Rev Richard Coles interview: ‘Dating again was like waking from hibernation’

Coles: 'Christianity demands that you make a fool of yourself' - Phill Taylor

There is a double-fronted house off a lane in a quintessential East Sussex village where most days piano music tinkles out of the bay window, up and over towards the chocolate-box village green and church. Today, it’s Chopin’s B minor waltz, balm to dog walkers passing by on their way for a latte in the deli.

‘If you want to curate an English village, this is what it would look like,’ says the Rev Richard Coles, 62, when he opens the door. As Britain’s most famous gay vicar (now ex-vicar), he is the latest celebrity recruit to the best-selling genre of cosy crime novels.

My arrival has dragged him away from the shiny black Bösendorfer grand piano that he bought himself for his 60th birthday – ‘I suppose it could have been a Lamborghini.’ I can’t see it. He shakes his head. Nor can he. This afternoon, he’s picking up a new Volvo. That’s more like it. ‘I’ll look like Mr Magoo,’ he says of motoring around the green landscape dotted with sheep, ‘and I’ll drive like Mr Magoo.’

Coles is tall and bespectacled, what Owl in Winnie-the-Pooh might look like if he were human. He has the look of old-fashioned cleverness, clerical in his case, the kind, when paired with a posh voice, that is so easily mistaken for pomposity. Coles, as it turns out, is not remotely pompous. One of his best friends is covered head to foot in tattoos of Keith Haring figures. Very few of Coles’s gang are religious.

‘Christianity demands that you make a fool of yourself,’ he says – and he certainly did that back on Strictly Come Dancing in 2017, when he danced the paso doble ‘like a walrus having a seizure’. He is, I will discover, happier to admit to his weaknesses than his strengths.

Coles performing the paso doble in 2017 - Guy Levy

Today he is wearing John Lewis neutrals, pullover and slacks, picked out for him by a friend after he had a sartorial crisis when he retired as parish priest of Finedon, Northamptonshire, in 2022, moved to East Sussex and reverted to the wardrobe of a man 20 years younger.

He’d spent almost two decades in a cassock and dog collar. ‘So I started wearing cargo pants, hoodies, that kind of thing, from when I was 40,’ he explains, leading me to the kitchen. His cassock is still hanging in his dressing room – ‘a bit snug round the waist’. These days, it rarely gets an outing.

For 12 years he presented BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live, a show he describes as ‘as much a feature of English middle-class life as the Aga or green wellingtons’. He combined it with his ministry, only stopping last year when the show moved to broadcast out of Cardiff. He was too busy for a weekly overnight stay in Wales – the crime novels were taking off and he was touring his one-man show, Borderline National Trinket.

He was not given a public goodbye. ‘I was a footnote in a BBC press release,’ he has said, adding today, ‘Institutions never love you back.’

Coles has appeared in multiple TV programmes, including the religious quiz Divine Inspiration - Shutterstock

The cosy crime genre is led by his friend Richard Osman. Coles, however, was signed first. ‘When my first one came out, he messaged me to say, “Richard, do you remember when both of us had the idea of writing crime?”’ Coles’s first two mystery novels are bestsellers, and his just-published third, Murder at the Monastery, is the reason I am here to see him. Only this morning he handed in the fourth to his editor. Cosy crime is a hungry beast.

In the latest, the murderer tosses a monk into the monastery turbine, breaking his neck. His round specs are found lying on the floor. Coles’s ecclesiastical protagonist, Canon Daniel Clement, is on the trail, this time battling with his sexuality. He is not based on Coles ‘because I never had any doubt I was gay’, he explains, but the churchy stuff is all him, ‘because I was a vicar, you are a detective ex officio. Do you know how many vicar detectives there are in literature?’ I do not. ‘Two hundred! I also wanted to do a love story that was messy.’

Coles’s life has been a bit messy. His mother spent his childhood saying, ‘Richard, stop showing off.’ Then as a gay teenager he fell in love with his straight best friend – the sexual rejection contributed to a breakdown and a suicide attempt. ‘I was rather lashing around looking for people to love and not always picking people who were the same [as me].

'I wanted to do a love story that was messy' - Phill Taylor

‘At first I thought this was some sort of monstrous lapse on his part, not to be gay. And it took me a while to realise that a condition of loving someone is that you don’t require them to be something they are not.’

Aged 20, he ran away to London from Kettering to discover a gay community, ‘although my place with my parents was assured no matter what. I never doubted for a second that I would be loved and supported, which was not the experience of some of my friends.’

Through an experimental theatre group, he became an unlikely pop star, playing keyboards in the band The Communards, fronted by Jimmy Somerville, whose voice reminded Coles of when he was a choir boy at the private Wellingborough School. ‘We wanted our music to be a soundtrack to [gay] liberation,’ he says.

Coles pictured in 1985 when he formed the Communards pop duo with Jimmy Somerville - Shutterstock

There was a lot of drug taking, a lot of sex, and then the devastating loss of a third to half of all his friends to Aids. It was this crisis that would eventually lead him, aged 40 (after 10 years at BBC Radio 3 and a degree in theology), to religion and then ordination in 2005.

‘Everything that was terrible and dark and awful and non-negotiable in life was surrendered on the cross. It has never faded for me for a second, that sense that we stand on the threshold of a new life [after death] – if we don’t f— it up.’

During his recent seven-month Borderline National Trinket tour, he stayed in many of the same hotels as he did when he was in The Communards, and ate late-night shish kebabs with his manager in small towns. But otherwise, life today is vastly different.

Coles’s house is very pared back: crisp white walls; stylish pale-wood kitchen cabinets; a huge abstract oil painting, propped against the wall opposite the Bösendorfer. The vibe is more east London than East Sussex, and it’s certainly not very vicarage-y – though he’s found a new community of friends here.

‘There’s a group of us in and out of each other’s houses.’ They all cook together. Coles won Celebrity Masterchef in 2021 (he’d come fifth five years earlier). This summer he’s going on an introductory course at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland.

Coles, centre, won Celebrity Masterchef in 2021 - BBC

Coles’s arrival in East Sussex is part of a bigger story – a fleeing from Finedon, where he oversaw the flock of St Mary the Virgin from 2011 until 2022. ‘I miss it,’ he says.

Before he left, in December 2019, Coles’s husband David Coles, also a priest, died from a gastrointestinal bleed, a result of his alcoholism. He was 43. Two years later, Coles published an exquisitely written memoir, The Madness of Grief, in which he wrote, ‘When your partner dies they take with them your future.’

As it turned out, this was not true, but Coles could not bear to stay in Finedon, and being a parish priest elsewhere ‘would have felt like a betrayal’. He explains: ‘I needed to see what life looked like [without David]. I needed to figure out who I was, what I was doing and what the rest of my life might look like.’

Leaving Finedon meant leaving the Church. ‘There are many things I don’t miss, like trying to pay all the bills and also the way the Church does not give equal status to gay relationships. I’d dealt with that for long enough.

‘Being a vicar defines you in so many ways and that’s great, but David’s death sort of shocked me out of complacency. I hope I wasn’t complacent, but it did mean I had to ask myself questions about who I was and what I was doing.’

Coles was the parish priest of Finedon from 2011 to 2022 - Richard Saker

Although the Church of England allows clergy to enter into same-sex civil partnerships, they’re expected to be celibate. Recently, Coles said publicly that he and David were not. ‘It wasn’t something I nonchalantly decided to do. I thought it was better to lie than to deny myself and David, and others, the opportunity of an intimate relationship with another person, because that would be cruel.’

He admits that he is not comfortable with his public admission because ‘it offended rather a lot of people’. After David’s death, Coles received hate mail saying he’d burn in hell.

‘I think lots of people in the Church never really understood the choices you have to make if you are gay and in a relationship. When [honesty] could cost you your job, your home, your career, your parish, your parishioners, and that’s the reality… Having spent all my adult life trying to live on equal terms as a gay man with straight people, the thought of not doing so was obnoxious.’

David is buried near Finedon. His alcoholism was appalling, for him and for Coles. ‘At its worst, I would come home and sit in my car on the drive, wondering what awaited inside. I had to nerve myself to go in, and find him passed out on the floor, surrounded by broken glass, the dogs desperate to be fed and watered and let out,’ Coles writes in his memoir.

Coles pictured with his partner David, who died in 2019 - Channel 4

‘David is still part of my life,’ he says now. ‘It’s not like a voice in my head. Sometimes it was hallucinations, auditory, visual, like his cigarette smoke or the dressing gown on the bannister of the vicarage, but now it’s more when I put on a shirt, I imagine what he’d say.’

There is a grave beside David’s ready for Richard. He designed the headstones as a pair, with a quote that will run from one to the other. But since then, there has been another development: two years ago, Coles fell in love again, with the actor Richard ‘Dickie’ Cant, whom he met on a dating app called Elite Singles. Of the pre-purchased burial plot, he says, ‘This is one of the interesting etiquette issues you get when you start dating again after bereavement… We’ll see what happens.’

Returning to dating wasn’t easy, he explains; it was years before he felt ready. ‘David died and for three years, I thought that was me done with romance and intimacy because I couldn’t imagine doing it with anybody else, actually.’

Then he dipped his toe in. ‘I felt like a polar bear waking from hibernation. I woke up and wanted to eat a seal. That sounds awful doesn’t it? All of a sudden, the appetite was back.

‘I began to realise more and more life was happening around my loss,’ he continues, ‘and that maybe I wanted to share it with someone.

‘I knew I wanted to meet someone who was a grown-up. I had to upload a little essay [on to a dating profile], which I just found embarrassing. I did a rather sarcastic brief set of responses. And then by accident uploaded a picture of my friend Johnny, then a picture of two Belted Galloway cattle in a field. It was a genuine error. But Dickie did get in touch. We have friends in common.

‘I had two other responses. My niece explained to me that the first one ghosted me, and the second fizzled out on the phone.’

Coles pictured in the shed where he wrote his memoir - David Rose

Coles is a niche date, no question. His first with Dickie was at an RHS property: ‘We looked at hydrangeas and ate a lentil salad – very “old gay”. But he was lovely. I liked him and he liked me and it was the easiest thing in the world to have a next date, and another, and we are still doing it.

‘I’m not trying to fill the hole caused by the loss of David with a bucketload of Richard, because they are two different people,’ he continues. ‘And I could never fill that loss. But I’ve lived enough life now without David being alive in the world for that to have a sort of density, I think. Richard was also in a long relationship so we both know what it’s like to have been in a relationship and then not to be in one.

‘Richard is very thoughtful, he understands people, watches them and is good at reading the signs of what are our stated intentions and our unstated intentions.’

Richard Cant, pictured in 2022 - Getty

There is nothing physical left of his life with David in East Sussex, except a mezuzah on the door from David’s brief time during childhood in an Orthodox Jewish community. ‘Every time I come in, I see it and I think of him. I regard his presence in my life as a continuing blessing. I’ve stopped worrying about forgetting what he looked like, sounded like or smelt like.’

There is another, fresher loss that he is battling too, that of his mother Elizabeth. She died in February; he’d lost his father back in 2016. ‘There was never a bigger mummy’s boy than me,’ he says today. ‘It is a loss so grievous I haven’t begun to get a grip on it.’

The day after our interview, Coles is off on his next book tour, which will take him to York and Oxford, via Wimbledon. He is looking forward to being back on the stage. ‘[I’m] a terrible show-off,’ he admits.

'I'm not trying to fill the hole caused by the loss of David' - Phill Taylor

‘There remains this constant impulse in me to run on to the stage and seek the spotlight and do my thing. I do it a lot. I feel alive in a way that is not really like anything else. I think it’s engagement with an audience or a congregation.’

‘If you are in my trade, if you are going to sin, sin boldly,’ he adds. ‘Although I do make myself wince sometimes.’

But his ongoing faith keeps his weaknesses in check, Coles says: his vanity, his ego, flouncing off; feeling aggrieved; being sarcastic. He is the master of self-examination.

He doesn’t worship at the local church in East Sussex because, despite liking the vicar, they do not share the same views about gay marriage in the clergy. Instead, he has found a church in Eastbourne. He seems genuinely excited at the thought of Sunday worship there.

‘One of the practices of a priest that I try to observe is the daily examination of my conscience. At the end of every day, I look back and think, “In what ways did I fall short of the glory of God today?” There’s a long list.

‘It’s good to do it because we need to be aware of what we do and how our actions affect other people. And more than that, our own silliness. I think about my own silliness. I need to check that.’

Murder at the Monastery, by The Reverend Richard Coles, is out now (W&N, £22); Telegraph Bookshop

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