Reverend Richard Coles: ‘If you doubted the possibility of miracles, I made it to the semis of MasterChef’

From pop stardom and battles with drugs and depression to Radio 4 regular, he’s no ordinary vicar

I arrive at Picture, a likeable English mezze restaurant round the corner from Broadcasting House in London, at the same time as the Reverend Richard Coles. He’s trailing a suitcase, and it’s tempting to believe he is carrying all his disparate lives inside it. Coles is a man of many hats. Formerly one half of the Communards – with Jimmy ‘Don’t Leave me This Way’ Somerville – Coles took full advantage, for better and worse, of all the unrestrained hedonism of 1980s pop stardom, before finding God in 1990. He is now a Church of England vicar in a parish near Kettering. He is also the presenter of Radio 4’s Saturday Live, a regular on the QI panel, a vivid and unflinching memoirist, and – lately – a celebrity MasterChef.

After some very hard times – periods of suicidal depression and being strung out on drugs and grief for friends who died from HIV/Aids – he now wears each of these lives with cheery intelligence. His latest volume of memoir, Bringing in the Sheaves, gives anecdotal insight into his crowded spiritual year; now musing on 700 years of parish records, now recalling the divine excesses of Alexander McQueen’s funeral, over which, as the most likely example of a turbulent priest, he was invited to preside.

I had a powerful vivid conversion experience. The burning bush, the voice from heaven and all that