Richard Coles: 'I've lost 20 per cent of my body weight through mounjaro - I had no problems'

“I love Vietnamese food and so I did eat like a pig but I’m fighting back now,” says the ‘borderline national trinket’, the name coined by his late partner David, who felt the famous vicar needed a downgrade after hearing someone call him a ‘national treasure’.

“I’m on Mounjaro, and that’s been very helpful. So I have lost a bit of weight, which is good. I just don’t get the exercise I used to get.

"Also, I like my food and wine. And the trouble is when you don’t like exercise and you do like food and wine.

“I think I’ve lost about 15 to 20 per cent of my body weight, which is the target you really need to aim for with Mounjaro. It’s been great. I haven’t had any problems with it at all.”

Did he really need the jabs? “I was getting there,” he reflects. “My neighbours were all on Mounjaro and said it was a wonder drug and signed me up.”

The amicable retired vicar, TV celebrity and author, whose first cosy crime novel, Murder Before Evensong, in the Canon Clement series was adapted for TV in 2025 starring Matthew Lewis, has now ventured into the realm of children’s books, penning factual stories in A Heist Before Bedtime.

It features all manner of quirky true tales, from a scammer who sold the Eiffel Tower to unsuspecting scrap metal dealers, to the theft of thousands of insects from a bug zoo in Philadelphia, and a succession of bear break-ins at homes in Lake Tahoe, California.

Each story is told in entertaining bite-sized chapters, featuring some of his favourite cons, hoaxes and heists, including the Cottingley Fairies story – the subject of a hoax by two young cousins who set up photographs claiming the existence of fairies – and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot.

The former pop star, who was one half of The Communards in the ‘80s, hasn’t ruled out writing a children’s fictional book.

“The thing I really enjoyed about writing this book, apart from the subject matter, was just trying to imagine what it was like to be kid myself, although some would say there’s not a lot of distance between me as a kid and me now.

“I just really enjoy the company of children. I always loved it when I was a vicar doing school assemblies and getting involved with the Scouts and the Rainbows. We had lots of fun doing that, and we had a brilliant panto in Finedon, where I was vicar, which was great.”

Coles, 64, says he doesn’t regret having children of his own but he does wonder if he would have liked to be a grandfather.

“I don’t think I’ve ever particularly wanted to be a parent but I would quite like to be a grandparent, but as you can see there’s a flaw in that. I rather missed the boat. But I love being an uncle and a godfather.”

His late partner David, who died from alcohol addiction at the end of 2019 while Coles was still a vicar in Finedon, Northamptonshire, and about whom he wrote emotionally in his memoir, The Madness Of Grief, did consider adopting, he recalls. But it was something they never pursued.

“At one point I thought about maybe having a kid with a friend, but I thought the only way I would go into that was if I was absolutely 100 per cent certain that it was what I wanted to do and felt I could do. But I never really felt that 100 per cent.”

Coles now lives in East Sussex with his partner, actor Richard ‘Dickie’ Cant, son of the late actor and children’s TV presenter Brian Cant, whom he met in 2022 on a dating app.

“The romance is going great guns,” he says. “He moved in six months ago but because we’re both away all the time we’ve probably spent about 20 minutes in each other’s company. So every day, we’ll spend a bit more time together.”

He thinks they will probably get married. “We’ve talked about it, but in our time of life we’re not looking for orange blossom and a bouquet. It’s mostly about the tax advantages.”

Although he is a retired vicar, Coles is still involved with the church where he lives in East Sussex, but he misses the contact he had with children during his time at Finedon, where he was vicar for more than a decade, until 2022.

“I’m still involved with the church, but the average age of my church is probably over 70, rather than under 20.

"The new thing that’s happening to me is my friends are now having grandchildren, so I’m sort of being renewed as an honorary grandfather, rather than an honorary father, and that’s really lovely.”

He’s continuing with his Canon Clement murder mystery series set in the fictional parish of Champton and plans to write a novel-length ghost story.

He hopes his next offering for kids will be a book of children’s verse.

“When I was a kid, I loved Spike Milligan’s book of verse for children, and I’ve started writing that because one of the things I loved with the kids was doing stuff that rhymed. They really enjoyed that.”

But another pastime is taking up time, he reveals. “My favourite thing is that I’ve joined the choral society, so I’m part of the Brighton Festival Chorus.

"I love the singing and being in the rank and file, rather than being at the front doing jazz hands.”

Later this year he’ll be appearing in a four-part Channel 4 series Oti & Richard’s South African Odyssey, with dancer Oti Mabuse, touring the land of her birth on a road trip.

Having been a contestant on I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here (he came third in 2024), he’s not holding his breath for more reality, but would love to appear on The Traitors.

“Should the call come from the traitors’ castle, I would of course take it and have a conversation, but it hasn’t actually come. I think there are too many whimsical gays ahead of me in the queue.”

A Heist Before Bedtime by the Reverend Richard Coles iWren & Rook, £14.99.