“Without the support network that I have, I am not sure I would be here to tell the story, to give this interview today” a noticeably subdued looking Maugham told the nation, who then compared himself with the television presenter Caroline Flack. Flack had taken her own life having suffered an avalanche of hostile publicity after being charged with an assault on her boyfriend. Maugham was suggesting he too had contemplated something similar after falling vertiginously from EU defending ‘hero’ to cross-dressing fox killer.

Thank you for @BBCr4today for inviting me on – at 7.40am – to discuss how it feels to be at the heart of a media hatestorm. https://t.co/K19e4qzOfn

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) March 9, 2020

Spiked immediately called out his ‘shameless hypocrisy‘. And yes, hypocrisy there was. Maugham hasn’t been shy of orchestrating a social media pile-on himself, and used all his considerable legal clout to pursue young BeLeave founder Darren Grimes though the courts with all the sympathy of a chasing pack of hounds.

The instinct to say that Maugham deserves all he got is undeniably powerful. He had it coming. I know why people feel that way. But something else needs to be said here too, something about the redemptive power of disgrace. Maybe that sounds too grand, too theological; but I have met quite a number of disgraced people in my time, and I find that their experience often changes them very much for the better. The charge of hypocrisy no longer quite sticks.

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I received an unsolicited communication from a well-known book publisher the other day. We are thinking about commissioning a book on hypocrisy, it went, and we thought you’d be the perfect person to write it. I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended.

But they were correct to guess that this is a subject that fascinates me, not least because the whole question of hypocrisy focuses attention on that gap between how we present ourselves publicly, and the reality of our actual lives. This gap exists even in the most apparently morally punctilious among us — perhaps especially so. Yes, for some of us the gap is negligible. But, for others, the elastic that holds together the public and the private is stretched to near breaking point. Perhaps this is why many unconsciously long to be exposed, the tension unbearable, the release longed for. Lies are a weight to carry. And there is often much relief in being able to lay down the burden of deceit.

A new series of Confessions begins again next week. And this seems like a good point to take stock of what I have learnt, not least as it applies to the very notion of confession and what sense it might make in a generally post-religious world. The Confessions title is a bit of a tease, of course. Yes, some guests have made personal revelations. I won’t ever think of Bondi Beach in the same way again after Iain Dale’s account of an encounter there. But though this kind of stuff is fun, it is absolutely not the point of the podcast.

What we can learn from the disgraced

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Partly, Confessions is a way of exploring interesting people’s big ideas. What also fascinates me about my guests, most of whom live under the bright sun of public gaze, is how they negotiate the relationship between what they profess and who they are. And this is tricky territory, not least because the public gaze is often unspeakably cruel, wanting to expose and punish people for tensions that exist within their own lives.

A number of Confessions fans have challenged me that I am insufficiently robust at interrogating those contradictions within the lives of my guests. Partly, this is because I do not believe I have earned the right to do so. I am a priest first of all, not a journalist. And the role of self-appointed public prosecutor is not one I have any appetite for. Indeed, I rather despise the species of journalism that exposes, with mock horror and fake surprise, the fissures upon which all human life is precariously poised. And its talk of ‘morality’ is mostly a cover for cruelty.

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Most of us do not have bodies buried under the patio so to speak, and we are not all pretending to be something else. The words attributed to the former Times foreign correspondent Louis Heren, “When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself, why is this lying bastard lying to me”, represents an approach to the search for truth that presumes the worst of human beings. And this distorts the fact that most people are trying to do the right thing, however compromised we may sometimes be. Nonetheless, the human condition is richly variegated, and the different parts of our lives don’t always fit neatly together.

In other words, the exposé doesn’t necessarily tell the whole truth. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in his Letters and Papers from Prison (arguably, the holiest book of the 20th century) there is a certain journalistic model which insists that it is only when a prominent person is exposed in their underpants or bath that the truth about them is revealed. This is often terribly misleading. The truth of a human life is often far more open to view when it is laid out as an extended narrative, as a life lived; it is just as much a horizontal phenomenon as a vertical one.

And, I hope, this manner of approach — my manner of approach — elicits the sympathy of the audience as much as it generates fresh perspectives. It is particularly pleasing when a listener describes their surprise at discovering how much they identify with someone with whom they thought they had little in common. This too is the bearer of truth, and one that challenges the audience as much as the guest.

This week we recorded Rev Jonathan Aitken’s Confession. Aitken was a former Conservative minister who served a number of months at Her Majesty’s pleasure after perjuring himself on oath (and on the Bible) after lying about who paid his hotel bill at the Ritz in Paris. Doubling down in his denial, Aitken famously took the Guardian to court: “If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent a twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play, so be it.” Aitken, of course, was lying. But the Guardian’s exposure of his deception, though absolutely the correct thing to do, was only the beginning of the story.

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The Reverend Jonathan Aitken now takes confessions himself, sometimes in Pentonville prison, where he serves as a chaplain. And I suspect that he is just the sort of person the lags are queuing up to confess to. After all, what better person with whom to share one’s sins than a man who knows a thing or two about having been there himself. Someone who can speak about judgment without being themselves judgmental — isn’t that precisely what we want from a confessor?

This is not supposed to be any sort of defence of Jolyan Maugham. I have used his example to speak in generalities. But if you can filter out that shrill cry of hypocrisy for just a moment, there is often a kind of wisdom that accompanies disgrace which we all might benefit from listening to.

I find the disgraced generally kinder people: more forgiving. Wouldn’t it be something if Maugham could find it within himself to say sorry for his own persecutory behaviour? But it’s more than this. Disgrace tends to release people from the hypocrisy-inducing effects of personal ambition and excessive self-regard. And the experience of disgrace allows people to finally come clean about who they really are. “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found” wrote the psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott. That perfectly describes the dynamics of confession.

Remember the game of hide and seek you played as a child? On the one hand, you don’t want to be found – that is the point of the game. But also, nor do you want people to give up looking for you — not caring enough to come and find you. In psychoanalytic terms, hiding is a strategy of protection. And an understandable one given the threats that exists out there. But not being found is worse. This is the territory that the confession inhabits. It is all about the tension that exists between wanting to be recognised and yet feeling there is something unbearable about this too.

In public life, this tension is exacerbated by the heightened threat of public opprobrium for transgression. And so public figures are obliged to negotiate an exaggerated version of hide and seek, and in their struggles with this game they reveal in bold a similar tension that is at work within us all.

You may call it hypocrisy. I call it being human.

But first attempts repelled me: the contestants seemed a mixture of the dreadful and the barely sentient, and the ‘love’ in question was anything but — that was plain to see. Meanwhile the suicides of former Islanders Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis lent the programme an aura of toxicity and tragedy, further entrenched following the death of its former presenter Caroline Flack last weekend in London.

Boring, appalling, wrapped in tragedy it may be. Nonetheless, persistence yields fruits, and last summer Love Island’s seductions finally worked on me. As well as finding myself increasingly curious about who would stick with or ditch who, I found myself absorbed by the programme’s deployment of gender. Love Island went from deadly dull to the ideal laboratory for observing the status of relations between men and women in our Insta-soaked era.

As the first winter installment of the series reaches its finale on Sunday, I find myself in mourning for its end, and reflecting on what it has taught me. For, despicable though it may first seem, Love Island offers a truly exceptional insight into the state of gender today — and it’s much worse than we thought.

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Relations between the sexes have deteriorated to brinksmanship between foes, and the show’s brilliance lies in starkly underlining the limits of feminism, an important lesson for people who, like me, inhabit the progressive, equality-obsessed metropolitan sphere.

Shorn of airs and graces, the lingo of advanced political correctness, or any ambition at all beyond fame and cash, Love Island contestants embody a raw, stripped-back version of what it means to be a man or a woman, one that accentuates both antagonisms and attractions. This allows for an unsettlingly clear view of how the sexes really see each other. And it’s not good.

There’s a coy, knowing irony in the very billing of the show. The word ‘love’ is on the tin, but the secret is soon revealed to those who persevere: Love Island is really about dislike, a simmering distrust. You could almost call it Hate Island. For lurking just under the lacquered surfaces of the contestants lies the fury of all-out gender warfare.

The landscape of discord and desire is set from the outset, with the gender binaries set in place nice and starkly – and, crucially, with a clarity that metropolitan elites tend to be deprived of. Everyone on Love Island has caricaturish bodies befitting Kardashian-inflected ‘girl’ perfection or tattooed, musclebound ‘boy’ bods.

They must participate in regular contests that play to traditional differences between these groups — strength and the ability to eat fast for the boys, doing bizarre tasks in bikinis for the girls. Noisy outbursts both of giggling hysteria and expletive-laden fury from the girls are de rigueur; the boys slap each other and punctuate key moments by jumping to the ground for a flurry of press-ups. It’s giggles and muscles; tears and tattoos: key planks of gender identity often forgotten by those used to loftier spheres.

Tracing both the emotional pathways of the contestants and the choices of the viewer-voters reveals a sense of deep fatigue and disgust with these enduring archetypes of men and women – while also showing just how entrenched they are.

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In this world, feminism is something the contestants very occasionally refer to from a supine position on a bean bag in the sun, slathered in oil, breasts popping. In this series there was much mirth when Ched asked fellow contestant Finn whether he was a feminist, to be told “I don’t know what that means”. When he explained it was about equality, Finn agreed and said: “I believe in equal rights for men and women… Am I a femininist [sic]?”

In an earlier series, a clash between contestants Jonny and Camilla (one of the poshest contestants ever in the shows’ history), started over the issue of whether a man should pay for a first date, clearly revealed the divide over traditional gender roles:

Beyond being a word to help pass the slow passage of sun-drenched hangout time, feminism doesn’t exist in the villa, where the orthodoxy is that power lies in the biological hand dealt women (plus enhancements), and the ability to hoard sexual power through playing games.

Such power is fiercely, stressfully contested in a world in which men are either romantic lotharios or cheating shits you have to watch like a hawk, and the women are hysterical, manipulative and obsessively on the lookout for insult.

There’s all the modern overlay, of course — the outrageous frocks showing over, side and under boob, sharp-edged female feistiness, the women’s refusal to be made to “look muggy” (made a fool of), the dishing out of terms of female empowerment (especially ‘respect’) among both genders. But the real story is one of failed equality and the rage this failure produces. Witness the jabbering fury when one of the women learns her hubby has either cast his eye over another lady, or — the ultimate insult — divulged even cryptic details to his mates of what has gone on between the sheets.

Love Island reveals the dark heart of our gym and surgery-obsessed age: desperate to look hot and love-ready, the fittest and most dewy-skinned find that they are rather weak when it comes to engaging with the opposite sex as human beings. Women in particular are not really human beings, but bodies with big lips fringed with tar-like eyelashes. As the programme unrolls through tears, anxiety, fizzled promise and ephemeral sparks of attraction, we are reminded that no amount of investment in looks and beauty helps ease the path to love.

It appears incredibly difficult for people locked in the Instagram world of physical perfection to actually make “a connection” — the very thing they say they so badly crave.

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These men and women have invested everything, their money and time, in their sex appeal, from bells-and-whistles gym memberships to pricey Brazilian butt lifts, full-chest tattoos and dramatic weight loss journeys. But when each person sees themselves as an expensive trophy, mistrust comes to underpin all transactions. Trust — won by immediate total honesty — is the biggest trophy and gift on Love Island, and its women, bred to be deeply insecure, crave its assurances most.

Love Island offers a true cautionary tale of gender. Relations between the sexes disintegrate when people fixate too much on bodies, and when gender relations suffer, so does intimacy. However, cut your eight-pack or enormous your breasts, intimacy is shown here as something that has become disfigured with untrustworthy members of the opposite sex, people who hurt and betray you, and leave you scarred and with “trust issues”. This is not what the march of gender equality was meant to look like.

When viewers voted for Amber and Greg to win last summer (the pair broke up via text soon after), they seemed to be voting for an end to tiresome manipulating hunks like Michael, Amber’s ex, and saying “yes, thank you” to the first appearance of a man who seemed — at least at first — to be capable of even the vaguest evidence of sincere feeling.

Yet watch enough Love Island and in it becomes clear that even those who seem like true gentlemen, or ladies, disappoint. For all things, in the end, dissolve into muscle, thongs and fake eyelashes. Anyway, who these days has time for the ups and downs of personhood?