be thought clubbable. He has not drunk for
20 years. He is also outspoken and a Labour
Party member. His piety, he thinks, may grate.
“I struggled to understand why that reaction
to me was really so visceral and I strongly
suspect they don’t know either,” he says. “How
much of this is personal animus towards me
and what they think I might represent and do,
and how much of it is to do with what they
wish to conceal about themselves? I think it’s
mostly in the latter camp.”
The other question is why a dispute
between dons and clerics at a wealthy Oxford
college matters.
“Because when institutions go wrong, and
this is only an example of one, you can very
quickly descend into the kind of civil war and
cloak and dagger conduct that’s been going
on for a considerable period of time here. And
it raises questions about the usefulness and
purpose of institutions to the public at large.”
Obviously, this is not how the people
who run Christ Church look at the saga.
When I last wrote about it in this magazine,
the college issued a statement that was
empathetic in tone. “Personal relationships
have undoubtedly suffered, and we regret this
deeply. We take our responsibilities towards all
members of our community very seriously, and
believe we have acted in the best interests of
Christ Church, including its students and staff.”
I ask Percy if he had ever considered just
quitting, for his sanity’s sake.
“My mental health really suffered, but the
things I take from these four years plus are
basically from the credit column.”
He mentions the support of college staff,
students, friends who “never stopped believing”,
allies such as Alan Rusbridger, then principal
of Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall, and Jonathan
Aitken, the former Tory cabinet minister whom
Rusbridger, as editor of The Guardian, had
helped jail for perjury in a libel trial (they are
now friends). He is indebted to his union, Unite,
and his lawyers, particularly the barrister
Sarah Fraser Butlin. Emma, his wife, has been
“amazing”; ditto their two grown-up sons.
“This is going to sound slightly strange and
possibly shocking, but I’m not sure I’d change
the past four years because of the good things
that we’ve discovered that I don’t think we’d
have found otherwise. You discover some
really brave people. You discover depths of
care and support that you would not have
known otherwise. You find fortitude and
resilience and courage and humanity. But you
also discover that the places you thought you
could get care from, places like the church- well, actually, you can’t.” n
The Times Magazine 51the police) complained Percy had interfered
with a crime scene because his dog, Lyra, had
leapt into the deanery garden to greet the
police. Percy bought an Easter egg for a
student who, despite lockdown, was still at
Christ Church. He was told he had broken
Covid regulations.
And then, that autumn, came Hairgate.
Percy was suspended again, pending a second
“immoral, scandalous and disgraceful conduct”
tribunal. Christ Church properly took the
woman’s complaint seriously, but for some
of Percy’s foes it was an opportunity.
“I really had a pretty serious breakdown
with this. And that was largely triggered by
the Bishop of Oxford writing a very public
letter, when people were trying to defend me,
saying that it was inappropriate for people to
be defending me in public when I was being
attacked in public.
“I was despairing, because I felt that
actually you would want your bishop to be
a person of courage and integrity, somebody
who might actually stand up against, pardon
the expression, the forces of darkness and
oppression, and he just colluded with them.”
Did Percy become suicidal?
“I think I came close. I don’t think I ever
really got there. I mean, other people have
done. We have had clergy and victims of abuse
who’ve gone through this Orwellian nightmare
with church investigations and they’ve
taken their own lives and I can completely
understand that,” he says. “You might get a bit
of pastoral care, but you don’t get any advocacy.
You don’t get the new legal support.”
The diocese paid for six free counselling
sessions but Percy saw a therapist every week
for 30 months. Late in the day, he says, Christ
Church offered to pay for counselling, but by
then he had spent tens of thousands of pounds
“just trying to stay afloat, stay alive”.
Extraordinarily, the following summer, 2021,
Christ Church hatched a plan to dismiss him
on the very grounds of mental infirmity. His
mental capacity would be adjudicated upon by
a panel of three specialists, one of whom the
dean could nominate. A newspaper dubbed
it the “insanity tribunal”. His response was to
find a “top psychiatrist” who would appear for
him with the weight, he believed, to prevent a
diagnosis of insanity or personality disorder.
But even as the siege of Percy continued
- he was forbidden to enter the cathedral,
teach or speak to students – outside forces
were circling the college. The Charity
Commission, which regulates Christ Church,
became ever more exercised by the amount
of charitable funds it was spending on lawyers
and PRs. Letters copied to the 60-plus dons
who make up Christ Church’s governing
body reminded them that as trustees it was a
criminal offence “to knowingly or recklessly
provide false or misleading information” to it.
In December, Percy visited Lord Patten, the
chancellor of Oxford University, and Louise
Richardson, the vice-chancellor, in her office in
central Oxford. He told them he could not stay
at Christ Church but he needed compensation
for the mental and reputational injuries he had
sustained and his legal costs reimbursed. Patten
and Richardson asked to meet the governing
body. The censors said yes but were privately
furious. (Patten was a “dinasour” [sic], one
fumed in an email accidentally copied to the
entire governing body.)
They heard out the chancellors’ peace
proposal but did not pursue it. It was however- with the notable omission of the proposal
that Christ Church would publicly wish Percy
well in his “future endeavours” – remarkably
similar to the peace deal finally hatched. On
February 4 this year, the governing body gave
itself an hour to agree the settlement that had
taken a single day (after four years) for the
mediator to negotiate.
“Lots of people [on the governing body]
were saying that it was ‘morally repugnant’
to settle but probably expedient. They were
paying off, let’s remember, a proven sex pest,
a safeguarding risk, a slightly mad person who
should really just be dismissed,” Percy reports
caustically. “But I think there was enough
pressure on the censors by this time to say,
‘Actually, if you don’t settle you’re committing
yourself to years of further legal struggles. You
will probably lose every one of those because
you’ve lost all the previous ones.’ ”
The hair-stroking complainant received a
payment – but from Christ Church, not Percy.
Percy insists he is not bitter, but does not
deny his anger. It seems to me fiercest against
the Church of England and his future in the
church looks, at best, uncertain. Steven Croft,
the bishop of Oxford, forbade him to give a
sermon at his leaving service in the university
church. It will now be held elsewhere. His
future, Percy hopes, lies in academia outside
Oxford. He will be 60 in July.
The dispute between Christ Church and
its dean was a power struggle. But why so
nasty, so personal? One theory is that Percy
was never a good fit for an Oxford college
with a reputation for conservatism and elitism
(in fact its intake, Percy says, is now a good
mix). He was adopted into a family with no
history of university education who “scrimped
and saved” to send him to a private school.
He attended Bristol and later Durham
universities, not Oxford. As a former colleague
put it, he did not have family furniture to
bring to the deanery. Although he is a witty
man, in Oxford high-table terms he may not
DID HE BECOME SUICIDAL? ‘I CAME CLOSE.
I DON’T THINK I EVER REALLY GOT THERE’