There are all sorts of qualifiers people append when describing themselves as Catholic: devout, lapsed, cultural, liberal, traditional. The actor Rupert Everett prefers something with more of a punitive Old Testament ring to it: fallen. “My life,” he insists dramatically, “has been led in such a Catholic way. Even a fallen Catholic is a Catholic.”

This is not quite the impression Everett usually gives of the Church of his upbringing in three decades’ worth of interviews since making his name in the early 1980s in the play, and later film, Another Country. Instead, he expresses fury, particularly over the Church’s attitudes to him as a gay man