God and Mrs Thatcher (2 page)

It is, however, an undeniable fact that from the late 1960s, Britain, like most other Western countries (with the exception of the United States) experienced a dramatic decline in Christian worship and affiliation. Yet, on the eve of the Thatcher years, Britain could hardly be called ‘secular’, for in education, broadcasting, law and, of course, in ceremonial character, Britain remained identifiably Christian. Enoch Powell was surely right when he wrote in 1981: ‘The nation was once not as religious as some like to believe, nor is it now as secular as people
now like to assume.’
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The blend between the secular and sacred may have been less obvious by the late-twentieth century and no longer a decisive factor at election time but it remained a notable undercurrent running through political thought and action. In short, Christianity still mattered, and it would matter significantly during the fractious years of the 1980s.

The broad aim of this book is to examine the interrelationship between religion and politics in post-war Britain. It is thus a two-pronged story concerning the politicisation of Christianity on the one hand and the Christianisation of politics on the other. It therefore seeks to demonstrate how the political class sought inspiration (and legitimisation) from the Gospel for their political ideas and policies and how the Established Church, to the same degree, viewed engagement in politics as part of its spiritual mission. The 1980s represent a key juncture in this narrative for two reasons. Firstly, in 1979, unbeknownst to most of the public at the time, Britain had elected its most religious prime minister since William Gladstone, one who from the very first moment of her premiership referenced her spiritual motivation by reciting a prayer on the steps of No. 10. Margaret Thatcher, though, did not simply draw on Christianity for rhetorical ornamentation for, as the daughter of a Methodist lay-preacher, she had a clear understanding of the religious basis of her political values. In fact, it was no accident that Britain elected a Nonconformist woman precisely at the time that its ‘Nonconformist conscience’ died; the conviction politics of the Iron Lady satisfied a thirst for certainty in an age of profound doubt. Just as the emergence of Thatcherism needs to be set within the context of Britain’s economic and industrial decline, so too does it need to be analysed within the context of the country’s religious decline.

Secondly, one of the most politically damaging and forceful challenges that Margaret Thatcher faced throughout her premiership was from the Church of England. While the Labour Party endured a period
of self-inflicted paralysis, it was the Established Church which, rather surprisingly and often willingly, stepped up as the ‘unofficial opposition’ to defend what they considered to be Britain’s Christian social democratic values. In the pulpit, at the picket line, on the Lords’ benches and in the inner cities, the Anglican clergy routinely condemned neoliberal theory and practice as being fundamentally at odds with the Christian principles of fellowship, interdependence and peace. How and why the Established Church sought and gained such prominence at a time of declining faith is one of the central themes of this book.

The Conservative Party and the once-dubbed ‘Tory Party at Prayer’ became locked in a conflict that would have political, spiritual and, in some cases, personal consequences. For many, though, this was not a minor political spat; it reflected a serious theological gulf. Was the biblical message principally about individual faith and liberty as Margaret Thatcher enthusiastically proclaimed, or collective obligation and interdependence as the bishops preached? Of all the biblical references that littered the sermons and speeches of politicians and clergy in the 1980s, it was the parable of the Good Samaritan that was most frequently evoked. For Margaret Thatcher, the story of a Samaritan helping an unknown, battered man, who was lying helpless in the road, demonstrated the supremacy of individual charitable virtue over enforced state taxation. In her uncompromising words: ‘No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.’
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For the Anglican leadership, on the other hand, the parable meant something quite different, namely the universality of human fellowship and the scriptural justification for the indiscriminate redistribution of wealth. As the Bishop of Stepney made clear: ‘The point of the story is not that he had some money but that the others passed by on the other side.’
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Behind these differing interpretations of one parable lay contrasting conceptions of Christianity, of political values and, indeed, of the nation itself.

It is, of course, possible to examine the 1980s not in terms of competing
theologies but in terms of ideologies, namely the polarisation between left and right. If the contribution of the Labour Party is downplayed slightly it is because the left had abandoned the post-war consensus (to an even greater degree than the right) and was entangled in a civil war, which had much to do with the decline of its traditional working-class support base and very little to do with Christianity. This is a book chiefly about the conflict between the Established Church and the Conservative Party, not about the various fortunes of Christian denominations in post-war Britain. But, of course, it is impossible to tell this story without reference to them and, in particular, to the rise of the ecumenical movement. Nor does this narrative deal sufficiently with that province where the convergence between religion and politics was most apparent and most damaging: Northern Ireland. This is in part because the Troubles were a sectarian conflict rather than a theological war of words on the rights and wrongs of capitalism. If anything, the toxic mix of the religious and the political in Northern Ireland revealed the tameness of the debate in Britain.

Of course Christians can be found on both sides of the political spectrum and Christianity itself has been both a progressive and a conservative force throughout history. If there is one scriptural certainty, it is that biblical interpretation is elastic and can be moulded to justify whatever one wishes to endorse, be it the ‘invisible hand’ of the market or the socialist utopia. In this specific case, the Church of England shifted further leftwards while the Conservative Party took a sharp turn to the right, causing an irrevocable breach between two institutions that had been close allies for over 200 years or more. Cracks in this relationship could be dated back to the early 1900s but the final break would only come in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher.

It might be said that both the Church of England and the Conservative Party have transformed more than any other British institutions in the twentieth century. Paradoxically, for two organisations supposedly concerned with tradition and preservation, both have shown a
remarkable ability to adapt in order to survive. That the Church of England was not only able to maintain, but, in many ways, strengthen its role as the Established Church in a secular pluralised society may have been by default rather than explicit design. Arguably, it has proved remarkably successful. The Conservative Party has gone through a similar process of reinvention. In the age of mass enfranchisement, the party of land and privilege gradually morphed into promoters of the free market and the upwardly mobile class, while maintaining its paternalistic tone and old establishment associations. It was not an easy transition and, like the Church, it consistently faced complaints from within its membership. But, by doing so, the Conservatives were able to become the most successful political party of the twentieth century. Collectively, what it does suggest is that all the heated debate over what is ‘true’ Conservatism or ‘true’ Anglicanism – a favourite navel-gazing pastime of both Anglicans and Conservatives – ultimately reflects a wilful misreading of their complex histories.

Margaret Thatcher, however, stands apart from this narrative. This is due to the fact that both the left and the right (for different reasons) have chosen to grant her an almost mythical-like status. Your opinion of Margaret Thatcher is immediately given away by how you refer to her; some literally spit out her surname with an emphasis on the first syllable, others prefer the overly familiar ‘Maggie’. Even after her death, the political class and the public still struggle to speak of the former Prime Minister as a part of history, consumed as they are in a seemingly exhaustive debate over whether her time in power offers the cause or the remedy for today’s problems. This hints at one of the main motivations of this book: a wish to consign Margaret Thatcher to the past and locate her place within it rather than see her as an ahistorical phenomenon of either saintly or devilish proportions.

By and large, the British prefer their prime ministers to be pedestrian rather than charismatic characters. One need only compare the palatial grandeur of the White House to the poky flat above No. 10
to illustrate this point. The post of prime minister, curtailed as it is by a parliamentary chamber and constitutional monarch, facilitates the British dislike and distrust of strong leadership. Yet Margaret Thatcher is one of the few occupiers of No. 10 to have subverted this tradition.

The legend of the Iron Lady is well known and remains remarkably intact. Margaret Thatcher, it appears, was gifted with superhuman capabilities. She was a woman from humble origins whose great mental and physical resilience made her the ‘best man for the job’. She emerged unscathed without a hair out of place from the ashes of the bombed-out Grand Hotel in Brighton and successfully crushed the enemies within as well as threats beyond our shores. She was Boudicca, beating the bureaucrats in Brussels; she was Elizabeth I, always flirtatious but firm with her ministers; and in the end she was sacrificial St Joan, burnt at the stake having been betrayed by her own party. Margaret Thatcher has now been accorded a place at the dinner table with these high priestesses of history. She bulldozed her way through the New Jerusalem, unleashed Britons from the chains of socialism and set the people free.

Recent biographers and historians have quite rightly put a dent in this mythology as Richard Vinen, John Campbell and others have reminded us that Thatcher was in fact an incredibly pragmatic and canny politician and that the ‘ism’ she spawned was not as coherent an ideology as she herself liked to proclaim nor as the left liked to presume. Charles Moore’s highly illuminating and balanced official biography offers a detailed portrait of her character and time in Downing Street that is never likely to be surpassed.
God and Mrs Thatcher
is not strictly a biography, rather Margaret Thatcher’s life and times are used as narrative hinges to explain the fundamental shifts that took place in Britain’s political and religious values in the second half of the twentieth century, and the ensuing debate in the 1980s (chiefly between the Established Church and the Tory Party) about those values. In
short, the aim is not only to show how Margaret Thatcher recreated Britain, but also to address a much more intriguing question: how did Britain create Margaret Thatcher?

Margaret Thatcher was very much a product of provincial interwar England. But, crucially, she escaped and then benefited from the opportunities that were opening up to women. In one sense, her story is a classic tale of mid-twentieth-century social embourgeouisement: a grammar school girl ‘done good’, although marrying a millionaire certainly eased the journey. She was not a throwback to Britain’s Victorian past, but most definitely a twentieth-century woman: one who witnessed Britain’s imperial decline and accepted the new American empire, indeed more readily than some of her contemporaries.

The two defining moments that shaped the politicians of her generation – the Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War – she experienced from a distance. What Margaret Thatcher did experience (albeit via her father) was the collapse of Nonconformity and the decline of the Liberal Party as its central mouthpiece. She was a product of Britain’s changing religio-political landscape and it is this, possibly more than any other factor, which explains why a lower-middle-class girl of Nonconformist origins was able to become the leader of the male-dominated party of the establishment.

Margaret Thatcher would often indulge in the fact that she was an outsider in her party, and it is true she was. Although she respected and often displayed an embarrassing reverence for the old establishment, it was always an admiration she felt from a distance. She married into it, she worked for it, adopted its habits, tastes and values more than she cared to admit, but throughout her life she always understood that she was never truly a member of the club. Much like Methodist founder John Wesley’s semi-attachment to the Church of England, Margaret Thatcher always had one foot in and one foot out of the British establishment. On the surface, it was her gender that marked her out, but in fact it was her Nonconformist class-consciousness, formed at a time
when such distinctions still held sway, which was the source of her anti-establishmentarianism.

The religious faith of leaders is not to be underestimated. It can drive some to war, others to peace; some left, others right. One’s faith and religious heritage is not something that is confined to the head or the heart, it manifests in different ways: in personality, outlook, style and language. When speaking of Margaret Thatcher’s Nonconformity, one cannot simply consider personal faith, but also her class and principles. If Thatcher was a conviction politician, then at the root of her politics were her religio-political values. These were assumed and accepted precepts about God and man applied to the political sphere. This is not a book about policies, but ideas. It is less about what Margaret Thatcher and her contemporaries did, more about what they believed.