What’s the fuss about a married clergy? The ‘retired’ priest, activist, and one-time leader of CND talks straight

Bruce Kent went to his local DIY superstore in north London recently, he tells me, where an older-than-usual assistant started peering at him. “I know you, don’t I?” the man began. “Isn’t your name Hume?” Kent is laughing as he tells it, his conversation as lively as his blue eyes. “It was only when I showed him this” – he pulls at the CND badge on his lapel – “that he realised his mistake. ‘Oh yes, you’re Bruce Kent.’”

For many in the 1980s, it was the then Mgr Bruce Kent rather than his boss, Cardinal Basil Hume, who was the face of British Catholicism. As general secretary of a resurgent CND in the early 1980s – with Margaret Thatcher’s government announcing a £5bn programme to replace Polaris with Trident as our nuclear deterrent, as well as playing host to American Cruise missiles at Greenham Common – he was caught up in what he now refers to as a “Vesuvius moment”, when public debate was dominated by nuclear weapons. “I was running out of breath,” he recalls. “There was so much to do.”

The nation was polarised; leading the opposition to an assertive British prime minister, and her American ally, Ronald Reagan, both willing to threaten nuclear Armageddon in their Cold War stand-off with the Soviet Union, was a persuasive, articulate and – especially for the young – prophetic Catholic priest.