HEARD the one about the bishop and the naked party girl?

The Bishop of Winchester has been praised for his chivalry after coming to the rescue of a drunk naked woman who was locked out of her hotel room during a hen do.

The Rt Rev Michael Scott-Joynt was staying in the same hotel as a hen party during a meeting of Church of England bishops in York when he was disturbed by loud noises outside his room.

Outside in the corridor he found a woman had stripped off her clothes and was stood banging on the door opposite, completely naked.

The Bishop, 67, fetched his dressing gown which he then threw over the embarrassed naked party-goer.

Shortly after the £130-a-night Park Inn Hotel,where nearly 50 bishops, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, had gathered for a conference was evacuated after another hen party member set off a fire alarm.

“It was just before midnight,”

the Bishop said.

“There was a commotion in the corridor outside my room.

“I went out to investigate and there were two young women there. One was binge-drunk and the other had nothing on and was banging on the door of a room opposite. I went promptly back to my room and wondered what I should do.

“I then went out again and threw the naked girl my dressing gown. She seemed desperately embarrassed to have locked herself out of her room.

One of them must have then have set off the fire alarm.”

The Bishop of Wakefield, the Rt Rev Stephen Platten, 63, said: “It was certainly the most amusing incident that I have experienced at a House of Bishops meeting. In another amusing twist, the Bishop of Winchester had to find a woman to go to retrieve his dressing gown later. If we had women bishops that wouldn’t have been a problem.”

Hotel manager Michael Lacy said the bishops were staying in a different part of the hotel to the hen party, and that no guests had complained.

“In the case of the bishop, it sounds as if he reacted chivalrously,”

he said. “No doubt if he’d been particularly upset by what happened he would have made his views known to us.”