He is a former award-winning industrial editor of The Observer and columnist and leader-writer for the Daily Telegraph and has written opinion pieces for most of the UK national press. He is also an Anglican priest, ordained at St Paul’s cathedral in 2005, and serves in the dioceses of London and Chichester. He is currently rector of a rural parish in East Sussex, where he keeps donkeys. For a year, he served on the staff of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, at Lambeth Palace, where he arranged the Archbishop’s controversial but highly successful guest editorship of the New Statesman.