Christmas tales from the prison pulpit

It was an unusual Christmas morning chapel service. There was a bishop, for a start, and a baptism and then, somewhere between the peace and the eucharist, two of the congregation started trying to thump each other. Boxing day, it seemed, had come early.

‘It unnerved the bishop slightly,’ the priest in charge admits, ‘but as these things go it was a very mild flurry of fisticuffs. Punches were thrown but none landed.’

The Bishop of Kensington, paying a Christmas Day visit to HMP Pentonville, may not be used to this sort of laying on of hands during the liturgy but for the Rev Jonathan Aitken, now six months into his new career as a prison chaplain, it was business as normal.

Exactly twenty years ago the former cabinet minister was the other side of the bars, nearing the end of a jail sentence for perjury. He had been moved three days after Christmas to complete his term in a higher-security prison after wardens had uncovered a plot by inmates to drug Aitken with Rohypnol, put him in bed with a nude inmate and sell the photos to a tabloid.