Assistant editor Chris Lloyd tallies up the scoreboard for the Bishop of Durham who announced his retirement while watching the Test at Headingley

AFTER the googling eyes and wildly waving hands of David Jenkins whipping up a storm, Durham, like any slip cordon in cricket, needed a safe pair of hands.

It received Michael Turnbull, a lifelong cricket supporter who, fittingly, announced on Test Match Special at the weekend that he will be retiring next year.

It wasn't just the cricket connection that made the venue for the announcement so fitting. Test Match Special is the nicest programme on the airwaves, all chuminess and well-played sir. And, by all accounts, Bishop Michael is probably the nicest person in his diocese who is regarded with warmth by his flock.

This affection, in itself, is a great achievement because his tenure in 1994 began in the worst possible way. It seems a sin to dredge it all back up again, but to understand Bishop Michael's achievement one has to understand its makings.

He arrived in Durham unheralded from his position as Bishop of Rochester in Kent. But within days of his appointment, he was turned over by a tabloid. The safe pair of hands was found to have had, in his dim and distant past, a conviction for gross indecency with a Yorkshire farmer.

It had taken place in a public toilet in 1968, and Hull magistrates gave him a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered him to pay £6.30 costs.

To make matters worse, he had recently suggested that homosexuality was incompatible with the job of a clergyman, and he was open to charges of hypocrisy. The church was accused of a cover-up.

Among the smallish crowd gathered on Croft Bridge in September 1994 to watch the centuries-old tradition of the new Bishop of Durham being greeted on his arrival in the county with a mighty falchion, there were murmurings of discontent. "An unhappy occasion," muttered one. "Morality is definitely going downhill and this is just another step in the wrong direction," said another.

More publicly, 600 out of 700 callers to a local radio station demanded that the Bishop resign immediately.

Lesser men would have crawled away from the embarrassment. Bishop Michael did not. Instead, he greeted it with great humility and understanding. "I have had 26 years to come to terms with what happened," he said. "Most people have not had time yet to consider their feelings."

From such an unhappy beginning, it is an achievement that he has built such an affection within his community. It has been his own redemption.

PERHAPS chastened by his experience, or perhaps because he was appointed to restore some stability to Durham's rocking boat, Bishop Michael has not courted controversy.

Gently, he has supported women priests and suggested that Charles may marry Camilla - but he has never confronted head on the vexed issue of homosexuality among the clergy.

Where Jenkins claimed Christ's resurrection was a conjuring trick with old bones, the new man said he believed in it - but added that he wished there had been a video camera on hand to capture. Well held, sir, shouted the church hierarchy.

Where Jenkins shouted from the pulpit about poverty and unemployment, Bishop Michael said he wanted to distance himself from the "day to day buccaneering of politics". He shared the same social concerns as his predecessor, but preferred to address them in a quieter, more collaborative way.

This can be seen in his involvement as the head of the campaign for elected regional government in the North-East. Right from his arrival from the fragmented South-East, he liked the regional idea. "This area, thankfully, has a very independent regional feel," he told The Northern Echo in his first interview in November 1994. "If there's County Durham on your address you know where you live and I think that the Bishop of Durham is bishop of that regional identity."

His non-political status leading the campaign has certainly given it a kudos and respectability that a group of squabbling politicos would not have earned on their own.

BISHOP Michael has also been an assiduous member of the House of Lords and has argued strongly that the Church of England should retain its seats as the upper chamber is reformed.

"The presence of bishops in the House of Lords is a public declaration of the importance of the Christian religion at the heart of the government of the nation," he said in 2000.

With Archbishop George Carey, Bishop Michael has helped reform the institutions of the church - although the eventual outcome of these reforms may not have gone as far as he would have liked.

Regional government, constitutional reform and ecclesiastical change are ivory tower topics that are never going to grab the headlines, but after Bishop David's nine years dominating them and following Bishop Michael's own initial unsavoury brush with them, that might well have been what the Durham diocese demanded.