After Mass, coffee. Someone had brought a copy of the Church Times which was avidly passed around. Opinion on Andrew Brown’s piece divided pretty evenly between those who thought it malicious and mean-spirited (‘unchristian’ was the word used) and those who thought it honest and truthful and rather melancholy in tone.

Reading the piece again I still find it hard to understand why other people found it so offensive. (No doubt a failure of imagination on my part.) The facts don’t seem to be in dispute, and as for innuendo, I’ve read much worse in many a Telegraph obituary. Indeed, Damian Thompson’s piece has two choice examples, ‘bon viveur’ (which, perhaps mistakenly, I read as obituary-code for ‘alcoholic’) and ‘private man’ (read ‘gay’). The official Church Times obituary says that his behaviour could sometimes be ‘challenging’, which is really a much worse thing to say because it leaves so much more to the imagination.

As an outsider, I find the press column in the Church Times valuable because it helps to explain how the media works—many Christians, particularly evangelicals, will tell you that the media is ‘anti-Christian’, but Andrew patiently points out, week by week, that no it isn’t anti-Christian, it just has its own agenda (‘all the news that fits, we print’ as they say in America). This particular piece, I thought, was less about Chris Morgan than about the soul-destroying effects of working for the Sunday Times, which is perhaps why it provoked such an outraged reaction.

I did not read the statement about Morgan’s perceived guardedness in relating to colleagues as “outing” him.

I read it as a deeply saddened person asking whether the deceased really let anyone in—- if he had isolated himself and paid the ultimate price for it. This isolation is generally true of every suicide. The poor souls don’t feel that they can express their truth to another human being and find an accepting listener. Nobody understands—because nobody has been allowed in. The demons can’t be exorcized until they are named.

I thought Brown’s article was a perfectly reasonable and honest portrait of a troubled man.

As explanations for taking his life, they simply did not add up. Depression brought on by his mother’s death many years ago fails as an account of his suicide. I expected either Ruth or Damian – but especially Damian, who knew him well – to give us an account of his torment; instead, they told us only of the big lunches and the scoops. It is good to speak charitably of the dead; but it is a betrayal of charity—contempt dressed up as kindness—not to tell the truth.

Andrew’s CT piece, which was obviously born of the same frustration as I felt, has provoked both into telling us a little more. As ever, Andrew’s pieces tell the harsh truths—and for what it’s worth, I never find them spiteful: AB uses irony with devastating effect, but is never malicious. He is a watchdog in a dangerously clubby world, and I for one am grateful to him for pointing out the little hypocrisies and false pieties in that world.

As for Damian, of all people, accusing AB of spite— I had to go and lie down for a while.

Chris wrote a deeply damaging, and deeply untrue, piece about me in the ST which provoked my resignation from the Cardinal’s office in 2006. Afterwards, Chris was filled with remorse, and desperate for me to understand that it was all the fault of the editors (his standard, and unpersuasive, defence whenever I challenged him about his stories which, as Andrew says, were often lacking any basis in fact). I reassured him that I did not take it personally, that he was just doing his job; but I was left with the impression of a tormented man—one who was kind and sensitive, yes, but also ruthless in trying to get a story into his paper. People cannot live with that kind of dichotomy; perhaps this is the reason for his suicide.

It is not a slur to allude to his homosexuality. It was part of who he was. A gay friend of mine who lived close to him told me how he would see Chris, in his fifties, leave his flat late at night in leather trousers to cruise gay bars. He spoke to his mother many times a day. These are simply facts; they imply no judgement, but they help to paint a portrait of a very lonely man.

Chris wanted out from the ST —they regularly ignored his copy, or cut it down to a tee-hee piece in Mandrake. No wonder he applied to be Rowan Williams’s press adviser at Lambeth Palace. Because of his earlier friendship with Dr Williams, his rejection in favour of Tim Livesey must have hurt.

But Chris was entirely unrealistic to believe that after Rowan was appointed to Lambeth he could continue to have kitchen-table discussions with him. Rowan and Jane Williams simply did not trust him—one of them told me so – and they were right not to. Chris would shmooze and flatter and then stitch you up.

My point is not that he was oily and untrustworthy—although he was —but that this was not who he really was. That’s why I quite enjoyed meeting him, and always had time for him—especially over those famous lunches. Underneath the bluster, he was a kind, sensitive man who was anxious to be loved. But as a journalist, he left those qualities at home. In depression, as Andrew suggests, what he did to others through his journalism may have tormented him; we just don’t know.

Whatever: I pray he has peace now.

If it’s even on that list. Privacy is privacy and, if Mr Thompson (who I take it, is gay?) hadn’t wanted a big deal made of that, others should have respected it (and if you didn’t, Andrew: your bad).

That said, I long (as I mentioned upthread) for the day when this issue will be regarded as amusingly quaint if it is regarded at all. And even today, anybody who would think less of Mr Thompson or Mr Morgan or, for that matter, you or me on the basis of where we have managed to find love is to be discounted and ignored.

*God knows I wouldn’t read John Dolan, among others, if not for this. ‘In honour of our special issue on the Congo, this article is dedicated to another great Central African disaster; the poetic career of Ben Okri.’

As for outing Damian—it was an accident, for which I apologised at the time; I had simply forgotten that anyone didn’t know. Of all the things to which anyone might object about his personality as it’s on display here, that seems very low on the list.