Reverend Paul Flowers has sensationally hit back at critics of his controversial chairmanship of the Co-op Bank.
The Methodist minister – dubbed by some “the Crystal Methodist” – has been released on bail following arrest in Merseyside in connection with a “drugs supply investigation”, and will face an independent inquiry into events at the Co-op Bank, from where he has been suspended, along with from the Labour Party.
This is in addition to investigation Bradford Council is carrying out over his resignation as Labour Councillor amid “inappropriate but not illegal” content being found on his work computer.
All this has created a storm in the press, with allegations of political cronyism and hedonistic excess flying.
But, in a major twist to events, Rev Flowers, 63, has said it was all, kind of, worth it.
“OK, I probably shouldn’t have done all those drugs and all those rent boys and charge all those expenses – but, in my defence, I did have a fuck load of fun,” he admitted.
“That’s what all these papers are forgetting. Yes, I spunked a load of money up the wall…and more! Oi oi! But at least hardly any of it was your money.
“Firstly, it wasn’t billions like in the big financial crash; it was only millions. That’s like pocket change in the City.
“And let’s face it the only people who invest in the Co-op anyway are the Labour Party – who are getting a fucking good deal, let me tell you, and are coming in for a lot of stick now – and Guardian readers, who are well off enough not to miss a few bob.
“If they were hard up, they wouldn’t invest their money in a bank fannying around trying to be ‘responsible’ just as a salve their bourgeois conscience, would they?!”
“The Mail, who have of course been hounding me, and its readers won’t have lost any money (and anyway its hardly short of dosh with all their online celebrity tosh). In fact they’ve probably done quite well out of making me public enemy number one.
“Pretty much the perfect story for them, isn’t it? Church scandal, dodgy bankers, drugs, prostitution, sordid homosexual sex and Labour-bashing. I tick all the boxes.”
“They and their readers profess to hate all these, yet repeatedly buy the papers to read about it all, like moths to a light. Thinking about it, that’s kind of moral masochism, which is probably more fucked up than me!”
Rev Flowers also went on to the say that, had the rent-boy well under half his age instead been a glamourous twenty-something female escort, he would be seen, by many, as a bit of hero.
Imagining what a typical reaction to this would be, he joked: “aaahh, that sly fucker, acting all godly while nobbing some hot little piece half his age on the side…. LAAAAD.”
“Let’s face it, what I did sexually pales in comparison to some of the shit the Church has done, which everyone knows about now and is kind of inured to. And look at pop music these days – a barely legal girl former Disney star, miming masturbating herself and swinging about naked on wrecking ball for ten-year-olds to see!
“So I don’t think my…loose morals, you could say – which were legal, I hasten to add – were really the issue. I think it was more the gayness of it all.
“I appreciate I’m not in the best position to preach at the moment, but that worries me to be honest. We have gay marriage now; we should also have equality of opportunity for depraved, duplicitous crack-fuelled prozzie orgies!”
When we suggested to him, that much of the outrage, instead, stemmed from espousing virtue as part of the Church and practising what many would see as hypocritical vice outside it, the Reverend was sanguine.
“Yeeehhh…..well….Methodism could do with being sexed up a bit, couldn’t it? All that helping the helpless is nice, but interminably dull and worthy,” he said.
“And Labour could do with it as well to be honest…bunch of private school kids bleating about energy bills from their Hampstead Heath mansions.
“Ed Miliband wants to reform the whole economic system, but he’s hardly Che Guevara, is he? He’s more Wallace out of Wallace & Gromit.”
joeldurston 