight from within. “You cannot be a Christian homophobe,” he maintains.
He is guardedly hopeful that change is coming – and is sure it has to “if the Church of England has any hope of maintaining a place as the semi-official conscience of the nation”. He thinks the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is proving pretty “sure-footed on these difficult things … but there remain plenty of people with fire in their eyes who want to restore us to purity”.
He suggests that the parishioners of St Mary the Virgin, Finedon, have no apparent issues with his “sort-of spousal clergy offering”. “We appear to have,” he says, “very quickly I suppose fallen into the roles of the vicar and the vicar’s wife.” His boss, the bishop of Peterborough, is much more likely to relay letters of complaint from the public about his TV appearances than his domestic arrangements.
There are surreal moments, though. “I find myself talking to the Northants Methodist Ladies Fellowship or whatever and wondering quite how au fait they are with the history of the radical gay movement in the 1980s. Usually they are fascinated. Though I did one recently where I talked about life on the road with Jimmy and all that, and it didn’t seem to be going down very well at all. At the end, I said does anyone have any questions. And this angry looking woman put her hand up and said, “What was he really like?” I said “Who?” She said “That Jimmy Savile…’”
Coles grew up in Kettering so the parish is a homecoming for him. “When I was younger I wanted nothing more than to escape it. But it is also who I am. It’s like when you look in the mirror and see your grandfather. Or worse, your grandmother.”
The family are well known in the area. His great-grandfather started a shoemaking business, and he and Coles’s grandfather grew prosperous making boots for soldiers in the two world wars. The business floundered in peacetime, and his father ended up shutting it down and taking a job in a removals company. Coles believes his gourmet tendencies come from his granddad, who wore plus fours and had a waxed moustache and who, after the war, took the family to Juan Les Pins and paid for his hotel in shoes. He died when Coles was eight, but not before he had introduced him to whisky and cigars.
His father, by contrast, distrusted flamboyance – he wouldn’t have pasta in the house. Coles rebelled into excess and also into leftwing politics. He was a founder of Red Wedge and went on tour once with Ken Livingstone playing tambourine. “It was 1987 and we were supposed to destroy Thatcherism and deliver a whacking Labour majority,” he recalls. “When that didn’t happen we had to have a rethink.” He can’t help feeling now that Corbyn’s Labour is “80s revival night. It is very difficult to feel it’s credible, and there is all this nastiness too.” In everything, he suggests, “I am more and more central than I used to be. There is a lot I like about the status quo in that it leaves you free to do other things …”
That sense of balance began in part as revelation – out of the blackness of grief for friends who had died of Aids – which has sustained his faith. “I had a powerful vivid conversion experience,” he says. “The burning bush, the voice from heaven and all that. Twenty years later you are handing out hymn books and arranging chairs.”
Does it feel hard to relate that former intensity with the long haul?
“Sometimes on the edge of vision something flickers,” he says, before heading off with his suitcase to Morecambe. “But it’s true I hadn’t realised quite how much the discipleship of Jesus Christ would involve keeping up with email.”
Bringing in the Sheaves (Orion, £20). Click here to order a copy from Guardian Bookshop for £16.40
