Deceit, fraud and suicide in the Church of England.
Martin Sargeant had a taste for the finer things in life. A bulldog-faced man in his fifties, he carried Louis Vuitton luggage, sported a Mont Blanc watch and was a frequenter of the £500-a-night Marriott hotel in Canary Wharf. His more sober-minded colleagues scratched their heads as to how the church official could host meetings in lavish venues and luxuriate in fancy restaurants. He was always greedy for gossip: the more lurid the titbits, the better.
As he rose up the ranks at the Diocese of London, he became indispensable. Not only to bishops and archdeacons, but to the parish priests who needed the omnipresent fixer to help them repair their crumbling churches and get their balance sheets back into the black.
Sargeant’s schemes could be absurdly grandiose. He identified the Church of St Mary-le-Strand as being ripe for conversion into a London branch of the ‘Museum of the Bible’, a Washington, D.C. setup by billionaire Steve Green, which has been mired in scandal over attempts to use his Hobby Lobby craft stores to smuggle papyri and other manuscripts from the Middle East. As of 2020, the museum had been forced to repatriate more than 15,000 artefacts to Iraq and Egypt by US customs. None of this bothered Sargeant.
The unprepossessing, portly church official was actively courted by clergy. One such vicar was Philip Warner, who had been getting on splendidly with him. Sargeant had wangled some money to smarten up the tower of his Christopher Wren-designed church and so the cleric invited the official and his partner to a little dinner at the vicarage.
It came as something of a shock when, a few years later, the priest received an email from the diocese about extraordinary allegations Sargeant had made about him during an exit interview. The departing staffer told his bosses on his way out the door that Warner was ‘known to make passes at members of the congregation’.
The clergyman was flabbergasted at the ‘fantasy’ concocted by Sargeant’s salacious imagination. But what hurt the genteel Warner most was the betrayal. He had befriended his colleague, welcomed him into his home, only to be stabbed in the back. What Warner did not yet know was just how far Sargeant’s spool of deceit had spread throughout the Diocese of London. How many other innocent priests had been suckered by his lies. How much power and influence – and ill-gotten wealth – the fixer had accumulated over the decades. And how he had used it to such devastating and ultimately tragic effect when he was finally forced out.
T I M _ W Y A T T 