The Brain Dump

The full story told for the first time of how a corrupt church official stole millions and ruined the lives of innocent clergy across London

Hello! I hope you all had a good Easter. I know I said I would be taking a week off, but in fact a major investigative piece I have been working on for almost a year was finally published on Maundy Thursday. It’s all about a corrupt and deeply malevolent former official at the Diocese of London, in the Church of England, called Martin Sargeant.

As well as swindling churches out of millions of pounds, this senior bureaucrat also compiled vicious and mostly untrue rumours about dozens of priests in the diocese, many of whom he had worked closely with for years. And when he was finally forced out, he dripped poison into the ears of his superiors prompting them to draw up a report - known infamously as the ‘Brain Dump’ - into 42 of these mostly innocent vicars based on Sargeant’s lies, innuendo and prurience.

As you will see, this had devastating - and ultimately fatal - consequences for the priests involved, and has left a legacy of mistrust, hurt and toxicity which the diocese is still grappling with today.

The article which has now been published by The Fence (a small investigative/satirical magazine) is in fact barely half of what I originally wrote as they had to cut lots and lots for space. So, as a special Easter bonus for my paying subscribers only, I’m posting the full-length version below so you can see the full extent of Sargeant’s malign influence and my exploration of how this utterly broken man was able to become so powerful and so destructive within the Church of England.

If you’re not yet a paying subscriber, you can sign up right here for just £5 a month or £50 a year. As well as special bonus posts like this, it also gets you access to the full archive of Critical Friend newsletters and my undying gratitude. The generosity of paying subscribers not only helps me keep the regular newsletter going, it also supports me to do more long-term investigations and accountability journalism like this.

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Martin Sargeant always had a taste for the finer things in life. The squat portly 54-year-old could often be found enjoying luxury hotels and fine dining, despite his modest salary working as a church bureaucrat. His more sober-minded colleagues scratched their heads as the corpulent official endlessly hosted meetings in lavish venues and luxuriated in fancy restaurants, sharing and greedily accumulating gossip. And the more lurid the titbits, the better.

As he rose up the ranks at the Diocese of London, one of the most ancient, wealthy and powerful parts of the Church of England, he became indispensable. Not only to the bishops and archdeacons, but to the parish priests who needed the omnipresent fixer to help them repair their crumbling churches and get their balance sheets back into the black.

And so the fleshy Sargeant was courted by clergy. One of those who did so was Philip Warner, who had thought he was getting on splendidly with the self-described Head of Operations. Sargeant had wangled him some money to help patch-up the tower of his medieval church, which nestles against the River Thames in the heart of the City of London. And so the cleric decided to invite the official and his partner to a cosy dinner at the vicarage.

Warner worked hard to make Sargeant comfortable, preparing a menu which navigated around his many allergies. The evening was spent merrily enough, and Warner believed he had established a friendly rapport with the diocese’s money man. “I thought he was a patriot for me and well-disposed to my parish,” he recalled, ruefully.

So it came as a shock a few years later when the priest received an email from the Diocese of London informing him Sargeant had passed on unsavoury allegations about him during an exit interview. The departing Head of Ops told his bosses on his way out the door Warner was “known to make passes at members of the congregation”.

The clergyman was flabbergasted at what he says is a “fantasy” concocted by Sargeant’s overactive and salacious imagination. But what hurts the genteel Warner most is the betrayal: “You’ll think I’m very old-fashioned, but hospitality is a sacred thing.” He had opened his home to the bureaucrat, wined and dined him – even gone to his party to mark his civil partnership. And so he was crestfallen to find out his avaricious colleague had stabbed him in the back. “He sat at my table in my house, enjoyed my food and wine, and then shafted me.”

What Warner did not yet know was how just how far Sargeant’s web of deceit and corruption had spread throughout the Diocese of London. How many other innocent priests had been drawn into his lies. How much power and influence – and ill-gotten wealth – the fixer had accumulated over the decades. And how he had used it to such devastating and ultimately tragic effect when he was finally forced out.

Martin Sargeant’s role at the Diocese of London remains so murky there is not even agreement as to when it began; various dates between 1997 and 2003 have been floated in official documents at different times. Either way, by the mid-2000s the Bournemouth-bred administrator was being recommended to parishes by the then-Archdeacon of London Peter Delaney as a financial whizz who could take over managing their books and collecting grants. Over time his role expanded from collecting the parish rates – an archaic and now voluntary tax City churches can still request from local businesses – to becoming a contracted consultant.

Sometimes parishes would question what he actually was doing or how much money he was bringing in, but Sargeant became adept at evading scrutiny and steamrollering opposition. Complaints to Delaney and others about his machinations were ignored.

“I thought he’s a very helpful chap to have on side,” recalled Warner, whose own parish hired Sargeant to collect their rates back in 2005. He even looked the other way when Sargeant began to massage the boundaries of the parish so he could request the tax from businesses further afield. “Call me a crook but I wasn't going to argue with that.”