The Oxford dean, the hair-stroking claim, and the bitter 4-year power struggle

On the last Tuesday of April the Very Reverend Professor Martyn Percy left Christ Church for the last time. Dean Percy would have been entitled to remain head of the historic Oxford college and cathedral until the day before his 71st birthday, which was still more than a decade away. Instead, he was departing early with a seven-figure sum deposited in his bank account by his former employers, with whom he had been in an extraordinary feud for four hellish years.

On one side was Christ Church's governing body, led by its senior dons or "censors" and a clandestine group of their predecessors in the role, "the ex-censors". Together they had persuaded academic and cathedral colleagues that Percy must go. Twice they hit him with the would-be killer charge of "immoral, scandalous and disgraceful" conduct, which if upheld would have had him fired. In total, Percy would be accused of 41 offences, all dismissed by independent bodies.

The allegation that gained most public notoriety came in October 2020. Percy was accused of briefly stroking a woman's hair in Christ Church Cathedral. Although both the church and the police declined to pursue her claim, Christ Church found it believable. It still hung in the air on February 4 this year, the afternoon Christ Church and Percy agreed to settle. By the terms of the deal, Percy would not face an internal tribunal into the hair-stroking claim, nor would he need to prove his sanity before a medical board. In return he dropped his employment tribunal cases – for his treatment as a "whistleblower" and for the repayment of his legal fees – against the college. The female complainant received a sum from Christ Church and, while conceding nothing, settled her claim against Percy.

Still just about standing at the end of all this was Percy, his wife, Emma, who is a chaplain at another Oxford college, and a small group of supporters who had come to believe Percy was the victim of a puzzling vendetta – puzzling because no one seemed quite able to explain what terrible offence Percy had committed in his eight years as dean.

"The coup to remove me began in earnest, I think, probably in 2017 and early 2018," says Percy, "and that coup was absolutely relentless in terms of levelling false accusations, bogus charges – absurd things – using the statutes and other levers to try to destroy me financially, reputationally and psychologically."

Christ Church college. Photo / Tetiana Shyshkina, Unsplash

Percy could not give interviews while at the college; now that he has left, at last he can. Since he is still in Oxford, which is where I live, I invite him round to my place. He looks like a man who has been through the wringer. He is, he says, 5ft 6in on a good day, but whereas the short beard that half-conceals a childhood scar once covered a full face, these days Percy is very thin. In the depths of the dispute he struggled to eat enough to reach 8½st (54kg).

"Hairgate", as people call it, crashed into the story in October 2020, two years into the row: a concrete, understandable complaint of misconduct. The woman claimed that after a service in a semi-enclosed area in Christ Church Cathedral, Percy had complimented her on her hair and then stroked it for 10 seconds without permission. He admitted the compliment (her hair was being cut for charity), but denied the touching. The police interviewed Percy under caution. They decided not to press charges, placing the matter "on file" for lack of evidence. The following May, Dame Sarah Asplin, the president of Church of England tribunals, effectively reached the same conclusion. "The incident itself was extremely short, the alleged hair stroking even shorter and the language and conduct as a whole was not overtly sexual."

On settlement day in February, the complainant issued a statement via Christ Church, acknowledging it was her word against his. "I am acutely aware that this is a situation faced by many women who bring complaints of a sexual nature," she said. "I know what I experienced on that day and I want to ensure that no other student or member of staff has to go through the ordeal that I have."

I ask Percy what happened. He starts by saying that on September 8, 2020, the Church of England's national safeguarding team had cleared him of allegations brought by Christ Church of supposed misconduct. These were not complaints of sexual misbehaviour, but concerned his dealings with students who had in previous years come to him, as dean, in confidence to discuss incidents that had happened to them. The church safeguarding team had dismissed all four allegations.

A month later, at 10 on a Tuesday morning, the cathedral sub-dean knocked on the deanery door. He told Percy there had been an allegation of a sexual nature.

"I asked what that was and he refused to say. He told me it wouldn't be appropriate."

Percy only discovered what the complaint was when he was interviewed by Kate Wood, a former police officer who specialised in sexual abuse cases and had been hired by Christ Church. In her final report she called the complainant's account "credible, detailed and consistent". Percy thinks Wood's report deeply flawed: parts of his statement had been removed and she had not spoken to the witnesses he had suggested.

Steven Croft, the bishop of Oxford, with Queen Elizabeth in April 2015. Photo / Getty Images

Did he touch the woman's hair?

"No, not at all. I was concentrating on putting eyedrops in, which is a two-handed job."

How long was he in that semi-private space with her?

"Oh, I don't know. Less than a minute."

Women, I tell him, say they suffer such microaggressions against their sex all the time: it may just be a pat on the head to him; to me, it was a deeply offensive intrusion into my privacy. He can see that, can't he?

"I can, absolutely, and I was quite prepared to apologise to this individual if there was anything I had said, which of course would have been unintended, that had caused her any upset or distress. But it was all taken out of her hands, heavily weaponised, and then talked up as a full-blown sexual assault."

But did he touch her hair?

"No."

"Safeguarding" – defined by NHS England as "protecting a citizen's health, wellbeing and human rights; enabling them to live free from harm, abuse and neglect" – runs through this story like a treacherous river. It is also its source, back in 2016.

Late one December afternoon, Percy had returned from the funeral of his brother-in-law when he received a phone call from the porter's lodge to say there was a problem in a Christ Church accommodation. A woman student had stabbed a young man in the leg with a bread knife. Police took her away. The following afternoon, Percy was called again and told she had broken back into her room and cut her foot. It was left to Percy to get her out of the shower, dried and dressed.

"We were left entirely alone to deal with this. It's only 24 hours since my brother-in-law's funeral so I'm not best pleased, it's fair to say," Percy says.

Determined to reform Christ Church safeguarding, Percy called for job descriptions to be drawn up of the censors' duties. He was met with resistance, particularly from the unofficial committee of former censors who seemed to resent his interference. Nevertheless, a year on safeguarding protocols were established (Christ Church, Percy says, is now as safe as anywhere else for a student). Relations had worsened, however, because Percy had also asked for a review of salaries of the four senior officers of Christ Church: the dean's among them. The word went round that the dean was greedy for a pay rise.

He was earning around £80,000 (about NZ$156,400) and living in the deanery Charles I resided in during the English Civil War. What was he complaining about? He says the Christ Church dean's salary had fallen into the bottom quarter percentile for heads of Oxford colleges whereas it had been in the top quarter (the dean also had a cathedral to run, after all). "This is a decision that needs justification and it needs to be open, transparent and honest and subject to scrutiny."

'He's got to go'

Emails showed just how annoyed senior figures at Christ Church were. David Hine, at the time "senior ex-censor", wrote in 2017 that Percy had a "low-grade mind" and was "spiteful towards tutors and exC[ensor]s." He was a "creep", "nasty and stupid": "He's got to go." His colleague, an investments expert called Karl Sternberg, wrote of Percy in January 2018, "He's incorrigible and thick and a narcissist… [T]he college has a serious problem unless he is forced out." In a recondite joke he wrote the same month, "Please, please ex-Censors – get rid of him. Just think of the Inspector Morse episode we could make when his wrinkly withered body is found at Osney Lock."

In October 2018, Percy was in South Korea to deliver a lecture. Overnight he received a series of documents from Hine informing him that he had been accused under college statutes of "immoral, scandalous and disgraceful conduct".

"I was devastated because I couldn't think how anything in terms of me trying to raise awareness about proper process, accountability, organisation and the like could remotely be construed as conduct of an immoral, scandalous and disgraceful nature. What they were doing was using that language to destroy me."

The governing body voted to set up an internal tribunal to adjudicate on his conduct in the pay dispute.

"I was petrified of losing my reputation, my house. I had nowhere else to live. I was not able, not allowed, to talk to the press. I was not permitted to explain what was meant by moral, scandalous or disgraceful. So you're turned into public enemy number one. The vast majority of your governing-body colleagues are just going around shaking their heads, saying, 'Oh, it's all very sad, but it's very, very difficult. He's done some terrible things. We can't say any more, but if you knew how difficult it was and how tough it was, then you'd agree with us.' And when people pressed and asked, 'Well, what are these terrible things the dean has done?' they turn out to be extraordinary. 'Well, he has looked at his iPhone during a meeting.' That was one of the terrible things I'd done."

The two-week tribunal, chaired by Sir Andrew Smith, a former High Court judge, was held in lawyers' chambers the following June, 2019. Percy was on the stand for four days. One bizarre exchange concerned whether Percy had "demeaned" a colleague by using the word "specious". The judge returned after a coffee break with a dictionary and explained it simply meant something superficially plausible but wrong. But Percy's legal bill was now more than £250,000, and Christ Church's more than £1.25 million.

All charges dismissed

In August, the Percys were on holiday in Switzerland when news arrived that Smith had rejected all 27 charges against him. He had some minor criticisms but they "fell far short of being good cause for dismissal".

"A good day in Switzerland. Lovely. Huge relief," Percy recalls. "And at that point I'm thinking to myself, 'Well, we'll go and we'll start to make things work.' "

As autumn term 2019 began, however, Christ Church made it clear it was not going to repay Percy's legal bills, a major worry for the dean. (In the end, Percy's settlement left ample money to repay his debts.) The censors meanwhile kept Smith's findings – and the records of those malicious emails – out of sight of the rest of the governing body.

In December 2019, it passed a vote of no confidence in Percy.

"I probably was at breaking point, I think, now I look back on it, but I came through that in the early part of 2020 and began to regain my strength. There'd been a couple of attempts at mediation and we went into one of those periods again in early March 2020. What I didn't know at the time was that there was, in effect, another plot out there to kill me."

This was the series of third-party safeguarding complaints that preceded Hairgate, the issues that the Church of England would decide he had handled properly. While Percy waited for the ruling, the censors found more trivial causes for complaint. That March, burglars escaped with three valuable Old Master paintings from the Christ Church art gallery. The censors (not the police) complained Percy had interfered with a crime scene because his dog, Lyra, had leapt into the deanery garden to greet the police. Percy bought an Easter egg for a student who, despite lockdown, was still at Christ Church. He was told he had broken Covid regulations.

And then, that autumn, came Hairgate. Percy was suspended again, pending a second "immoral, scandalous and disgraceful conduct" tribunal. Christ Church properly took the woman's complaint seriously, but for some of Percy's foes it was an opportunity.

"I really had a pretty serious breakdown with this. And that was largely triggered by the Bishop of Oxford writing a very public letter, when people were trying to defend me, saying that it was inappropriate for people to be defending me in public when I was being attacked in public.

"I was despairing, because I felt that actually you would want your bishop to be a person of courage and integrity, somebody who might actually stand up against, pardon the expression, the forces of darkness and oppression, and he just colluded with them."

Did Percy become suicidal?

"I think I came close. I don't think I ever really got there. I mean, other people have done. We have had clergy and victims of abuse who've gone through this Orwellian nightmare with church investigations and they've taken their own lives and I can completely understand that," he says. "You might get a bit of pastoral care, but you don't get any advocacy. You don't get the new legal support."

The diocese paid for six free counselling sessions but Percy saw a therapist every week for 30 months. Late in the day, he says, Christ Church offered to pay for counselling, but by then he had spent tens of thousands of pounds "just trying to stay afloat, stay alive".

The 'insanity tribunal'

Extraordinarily, the following summer, 2021, Christ Church hatched a plan to dismiss him on the very grounds of mental infirmity. His mental capacity would be adjudicated upon by a panel of three specialists, one of whom the dean could nominate. A newspaper dubbed it the "insanity tribunal". His response was to find a "top psychiatrist" who would appear for him with the weight, he believed, to prevent a diagnosis of insanity or personality disorder.

But even as the siege of Percy continued – he was forbidden to enter the cathedral, teach or speak to students – outside forces were circling the college. The Charity Commission, which regulates Christ Church, became ever more exercised by the amount of charitable funds it was spending on lawyers and PRs. Letters copied to the 60-plus dons who make up Christ Church's governing body reminded them that as trustees it was a criminal offence "to knowingly or recklessly provide false or misleading information" to it.

In December, Percy visited Lord Patten, the chancellor of Oxford University, and Louise Richardson, the vice-chancellor, in her office in central Oxford. He told them he could not stay at Christ Church but he needed compensation for the mental and reputational injuries he had sustained and his legal costs reimbursed. Patten and Richardson asked to meet the governing body. The censors said yes but were privately furious. (Patten was a "dinasour" [sic], one fumed in an email accidentally copied to the entire governing body.)

They heard out the chancellors' peace proposal but did not pursue it. It was, however – with the notable omission of the proposal that Christ Church would publicly wish Percy well in his "future endeavours" – remarkably similar to the peace deal finally hatched. On February 4 this year, the governing body gave itself an hour to agree the settlement that had taken a single day (after four years) for the mediator to negotiate.

"Lots of people [on the governing body] were saying that it was 'morally repugnant' to settle but probably expedient. They were paying off, let's remember, a proven sex pest, a safeguarding risk, a slightly mad person who should really just be dismissed," Percy reports caustically. "But I think there was enough pressure on the censors by this time to say, 'Actually, if you don't settle you're committing yourself to years of further legal struggles. You will probably lose every one of those because you've lost all the previous ones.' "

The hair-stroking complainant received a payment – but from Christ Church, not Percy.

Percy insists he is not bitter, but does not deny his anger. It seems to me fiercest against the Church of England and his future in the church looks, at best, uncertain. Steven Croft, the bishop of Oxford, forbade him to give a sermon at his leaving service in the university church. It will now be held elsewhere. His future, Percy hopes, lies in academia outside Oxford. He will be 60 in July.

The dispute between Christ Church and its dean was a power struggle. But why so nasty, so personal? One theory is that Percy was never a good fit for an Oxford college with a reputation for conservatism and elitism (in fact its intake, Percy says, is now a good mix). He was adopted into a family with no history of university education who "scrimped and saved" to send him to a private school.

He attended Bristol and later Durham universities, not Oxford. As a former colleague put it, he did not have family furniture to bring to the deanery. Although he is a witty man, in Oxford high-table terms he may not be thought clubbable. He has not drunk for 20 years. He is also outspoken and a Labour Party member. His piety, he thinks, may grate.

"I struggled to understand why that reaction to me was really so visceral and I strongly suspect they don't know either," he says. "How much of this is personal animus towards me and what they think I might represent and do, and how much of it is to do with what they wish to conceal about themselves? I think it's mostly in the latter camp."

'I'm not sure I'd change the past 4 years'

The other question is why a dispute between dons and clerics at a wealthy Oxford college matters.

"Because when institutions go wrong, and this is only an example of one, you can very quickly descend into the kind of civil war and cloak and dagger conduct that's been going on for a considerable period of time here. And it raises questions about the usefulness and purpose of institutions to the public at large."

Obviously, this is not how the people who run Christ Church look at the saga. When I last wrote about it in this magazine, the college issued a statement that was empathetic in tone. "Personal relationships have undoubtedly suffered, and we regret this deeply. We take our responsibilities towards all members of our community very seriously, and believe we have acted in the best interests of Christ Church, including its students and staff."

I ask Percy if he had ever considered just quitting, for his sanity's sake.

"My mental health really suffered, but the things I take from these four years plus are basically from the credit column."

He mentions the support of college staff, students, friends who "never stopped believing", allies such as Alan Rusbridger, then principal of Oxford's Lady Margaret Hall, and Jonathan Aitken, the former Tory cabinet minister whom Rusbridger, as editor of The Guardian, had helped jail for perjury in a libel trial (they are now friends). He is indebted to his union, Unite, and his lawyers, particularly the barrister Sarah Fraser Butlin. Emma, his wife, has been "amazing"; ditto their two grown-up sons.

"This is going to sound slightly strange and possibly shocking, but I'm not sure I'd change the past four years because of the good things that we've discovered that I don't think we'd have found otherwise. You discover some really brave people. You discover depths of care and support that you would not have known otherwise. You find fortitude and resilience and courage and humanity. But you also discover that the places you thought you could get care from, places like the church – well, actually, you can't."

Written by: Andrew Billen
© The Times of London