Malcolm Turnbull's wedding involved threatening a vicar and "fornicating".

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull wasn’t always the silver fox he is today.

Once upon a time he was a young man in love, living in a small village outside of Oxford, England, with his betrothed, Lucy.

“We wanted to get married in the beautiful old church in this little village and it was an Anglican church,” he recalled on Brisbane’s 97.3 FM this morning.

“We went along to the vicar and we said ‘we want to get married’, he said, ‘okay what religion are you?'”

Lucy admitted she was a Catholic. Malcolm admitted he was a Presbyterian. The vicar admitted he was unimpressed.

When I first asked Lucy to marry me she said, ‘Let’s wait until we grow up.’ Well we didn’t wait long and now it’s almost impossible to imagine, let alone remember, what it was like not to be together, so much so that I have a much clearer sense of ‘Lucy and me’ than I do of ‘me’.

A photo posted by Malcolm Turnbull (@turnbullmalcolm) on Feb 13, 2016 at 4:52pm PST

“Get out of here,” he told them. “What’re you talking about? You’re not part of my flock go to the registry office!”

The couple really wanted to get married though (imagine wanting to marry the love of your life and simply not being allowed!), so Malcolm used his silver tongue to make it happen.

“You’re a minister in the Church of England, right? And the Church of England is an established church in the United Kingdom? … You’re kind of like a public servant,” he told the vicar.

He then argued one of the vicar’s jobs was to “prevent fornication in the parish”.

“I said ‘look, Miss Hughes and I are not making any admissions but we are young and in excellent health and sorely tempted, so if you marry us you will eliminate the risk of fornication in the cottage where we’re living down the road.”

Anyway, it worked. The vicar thought it was so funny he married them.

The couple have now been together for more than three decades.

You can hear the anecdote in full here (with thanks to 97.3 FM). Post continues after video…