this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. britain mourned the death of queen elizabeth in ways that combined the intimate and the personal with the grand and ceremonial. for most of us, of course, death and grief remain a very private affair. an irreversible, life altering shock when we lose someone close for which there is no

guide or preparation. my guest today is the one time pop star turned church of england vicar, the reverend richard coles, whose frank account of his own grief has struck a chord with many. why did grief nearly break him? richard coles, welcome to hardtalk. britain has just lived through a rather extraordinary, momentous experience, the death of queen elizabeth, the mourning that came with it. and many people have said that the death of the queen

revived very sharp memories for them of their own losses and how they felt during their own losses. you've just written a book about grief. is that true of you, too? oh, yes, very much so. i think the queen had a representative life as well as a sort of constitutional life and a personal life. and her loss is a loss we all experience. people say, oh, but you didn't know her, but of course, we all did know her from banknotes, from stamps, from simplyjust being there, the christmas message. and that absence affects all of us. and any absence will elicit in you your own experience of grief, reviving your own experience of grief, i think. i remember when princess diana died, having a look at all the books of condolence in stjames's palace. and it was full of stuff that people were writing about their own loss, that they could all of a sudden then add to this big public loss. and there was just a wider acknowledgement of these powerful and sometimes

quite troubling feelings. collective grief is one thing, very private grief is another. i just wonder whether you think, when you reflect on your own loss, and you have written very frankly about it, was it something you felt able to share, that you wanted to share or did you turn inward? i don't really know, actually, stephen. i don't remember anything about writing the book at all. so david died just before christmas 2019, and so i was wiped out by that. and then we went into lockdown. so grief is itself a sort of personal lockdown. and then the world went into lockdown, too. so like lots of people, i found myself sitting at home, not really able to do anything. and i think one of the things that's quite common with people who are bereaved, is you, i did feel this desire to hang on to as much of him as i could because i could sense him beginning to fade, beginning to disappear. and lots of people who've been bereaved will tell you this fear, the first time you fear it, that you will forget how someone talked, how they smelled, how they walked. so i wanted to kind

of write that down as a way of fixing it, i think. also, writer's going to write, it is what you do, but i don't remember writing the book at all. it was almost like a, not quite a trance exactly, but i wrote it out of intense feeling. can you, do you think, prepare for loss, for absence of your closest loved partner? no, i think, i thought you could, actually. and also as a vicar, i spent a lot of my time with people who were going through that. so i knew what it looked like. i know the technicalities, registering a death, the coroner's office, all that kind of stuff, probate. but of course, that's from the outside. and when, of course, it happens to you, it's completely different. and it is, for me, it was like a depth charge that sort of blew up and disrupted all the surface, but also stuff that was very, very deep within came up and sent me completely mad for a while. i remember going to, the day david died, i went to the co—op on the way back from the hospital because i had

to buy milk and bread. and when i got home i looked in my shopping bag and i'd bought three kinds of parmesan. it's funny the metaphors you use, the depth charge, you've talked about the explosive effect of it all, and indeed the title of the book, the madness of grief. it is very striking. do you really think, and of course, we're going back sort of three years now, you've had time to reflect on it, do you think you really did go mad for a while? yeah, i think so. and it really made me understand how i'm sometimes a bit puzzled by grieving people, by these odd surges of anger or odd failure to grasp what, to me, would be an obvious reality. and i realise now that your perception, your cognition, all that stuff goes a bit a bit haywire. the one thing in it that kind of is solid, is the experience of other widows and widowers. so that was really good. i didn't want people to tell me what i should feel, you know, there's lots of people who do that and lots of online stuff that would do that.

i wanted people to walk alongside people who'd been through the same thing. just say, what was it like for you? that was the stuff that was kind of solid. i wonder if you still feel lost in a way, because you've done lots of important things since david died. you've moved, the village you were rooted in as the vicar of the parish with david, your partner, living in the vicarage with you. that was such an important part of your married life. and now you're not there. you've gone somewhere different and you've left behind so much that linked you to him. yeah. i mean, ifeela bit like a floating voter, i think, after a sort of tribal loyalty to a political party. so, the landscape's different, literally different, the routine is different. but i think i realised quite early on with david was that i, there's a point where you think, well, i'm going to have to face forward and stand up, stand up and face forward even. and that involves an acknowledgement of loss. and it's also involves a willingness to embrace a future without that person, which is a big deal, actually.

but i sort ofjust have to do this, so... you've said that death brought up many difficult feelings from deep within you. and i think one of them, it's fair to say, and again, you're very frank about it, is guilt. guilt about how you and david lived together. he, as you say and describe in very painful detail, was an alcoholic. and that was very much related to the health problems that led to his death at a3. and you describe how once he died, you felt terrible, that you at times had not been understanding about his illness. yeah. i mean, anyone who's lived with an addict will know what that's like, i think. and at first, when his addiction began to shape our life very dramatically, all i could think of is, why are you doing this? why are you raising that glass to your lips? you don't have to do that. and when you do that, you destroy yourself and me and everything that's good in our lives. you were angry? furious. yeah, absolutely.

the other thing about it is that alcohol produces unreason. and if you're trying to work out how you're going to solve a problem, if the person you're trying to negotiate with is incapable of negotiation because they're not, they're not reasonable, that for me is a sort of kafkaesque scenario. awful. and i was so angry with david until i stopped being angry. just understood that he was in the grip of something that he could not control. and once i stopped being angry with him, our lives got a lot better, actually. but that guilt, is it still with you? i mean, you describe one particular incident, i think perhaps just days before he actually went into the hospital for the final time, where he'd done something you thought was so ridiculous, so impossible to deal with, so wrong that you yelled, you lost your temper completely. yes, i became a screaming thing, and it was almost an out—of—body experience. but, of course, it was frustration because i think, like anyone who's, if you're married to an addict, you know that the end is in sight.

so, i was terrified about that, of course, and occasionally would... the other thing is i've tried, you have to be the one who keeps things together, and also i was the vicar. so myjob is to be unflappable, to get people through moments of crisis. and i imagine you would have seen situations like that in other families. you had been in hospital bedside situations, you'd been counselling families in the most difficult situations. and yet, i guess, you also felt, "this is me." yeah. and i was powerless. and david, who was also ordained, but he was a medic before that, he'd worked in a&e. so these were scenarios that we both had encountered professionally, but i couldn't do anything about it. so i thought, what can i do about this? and i thought, well, i love him and i'm going to make sure that i just locate, i'd centre myself in that. when i did that, life got a lot better. he didn't stop drinking, though, but life got a lot better. there's so much that is very raw in this account of yours, and it is gripping to read, but it's also very

difficult to read in a way. why have you done it? well, i thought if i'm going to do this, i'm going to do this. so i thought, full, there's never full disclosure, but i thought as much disclosure as i can. i got permission from david's family. i was going to say, because, you know, you're writing about your husband, your life partner, but you're also writing about somebody�*s son, somebody�*s brother. yeah. so i got their permission to do it. and partly it was because... ..i wanted to tell the story, actually, and partly because i thought it might be good for other people who were going through the same thing. and also, actually, writers write, it's what i do. is that ever exploitative? oh, yeah. yes, of course it is. this is the thing people say about the chip of ice, don't they, in the writer's heart. and there are elements, i think, when you're dealing with stuff which is extremely painful for other people, and you're editing and selecting because you have a story to tell and there are rules of narrative and you want to, you want people to read it.

but that's a trade off, i think. is this a project that has integrity and honesty? is it valuable? well, if you think so, yes, then you do... the other thing is, you know, you bump into people in life. i learnt this with david, actually. we've had a very, you know, you bruise. you knock bits off. it's not always sweetness and light. and that, i think, needs to be part of the telling of the story. the anger that we referred to that you felt at times within your loving relationship has other layers to it, and i want to explore those. anger with the church, of which you were an important part. and david was, too, because he was also a vicar. yeah. here, the two of you living in a loving relationship and your own church would not recognise, fully recognise your relationship. indeed, you had to promise the church, as i understand that, that you would be

celibate within your live in partnership. you couldn't have a blessing of your civil partnership inside the church. why did you stay in that church? because i love the church, because... but the church, in a sense, didn't love you. well, that's always true of institutions, isn't it? same of the bbc. lots of people love the bbc, doesn't love you back. you learn this, right? so you make your accommodation with it. if you think it's something worth doing, and i did, and there's much about the church that i do love and lot about the people in the church that i loved. and also my day to day experience was always of being affirmed, actually. and david and i managed to find a way in which we could conduct the necessary intimacies of our relationship without subjecting that to this kind of weird forensic process that the church expected. i mean, again, this is difficult territory. i don't want to sound... i'm very happy talk about this. ..voyeuristic or prying in any way. but i mean, could you be honest

to yourself and to those promises that the church required you to make? no. and where did it, where did it break? where? where was the dishonesty or the failing to fully truthful? celibate relationship. we didn't have a celibate relationship. we didn't, no. but then i've often thought, you know, i've never had, i've never had a twinge of conscience about that because i thought the question was not a legitimate question. would you tell the gestapo the truth if you were being interrogated? no, you wouldn't. of course you wouldn't. but this isn't the gestapo. this is the church that you are a part of, that you actually represent. but it was a question that was not legitimate. it was one that refused to acknowledge the equal dignity that david and i had and i wasn't going to, i wasn't prepared to brook that. so we did what we had to do. i just wonder whether your feelings about the church, now that you've left the full time vicar role and indeed the vicarage which you loved so much, are you freer to be open about your anger

and sometimes your shame of some of the positions the church of england has taken when it comes to lgbt rights and equality? not just lgbt stuff, other stuff too. its failure to deal with its safeguarding responsibilities adequately in the past, much better now, is another one. but i think kind of coming out of it has made it easierfor me to speak more freely — and also, if i'm honest, made me realise what it's cost me and others to not be honest, actually. and if a church can't be honest, it's an institution. a bishop said to me, "all institutions are demonic" and i kind of get what he means because they have to be upheld, and upholding an institution will inevitably run contrary to your personal integrity and honesty. so you make your accommodation with that as best you can. but coming out of it... but i do, there's so much in it that's great and so many people in it who are loving and wonderful, so i could never... it's a complicated and contradictory complex.

i get that it's complex but you just interestingly talked about the cost and even the cost to you. do you think, in retrospect, it was a mistake to be sort of so obedient to the church? i couldn't have done it any other way. we did what we had to do to be viable within the system. i think bill clinton said that, didn't he, about whether he inhaled or not? well, we did inhale. and but we wanted to remain viable in the system, so that's what we did. i want to now ask you whether you — you see a coherent thread in your own life, which is a funny question, but you've done so many different things that, to the outside observer, it looks like a sort of almost a random life where you just threw stuff up in the air and see what happened but you were, for those who don't know, you were a very successful pop star in your 20s with a series of number one hits. the communards were a huge success in the 1980s. you also were a social activist in the red wedge movement which was radical, it was pro—gay rights,

it was socialistic. you then became a sort of thoroughly english vicar in the most english of villages, but you also became a broadcaster with the bbc, amongst others, and a bit of a national celebrity. yeah. do all of these things have a thread? well, i don't know. i mean, living your life — kierkegaard says, you live your life forwards but you experience it backwards. so, at the time, it was just one thing happened after another thing. of course, there were choices being made consciously an unconsciously. in retrospect, i do see more of a pattern. i mean, the interesting is i started off as a chorister, stephen, so the chorister contained two elements which have been consistent in my life — one of them is a fascination with the church of england and the other one is commitment to music. so, those two things have been pretty consistent. you will know from, as being a bbc lifer, the number of vicarage kids who work in the bbc is wildly disproportionate. in the arts unit, i think 25% had grown up

in vicarages, so go figure. i think it's about something to do with wanting to commit yourself to something that aspires to be the best that we can be. well, that's within. but what about without? did you also aspire to change the world? oh, yeah, yeah. i loved the idea of — even when i was, when i was young, i loved the idea of people being passionately — being full of passionate conviction, and this idea that you could do that, you know? you could make the world better. i mean, there's so much of that. in a way, just looking at the arc of your career, i wonder why you walked away from being a potentially very influential pop star so early because you had such great success, you were part of a movement, which was, you know, it was out and proud and gay and it was socially committed and then, you just packed it all in. yeah. i mean, i wanted to do something different. and i think part of it was — i mean, the defining event of my adult life

was the aids epidemic. so, at the best of times, the worst of times, at the height of our success in the 1980s, we were absolutely hit by the arrival of hiv and that changed all our lives because half the people we knew died and died terribly, and in a way which was horribly undefended. so, i didn't really want to do pop music after that. so what we did, we concentrated our efforts, we regrouped and we started working into activism around providing care and support for people with hiv, because nobody else was doing that. and then, i think also, confrontation with mortality in me, in many others, led me to ask questions and i found that the kind of places i would go to answer those questions no longer served. and i was looking for — i was convinced up to that point that the world was a material phenomenon and everything you would need from it, you would find in it and i began to think, "no". i remembered being a kid in chapel. i was never a believer, but i liked being there. and i sensed what lots

of people sense — that they're unique and distinctive places and you can take stuff there that simply doesn't fit anywhere else and that's got me back in. and the minute i reconnected with it, i realised it was actually my homeland and i needed to start living in it. the story you've just told does involve a lot of death and it sort of takes us back to the beginning of this conversation and making sense of grief and how it works. do you think you — there is a depressive side to your personality which does actually overfocus on loss and death? yes, i think that's true. less so now. when i was younger, i was like hamlet — well, in one or two ways — but i was obsessed with it, actually. and i think — i think it did colour my thinking and my view of the world, but it still does actually. but i'm much more interested in life, actually. but you cannot be interested in life without being aware of the shape of life, and what shapes life is its beginning and its end. you've also said, i think

recently in talking about the book and what it means, that you reached a point where you were tired of fighting the activist fight to change society. yeah. and it is interesting to me now that one of the things you are doing, and very successfully doing, is writing the most quintessentially english crime novels, which aren't particularly challenging but sort of provide a sort of comfort food for the mind for a lot of people. well, that's interesting because i mean, i think i like to deal with that stuff but actually, i'm also a bit more disruptive than that, but i try to do... i love emily dickinson, one of my favourite poets. and she said, "tell all the truths, but tell it slant. "success in circuit lies." and i'm really interested in how you talk about these ideas. talk about change, the possibilities of change in ways that are not so directly confrontational because there's no shortage of confrontation, mr hardtalk, as you know. stephen chuckles

and actually, i'm not really interested in that and i do find that there's a cost to activism. and it is this thing you strap on armour every day, you go out into the world and you fight what you hope is a good fight, but it costs you again. and sometimes you want to take the armour off and explore your own vulnerability and also explore the unignorable ambiguities of your own position on things, like lots of people. i'm 60 now and i think a lot about how the certainties that i would enjoy in my 20s and 30s, i don't have them any more. i'm more pragmatic. and the recent death of the — of the queen, of course, has been — for me and for lots of people, i think — a really decisive moment because it's made me realise with more clarity where i am now, it's not the same place. you're very good at self—deprecation and you, in the book, make a point of how david used to mock you by — when you were angry with each other, he was, "ah, britain's best—loved vicar!"

as a joke. but you are britain's best—loved vicar. and as such, i just want you, given everything you've done in different aspects of british culture, to tell me whether you are more comfortable with where britain is culturally now than you were when you were in your radical 20s. do you think britain is a better place culturally? oh, well, yes and no, isuppose it's the answer to that — in some ways, immeasurably so. you know, when i was first an activist for lgbt rights, as we're called now — we didn't call them that then — in 1980, if you look at the index on social attitudes, you'll see i think it was 80% of people in 1980 in britain thought gay relationships were always wrong. by 1990, that had shrunk to 20%. huge change. and to be part of that was great. and i look around now and i talk to — i had someone who came to supper last night who's in his 20s and ijust thought he had this opportunity to live a life that was unavailable to my generation, and that's good.

but then, i also look at a country and a culture which is divided, full of centrifugal forces that lapses into kind of easy, lazy anger, if you can have a lazy anger, and everyone shouting at each other on twitter. and ifind i'm very worried about that. and let's end on a personal note. where is yourfaith now? we talked a lot about the church as an institution. yeah. where is your faith? faith is good, actually. faith is good and burning strong and always has — i've never had the dark night of the soul that you're meant to have. i don't know why, but i never have done. i mean, my faith in the church waxes and wanes. my faith in myself waxes and wanes. but faith in god has only — has been a constant, actually. and are you a very different person now from the richard coles before you experienced this terrible madness of grief and loss? yes, i think i am. it does change you — of course it does. and i hope i'm more tolerant.

i hope i'm slower to be judgemental and more compassionate. it's a great place to end because we have to end, but richard coles, it's been a real pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you. thank you, stephen. thank you very much, richard. hello there. according to data released by the met office on monday, across england and wales in september, we saw a first month of above average rainfall since february. this is the average line — notice how significantly low it was at times during the summer. problem is, to sort the drought issues out, we need more of what we had in september. and whilst we'll see some rain

certainly across northern and western areas over the next few days, the south and east, not what we need — largely dry for one or two. heaviest of the rain is across those western areas, and by the end of wednesday we could see 30—80 millimetres of rain. by the end of the week, some parts of western scotland maybe as much as 200 millimetres. and that's because a supercharged jet stream will push in weather fronts like they do on tuesday, and that'll drop a lot of rainfall across those western areas. and starting tuesday, wet across parts of western scotland, northern ireland, but very mild here, 111—15 celsius. fresher to the south and east, but not as cool as it was on monday morning. some southern and eastern areas will stay dry throughout the day, particularly east anglia, the southeast, and the channel islands. brightening up through scotland and parts of northern ireland as we go through tuesday. but southern scotland, maybe northern ireland, and certainly to northern england, we'll see outbreaks of rain develop — same too across north and west of wales, some of which will be on the heavy side. top until the country drier, but for all with winds — quite blustery in the morning, easing a bit into the afternoon

coming in from the south, south west — it will be a mild one. and a mild night will follow the wind strengthening, touching gale force later across the west with more in the way of heavy and persistent rain developing. scotland, northwest england, wales again, probably likely to see that, but notice what a warm start it will be to wednesday morning, a warm and windy one gales in places. and this is a developing area of low pressure. now, if the development takes place after it leaves the uk, that's where we'll see the strongest the winds out into the north sea. but if it happens earlier, bear in mind winds, could be stronger. the cloud and more persistent rain for many will be during the morning, lingering longest into the afternoon, east anglia and the southeast. but most places on wednesday will brighten up to sunshine and blustery showers, some of those heavy and thundery. these are the average wind speeds — we could see gale force winds quite widely, particularly for parts of england and wales, even 50—60 mph gusts possible in the west. we'll keep you updated — all depends on how that low pressure develops. turning fresh into the north and west later on in the day after a very mild start, and that leaves us with a fresher end to the week, thursday and friday.

very blustery, though, with frequent showers in the north and the west. bye for now.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm karishma vaswani. —— i'm monica miller. the uk chancellor tries to shore up his government's economic credibility after an embarrasing u—turn on a key budget policy. i know the plan put forward only ten days ago has caused a little turbulence. i get it. i get it. we are listening and have

listened.