Melanie Phillips

The Revd Paul Flowers ticked all the right ‘progressive’ boxes — that’s why he could get away with anything

Sustainability. Tick! Inclusivity. Tick! Fairtrade. Tick! All that mattered to Labour was the Crystal Methodist's show of liberal piety

issue 23 November 2013

Listen to Melanie Phillips and Jesse Norman discuss Paul Flowers:
[audioboo url=”https://audioboo.fm/boos/1746120-melanie-phillips-vs-jesse-norman-on-revd-paul-flowers”/]

Yet again, one particular question has formed on lips up and down the land. How in heaven’s name could so many people have failed to spot such a spectacular abuse of a public position?

We heard it first in the Jimmy Savile scandal, when the posthumous discovery of half a century of predation left people incredulous that so many had known about but done nothing to stop his serial depravities. Now a similar question needs to be asked about the Revd Paul Flowers, the disgraced Methodist minister and former chairman of the Co-op Bank who was filmed apparently handing over £300 to buy a stash of cocaine and crystal meth and also boasted of using ketamine, cannabis and a club drug, GHB.

The real scandal, though, is not just that he was a staggeringly incompetent bank chief who knew next to nothing about banking and presided over a bank that somehow fell into a £1.5

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