Methodist minister and former Co-operative Bank chairman Paul Flowers has claimed it was the stress of the job that led him to look online for male escorts.

He also insisted it was not a criminal offence to take drugs in his own home.

The former chairman of the Co-operative Bank invited The Guardian to interview him after a feature appeared in  a Sunday newspaper of him taking class A drugs and entertaining male escorts at a hot tub party in his house in Salford, Greater Manchester.

"You had nights when you had been battling through the issues of the day, then the senior officers had to entertain the troops in the evening and I was bloody well worn out. That was part of the job, but you were knackered. And like many thousands of other people – judges, lawyers, journalists, people of all professions and none – I sought intimacy among escorts," he said.

He could not put a figure on the number of escorts he had used but it was more than 20.

"I think it would be almost salacious to put a number on it, forgive me. Just say that I have, over the years, at points where I was often spending three or four nights a week in one particular hotel in Manchester, often sought comfort and solace."

He said he had sympathy for the escorts, and would even ending up acting as a counsellor towards them.

"Often they have been in care, often they have suffered different kinds of abuse, whether physical or mental, and they struggle with their demons, too."

He also attempted to justify the practice of paying for sex on Christian grounds: "If I could be terribly blasphemous for a moment, as somebody who tries to be, please don't laugh too horribly, someone who tries to be a decent Christian person, I would like to use that little mantra that is often beloved of evangelicals, though that is not the evangelical camp from which I come at all. They often use the mantra: 'WWJD – What would Jesus do?'" 

Flowers, known as the "Crystal methodist", said he had never in fact taken crystal meth. 

And he said that he had been raped by another student when studying theology in the 1970s which traumatised him and prevented him for years from developing lasting relationships with other men. 

The Methodist Church suspended Flowers in November 2013 but he has not yet been subject to disciplinary proceedings because of ill health.