OF ALL the priests in the Church of England, the one Jeffrey John most resembles is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. Both men are Welsh, highly intelligent, gifted theologians, transparently good, doctrinally orthodox and socially liberal. Both believe strongly in stable, faithful, monogamous relationships.

The crucial difference is that one is gay and the other isn’t. And that is why one leads the Church and the other was forced to withdraw from being consecrated as Bishop of Reading last summer in the face of conservative evangelical opposition.

The two priests even share a certain flinty Celtic pessimism. “I’ve always considered Eeyore to be something of a heady optimist,” Dr John tells his friends.

So his elevation, at last, to the post of Dean of St Albans will have come as an unexpectedly pleasant surprise. Dr John was under no illusions about the scale of opposition to a gay dean or bishop, notwithstanding the fact that his relationship of 27 years has long been celibate.

In other respects, Dr John has all the attributes of a church leader. As well as having “a brain the size of a planet”, in the words of a fellow priest, he is also hard-working and, perhaps unusually for a theologian, good at pastoral duties too. He was as popular with students when he served as Dean of Divinity at Brasenose and Magdalen colleges, Oxford, as he was as a Vicar at Holy Trinity, Eltham, where he doubled the number of worshippers.

Dr John was an early supporter of women priests, but he is by no means a trendy liberal. Attending a “New Ways of Church” conference, he was heard to harrumph: “It’s not the new ways of Church I want to see; it’s the old ways done properly!” And, by all accounts, he does the old ways extremely well. A church colleague was impressed to see him celebrating the 8am Eucharist at Southwark Cathedral, with great composure, every day last summer while the furore surrounding the Reading appointment raged.

Although Dr John claims to have a thin skin, and understandably hated the press attention focusing on his partner and mother as well as himself last summer, he possesses a certain toughness too. He demands the same intellectual rigour and motivation in others as he displays.

St Albans should welcome a dean who is as mischievous and funny as he is prayerful, a man who enjoys good food, wine and conversation as well as liturgy. Dr John may be committed to the Church, but he could never be described as dull or worthy. Rather like Rowan Williams, in fact.

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