God in Number 10: The Personal Faith of the Prime Ministers, from Balfour to Blair by Mark Vickers
Anyone interested in politics and religion should get this book. Mark Vickers examines a subject, the personal faith of every 20th-century Prime Minister from Arthur Balfour to Tony Blair, which political writers tend increasingly to neglect.
The result is a wonderful anthology. Mark Vickers writes in a sober, unsensational style, yet produces something surprising or even bizarre on almost every page.
He has consulted a vast number of unfashionable books, and establishes that for most of these 19 PMs, religion was far more important than one would think from recent accounts, or from the decline in religious observance towards the end of the 20th century.
The book opens with Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister from 1902-1905 and a senior and significant Cabinet minister until shortly before his death in 1930.
Balfour took a philosophical interest in religion and science, and how one reconciled the two, and also in spiritualism, not then, as Vickers says, “viewed as the preserve of the eccentric or deluded”, but as a way in which it might be possible “to provide scientific proof of personal immortality”.
Serious figures – Lord Rayleigh, winner in 1904 of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Henry Sidgwick, Knightsbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, both of them Balfour’s brothers-in-law – set up the Society for Psychical Research to carry out the rational investigation of paranormal phenomena.
And as Vickers relates:
“Sidgwick met his wife, Nora Balfour, at a séance in Balfour’s London home in the 1870s. There would be many more séances over the course of half a century, including in Downing Street itself. These were often organised by his brother, Gerald, a ‘true believer’ and lover of Winifred Coombe Tennant, who operated as the medium ‘Mrs Willett’. (The two had a child, whom they believed the Messiah.)
How cranky this looks, yet at the time it was a widely accepted way of communicating with the dead. Vickers tells us that in 1922, “Mrs Willett was a delegate at the League of Nations conference in Geneva attended by Balfour,” and messages from May Lyttelton, whom Balfour hoped to marry but who died in 1875, “flooded in as other delegates spoke”.
These PMs evoke the perplexities entailed by religious belief in an age of increasing scepticism. But it is perhaps helpful for a politician to have an above-average capacity for belief, and many of them did.
After all, if you want voters to believe in the political good news which you are proclaiming, it probably helps if you believe in it yourself.
Tony Blair is one of the most devout figures in this book. Vickers objects to the lazy claim, repeated by many biographers and journalists, that Blair was the most committed Christian to enter Number 10 since Gladstone, pointing out that for this to be true would mean overlooking Lord Salisbury, Stanley Baldwin, Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home.
We get Blair’s account of how at Oxford he discovered, thanks to Peter Thomson, an Australian Anglican cleric,
“religion as something living, that was about the world around me rather than a special one-to-one relationship with a remote being on high. Suddenly I began to see its social relevance. I began to make sense of the world.”
Blair avoided talking about religion while he was PM, but said plenty before and after it, and remarks in his autobiography that “I have always been more interested in religion than politics”.
Vickers reminds us that in an article in 1996 for the Easter edition of The Sunday Telegraph, Blair described the story of Pontius Pilate as “a timeless parable of political life”.
While looking for the original piece, I came upon this longer extract from it:
“The intriguing thing about Pilate is the degree to which he tried to do the good thing rather than the bad. He commands our moral attention not because he was a bad man but because he was so nearly a good man. One can imagine him agonising, seeing that Jesus had done nothing wrong, and wishing to release him. Just as easily, however, one can envisage Pilate’s advisors telling him of the risks, warning him not to cause a riot or inflame Jewish opinion.”
Politics is often discussed, by self-righteous pundits and angry people on Twitter, as if all would be well if only our rulers behaved with unwavering honesty and integrity.
Blair sees it is more complicated than that. Pilate knew Jesus was innocent, but that if he released him, there would be a riot.
When Charles Moore spoke at a party held at the House of Commons to launch this book, he said: “You wouldn’t know a Catholic has written it.”
In the sense that the book is wonderfully impartial, that is true. Vickers does, however, relate in a short Preface how, having in his youth (he was born in 1966) intended to become a lawyer, enter Parliament and climb the greasy pole, he instead found himself, on the day after Blair’s election victory in 1997, attending a selection conference to train to be a Catholic priest for the Diocese of Westminster.
Vickers observes that many of the earlier Prime Ministers in his book had read Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, first published in 1863, and says this book did immense damage by reducing Jesus to a teacher of morality.
Renan’s book is indeed immensely persuasive: I recall reading it in my early twenties and being charmed by the sincerity of its style.
When Winston Churchill, as Prime Minister, was interviewing Geoffrey Fisher for the vacant see at Canterbury, he asked him if he had read Renan, and was astonished to find he had not: Churchill found it “quite unthinkable”, Vickers tells us, “that a senior prelate was unacquainted with one of traditional Christianity’s most trenchant critics”.
Harold Macmillan, on becoming Prime Minister in 1957, met Archbishop Fisher and recorded afterwards in his diary:
“I try to talk to him about religion. But he seems to be quite uninterested and reverts all the time to politics.”
Here is a temptation for the clergy: that in order to seem relevant, they become devoted, often in a naive way, to the study of politics, and even, perhaps, to salvation by politics, and miss the opportunity to preach transcendent truth.
But how difficult it is to know when to be sincere, when to make a clean breast of things. We English (I do not presume to speak for the other inhabitants of these islands) have a doctrine of privacy which can render serious communication impossible.
There is in spiritual matters a passing by on the other side of the road, a feeling that we mustn’t intrude, it would be bad manners, like walking into someone else’s house without being asked.
Vickers is aware of how difficult a task he has set himself. He knows that faith “is seldom a constant over the lifetime of a believer” and may be riven by inconsistencies.
Full knowledge of anyone else’s beliefs is not attainable. But in each of these 19 essays, average length 25 pages, Vickers interrogates the record with scrupulous care to see what emerges from it. I wish I had been able to read his studies before publishing my own volume of brief lives of the Prime Ministers.