Spectator columnist and former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore wrote in his Spectator magazine diary in June of how Alpha is ‘conquering the entire world’ – and how Nicky Gumbel is ‘walking with destiny’.

The item followed a description of an event Mr Moore (inset, right) had attended at the Brompton Oratory, the Catholic church next to Holy Trinity Brompton, at which he had seen Nicky Gumbel. The article read:

‘One of those in the audience at the Oratory was Revd Nicky Gumbel, from Holy Trinity Brompton across the way. In the old days, the idea that an evangelical would darken a Catholic door would have been unthinkable, but now there is a lot of common ground between the two.

‘I was at school and Cambridge with Nicky Gumbel. At the time, I thought he was very nice, but it did not occur to me that he would walk with destiny.

‘When we were at Trinity, he told me that he had written 'reading' as his hobby on his CV for university entrance because he could not think of anything else. When, at interview, the dons asked him what he had read recently, he blurted out 'The Day of the Jackal', which was not what they meant by reading.

‘Today, Nicky has claims to be the most successful of my fellow schoolboys a man to whom hedge-fund kings, SAS generals and Cabinet ministers should defer.

‘He is the chief begetter of Alpha, the course in basic Christianity which is now conquering the entire world and had been studied by literally millions of people.

‘His mission has probably reached more people than that of any Englishman in history except for John Wesley. Yet he seems exactly the same as 30 years ago – the jolly young man who used to toast me crumpets while explaining why I should pay more attention to St Paul's Epistle to the Romans.’