I just wish I’d been there with my camera:

Meetings of Church of England bishops are usually sedate – and that’s how they like it.

But last week’s proved decidedly more eventful, when they found themselves sharing their conference hotel with a hen party.

It was the cue for Carry On-style high farce which culminated in the Bishop of Winchester, the Rt Rev Michael Scott-Joynt, 67, gallantly offering his dressing gown to a naked girl, who was apparently locked out of her hotel room.

Other bishops soon became aware of drink-induced vomiting and screaming – and everyone was eventually forced to evacuate the hotel in the middle of the night when a reveller let off a fire alarm.

The Bishop of Wakefield, the Rt Rev Stephen Platten, 63, said: ‘The alarm seems to have been triggered when two young ladies, who were pickled, came back late at night.

‘One of the ladies was naked and one of the bishops had to give her his dressing gown to cover her nakedness. I think the other woman was trying to take her clothes off, too, but she was stopped in time.’

Nearly 50 bishops, among them the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, had gathered at the £130-a-night Park Inn Hotel in York for the meeting, where the main item was admitting women to the episcopate.

Rowan Williams denied foreknowledge of the ladies’ night out and shortly after tussling with Rev. Michael Scott-Joynt in an attempt to thwart his dressing gown manoeuvre, inspired by the moment, burst forth into this peroration: “Nothing will stop sex being tragic and comic.  It is above all the area of our lives where we can be rejected in our bodily entirety, where we can venture into the exposed spontaneity and find ourselves looking foolish or even repellent: so that the perception of ourselves we are offered is negating and damaging.  And it is also where the awful incongruity of our situation can break through as comedy, even farce.”