I mind the invisibility of the daily work of choirs for 51 weeks a year

Even before Gaudete Sunday, Christmas had come, because on one day four newspapers carried photos of choristers. The captions had to be jokey: “Selfie-service choristers take a festive snap,” in the London Evening Standard; an upmarket “Glissando” on a picture of skating choirboys at Winchester in The Times; “We’re not skidding!” (though they were) on a shot from the same photocall in the Daily Express; and a feeble “Cathedral’s sopranos on skates” from The Guardian, which later went into a tizzy of doubt about whether they were sopranos or trebles. I don’t mind the lack of pictorial imagination so much as the invisibility of the daily work of choirs (unless they’re TV’s Military Wives) for 51 weeks a year.

But while readers fought through Christmas shopping crowds in obedience to iron laws that require every household to acquire hecatombs of poultry and potlatches of presents, the press reported that “Britain is no longer a Christian country”. That was how The Independent, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and The Daily Telegraph headlined the conclusions of Baroness Butler-Sloss’ Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life.

The 20 commissioners under her chairmanship had spent two years collecting evidence to reach this judgment (which does not appear in so many words in their report). It caused, The Daily Telegraph reported, “a furious row, as it was condemned by Cabinet ministers as ‘seriously misguided’, and the Church of England said it appeared to have been ‘hijacked’ by humanists.”

But someone who agreed with Lady Butler-Sloss was Tyson Fury, the Wythenshawe-born world heavyweight boxing champion of the world, who thought things had become so unchristian that the end of the world was nigh. His methodology relied on homespun Bible study.

The 6ft 9in, 18-stone boxer, who calls himself “Gypsy King” on Twitter, had beaten the Ukrainian Wladimir Klitschko for the title last month. Both men are Christians, though Fury accused Klitschko of being a “devil worshipper”. But that was not what had provoked a petition by “131,000 urging the BBC to remove him from the Sports Personality of the Year shortlist”, as The Sun reported. The casus belli was his saying in an interview with Oliver Holt in The Mail on Sunday: “There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the Devil comes home: one of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion and the other one’s paedophilia.”

The next thing he knew, the Daily Mirror reported, was that “a hate crime investigation started, after a gay ex-police officer said the world heavyweight champ’s statements seemed to link paedophilia and homosexuality.” Late last week, the Daily Mirror reported that “Tyson Fury will face no charges”, and “his remarks had been recorded as a ‘hate incident’ rather than a hate crime”. 

“If you want to know any more about any of my opinions,” the Premier Christian website reported Fury saying, “consult the Pope of Rome, because he has the same opinions.” Pope Francis has not yet commented, though in October, The Observer noted, he met “delegations from the Roma, Gypsy and Traveller communities”.

In a piece in the Telegraph magazine before all this blew up, Gareth A. Davies wrote of the two sides of Tyson Fury – the “chest-beating wild man, who spews expletives from a red mist” and “the man himself, thoughtful, sensitive and intelligent”. At his training camp, Fury opened “a drawer in his caravan to reveal a King James Bible, the only book in the place. ‘I don’t read anything else’.” Davies observed that Fury was given to “provocative comments about same-sex marriage (‘Travelling people don’t get involved in that stuff – we stick to Bible laws’)”.

Sarah Hughes in The Observer called Fury’s religion a “mixture of traditional Roman Catholic ... and a particularly literal interpretation of evangelical Christianity”. She quoted Jake Bowers, a Gypsy journalist and blacksmith: “I would be lying if I said that his misogyny and homophobia wasn’t quite representative of certain parts of the Gypsy community.” Amid the acres about Tyson Fury, a detail, mentioned by Beth Hale in the Daily Mail, lodged in my memory: that, until dissuaded by his wife Paris, he wanted to call his son Jesus Fury.

Happy Christmas.

Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph.