As headlines go it was a belter. “Enoch Powell accused of satanic sex abuse,” the Mail reported at the weekend. “Bishop of Durham gave his name to Met detectives.”

Bishops are sedate and careful creatures, you might think, not given to being impulsive. If the Bishop of Durham (for it was he) passed on Enoch Powell’s name — along with those of Thatcher’s home secretary Willie Whitelaw and the Labour MP Leo Abse — to the authorities, then he must have had reason to do so.

Durham had the names from Dominic Walker, the former Bishop of Monmouth, who in turn, he revealed, got them from three individuals claiming to be victims of abuse whom he had counselled as a parish priest in the 1980s.