Eventually he retired to Chester, and there wrote three little books, Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense; The Stature of Waiting; and Farewell in Christ. "He had this conviction that bishops were either stupid or vain, and in some instances both," said one Cambridge friend, Robert Runcie.As a priest, he was too busy to write. Other, less talented, contemporaries rose to become Christian leaders Vanstone did not want the jobs. Another is supplied by the death of Canon William Vanstone, who died last week.

After a career of staggering brilliance at Oxford and Cambridge, in which he picked up three first class degrees, and followed them with another in America, he spent his working life in the decent obscurity of the Anglican parish ministry on the nasty edges of unpleasant places like Manchester. And the belief among Christians tends to be that, if only they could lead the world, instead of following it, all would be well.The career of Pat Robertson provides one powerful counter-argument to this. This was the basis of the economics of the Family Channel, which he sold for so much to Rupert Murdoch. He was thus the inventor of the Holy Grail of the modern media industry: delivering carefully targeted audiences to advertisers by using the cheapest possible content whose providers are, ideally, dead. He is one of the world's most influential Christian leaders.All this may be hard to believe because we are so used in Britain to the idea of Christianity following trends rather than starting them.

He was the first to discover that old films could be reshown on cable television to the delight of advertisers and the profit of the station owner. Even so, I think it is the feeling of belonging which makes the difference, rather than the miracles which must always happen to third parties rather than to any particular customer.The final innovation that Robertson pioneered also came about by accident. It is a trick which all modern businesses have tried to learn from them. There is nothing that Richard Branson could teach Pat Robertson about personality-led marketing.

Of course, Branson does not stud his television appearances with claims to be miraculously healing members of his audience or to be diverting, by the power of prayer, hurricanes from their course. His main chat show was called the 700 club after the number of regular large donors. This technique was and remains the basis of the political power of the religious right in America.The basis of their financial alchemy is that they can turn putting a cheque into an envelope into a social, almost friendly transaction. But lowlier minds will point to Pat Robertson's great business innovations The first of these was the telethon. He actually invented this now standard fund-raising trick, at a time when it was the only thing that could rescue his studio from bankruptcy. The second, which has been much more widely imitated, was the use of mailing lists, later computerised, to nourish a base of regular customers even in a business as impersonal as television preaching. He started his television empire with one shabby jury-rigged studio, and he sold part of it 20 years later to Rupert Murdoch for $200m. It's possible the Holy Spirit was just looking after his own here; Mr Murdoch is after all a papal knight.