The former Co-op Bank chairman, who oversaw the organisation’s near collapse, has been caught using hard drugs.
The Rev Paul Flowers, 63, who it appears is also a Methodist minister, was filmed buying crack cocaine, crystal meth and ketamine, counting out hundreds of pounds in £20 notes days after appearing in front of MPs on the Treasury Select Committee to be questioned about the Co-operative Bank’s financial problems.
Earlier this year the Co-op was forced to pull out of its proposed takeover of the TSB branches of Lloyds-TSB because of a near £1bn hole in its accounts.
In an additional irony, Paul Flowers is himself homosexual and was outed as a drug user by a man he met on a gay dating site disgustingly called ‘Grindr’ in October. The man apparently objected to Flowers using drugs to take advantage of younger men at his parties.
According to the Daily Telegraph, Rev Flowers, who resigned from the bank in June after the disastrous state of its finances were revealed, texted: “I was “grilled” by the Treasury Select Committee yesterday and afterwards came to Manchester to get wasted with friends.”
In another message he apparently boasted that his plans were ‘turning into a two day, drug fuelled gay orgy!!!’
Paul Flowers boasted about the success of the Co-op Bank, saying it would be ‘easy to be smug’ in 2011, two years after it took over the Brittania Building Society and its toxic debts and two years before its financial problems came to light.
He has been suspended by the Methodist Church for three weeks and by the Labour Party, for whom he was a local councillor.
In 2005 the Co-op Bank terminated the bank account of Christian Voice as part of its ‘diversity’ policy objecting to ‘discriminatory pronouncements on grounds of sexual orientation’. The Co-op said the group was ‘incompatible with the position of the Co-operative Bank, which publicly supports diversity and dignity’.
The Co-op Bank’s self-styled and much-trumpeted ‘ethical’ stance has now come back to haunt it, with even the Daily Mirror putting the word in inverted commas in its report on the Flowers scandal. Both the Telegraph and the Mirror claim that Flowers’ drug habit was well known by Labour MPs at Westnminster, prompting the question: ‘How much did his colleagues at the Co-op know about his lifestyle – and did they care?’
Previous stories:
11th July 2013: Co-op Bank Investors slam Regulator
25th July 2012: Anti-Christian Co-op grabs bank accounts
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Certainly the Methodist Church’s choice of minister here is unusual : a rich banker, a seriously drug-taking homosexual prone to orgies. One wonders why he ever wanted to be a Methodist minister. Wouldn’t he have found it a little boring ? I wonder what their enquiry will turn up about his suitability to continue in three weeks’ time.
I think you need to be a little careful what you say about the Co-op Bank. If they thought that your ‘discriminatory pronouncements on grounds of sexual orientation’ were unethical, then of course they would not themselves discriminate on such grounds, or you would say they were hypocrites. So when it turns out that their former chairman was a homosexual, you can’t complain that they were not as ethical as they claimed. They were perfectly ethical by the standards they had defined.
They didn’t complain about you being against drug taking, and we don’t know that they were aware of this, though I have heard tell that a little cocaine is not unheard of amongst city types who can afford it. In the end, the strangest thing is that he was a Methodist minister. In the popular imagination (although not in reality) Methodists are more “ethical” than Jesus himself even when it comes to avoiding alcoholic drinks .
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I am much more concerned about the effects on the ministry of Christians generally. This behaviour brings disgrace upon us all. A non-Christian friend has said, “What more did you expect from a man who wears a dog collar. You have to be especially careful around them because they are far more likely to be perverts.”
From what I have read, the Methodist Church knew about his criminal conviction in 1981, and allowed him to continue because he was contrite and enthusiastic about his work.
The Methodist church ought to have known about his drink-driving conviction in 1990.
As an ‘out gay man’ he was a trustee of the Terence Higgins Trust. What assurances did the Methodist church obtain in regards to his sexual activity when he became a trustee of the THT.
He resigned as a trustee of Lifeline following a bust-up with the charity’s chief executive over his expenses in which the charity’s chief executive claims he wrongfully claimed £75,000 in expenses over five years. Lifeline has made a report to the Charity Commission about this. He was also a trustee of a Methodist Trust holding assets on behalf of the church. I would expect such conduct to make him unsuitable, at least for a period, to act aqs a trustee. Did the Charity commission inform any of the other charities of which he was a trustee of his failure to behave appropriately and if not why not? And if they did, what action did the Methodist church take to ensure that their assets were properly safeguarded?
The co-operative is a worldly institution. I am relatively unconcerned about it. Where were the safeguards within the Methodist church to ensure that leaders complied with Biblical standards for leadership?
Give Rev Flowers his due, it’s amazing how he managed to stay plausible in so many unlikely situations. He should now be devoting himself to writing books along the lines of “How to win friends and influence people”.
The recent revelations about the Co-operative Bank and Its fall from grace both as financial institution and as regards its recent chairman, Rev Paul Flowers, brings to mind one word as regards its disgraceful past behaviour towards Christian Voice, namely nemesis! I have never forgotten the way it closed your account without entering into any referral or discussion with you, and this incident is, in the light of what we now know at a wider level, surely shows how totally hypocritical their claim to pursue an “ethical” trading policy is. All involved should repent and resign, as indeed I see the Chairman of the Co-op Group has already done.
With very best wishes
In the Lord
Simon Nickerson
The Coop has a policy of boycotting goods and services from Israel.
The Lord told Abram ‘And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.’ Genesis 12:3-4.
I wonder if the Lord is being true to his word here.
Christopher
I wasn’t actually too surprised by any of this.
Methodism has for years been far more interested in pursuing the leftist agenda than in Biblical truth (probably a consequence of the unfortunate historic connection between Methodism and the Labour Party). Before I got saved, I wasted many a Sunday morning listening to the agitprop of left-wing Methodist ministers — one week, there’d be some bloke lecturing against homophobia, the next there’d be some woman denouncing capitalism, and so on. Despite their dog-collars, they sounded more like Marxists than ministers of the Gospel (probably because at heart they were).
Mr. Flowers simply ticks a set of ideologically similar boxes — Methodist minister, Labour Party councillor, Co-op Bank chairman — and his homosexuality and drug use merely go hand in glove with this ideology. Contemporary leftism is all but synonymous with antinomianism.
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