And do Sony executives read the Sun? I think not.Behind all the form-filling, one can detect two strong emotions: guilt and doubt. I cannot recall reading anywhere about how many Nintendo executives go to church. No other set of managers would take regular polls of opinions and habits – and then publish the results. The survey showed that one member of the House of Bishops had video games equipment in his home. It is a peculiar quality of the present Church of England, this obsessive self-examination. Once again, in or out of touch?Where bishops seemed out of touch was in taking part in the survey at all.

These priorities are more generally those of people 40 years younger. Did voting for the LibDems show them to be in or out of touch?Asked to list which, in their view, were the most important issues, they chose the environment, unemployment, Third World problems, politics and racial harmony, in that order. Of the 14 who had and were prepared to divulge details, four voted Tory, four Labour and six Liberal Democrat. The big difference, as suggested by the low Telegraph readership, was over politics. Most were members of the House of Lords and hadn’t voted in the previous election. “But I listen to Radio 4,” he bit back.
The results of the poll were predictable for any group of male executives with an average age of 60: 84 per cent university-educated; none listened to Radio 1; only one with satellite television; none read any of the tabloids. At one point an interviewer on Radio 4 had her teeth into a bishop’s leg and was shaking it vigorously Out of touch, out of touch.

The phrase was used so often it was like being tuned in to a 24-hour rugby commentary, and a dull one at that. The publication of Church of England General Synod 1990-1995 – Analysis of Membership triggered the inevitable debate about whether bishops were out of touch or in touch. This is known, because three-quarters of the bench of bishops answered an internal questionnaire about themselves, the results of which were released last week. I meanwhile, can address myself here confidently (and, it must be said, smugly) to the 15 who read the Church Times. Poor old Daily Telegraph. All that sensible, clear, friendly advice it gives to the bishops in the Church of England, and only one bishop takes it. He was killed in an avalanche while skiing in the Swiss Alps.Stephen FosterAnthony James Nares, publisher: born London 17 December 1942; married 1975 Thomasin Gilbey (one son); died Klosters, Switzerland 19 February 1996..

His particular skill, apart from coming up with two very good ideas, was his ability to motivate his sales staff with the same “never mind the odds” gusto which he embodied.A one-time Blues officer, Nares hunted and shot, waterskied on what he called his “lake” somewhere off the M4 and skied with the same audacity he brought to all his activities. Capable of driving his staff to distraction by firing off ideas by the score with little sense of their practicability, he was almost universally liked by his colleagues and customers, which can’t be said of all trade publishing executives, who tend to embody the roundhead tendency. Despite competition from Emap and Financial Times magazines, Money Marketing provided the important second leg of Centaur, a company now turning over pounds 41m, owning a dozen or so major trade titles (and, for some reason, Linguaphone), and expected to float on the Stock Market.Nares was one of life’s cavaliers. Sherren had already launched and floated one successful trade publishing house, Morgan-Grampian, and Centaur brought with it much-needed investment funds and, for a short time, the rather less obviously beneficial presence of the former managing director of Express Newspapers, Jocelyn Stevens.The Eighties were high days for trade publishing, as both display and classified advertising boomed, and later that decade Nares, as Centaur’s managing director, had his second brainwave, Money Marketing, a magazine aimed at financial intermediaries.