God and Mrs Thatcher (22 page)

Parkinson also hinted that her thriftiness was the cause of tension with her colleagues. When she demanded that the Cabinet set an example and not take a pay increase, he, along with others ministers, remembers feeling slightly aggrieved that she could afford to take such line. Thatcher had the additional benefits of Denis’s salary and free accommodation at Downing Street and Chequers, while her ministers were sat round the Cabinet table stressing about how they would pay their children’s education fees.

One aspect of her private character that never filtered into the
public consciousness was Thatcher’s personal compassion. There are many who could testify to her acts of kindness, letters of condolence or congratulations. Just before the 1979 election, a memo from Conservative HQ observed that while it was ‘agreed by the electorate that Mrs. Thatcher is a highly competent and well-qualified woman. An aspect of her character about which the majority of the electorate are far less aware of is the fact that she is both warm and feeling.’
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Margaret Thatcher’s frequent hospital visits to casualties of disasters and victims of IRA terrorism were always sincere but did little to soften her image; the conviction politician did not sit well with a caring one. Moreover, all Thatcher’s efforts in this regard were somewhat superseded by that other female who dominated the front pages: the ‘touchy-feely’ Princess Diana was the ultimate ‘compassionate woman’ of the 1980s.

Margaret Thatcher may have spoken openly of her faith and values but the public was less aware of her personal piety and devoutness. The habit of Sunday worship, ingrained in her since childhood, never left her. As Prime Minister, she was a member of the Methodist Parliamentary Fellowship. On weekends spent at Chequers, she would worship at the nearby Anglican parish of St Peter and St Paul in Ellesborough. According to the rector, Thatcher attended more often in her first two years of her premiership than all the previous post-war prime ministers put together. The incumbent, the Reverend David Horner, however, was always mindful not to delve into political matters in his sermons and was under strict instructions from Denis to keep it short: ‘Padre, most of us know what the Sermon on the Mount is all about, we don’t need you to explain it to us. Twelve minutes is your lot.’

Later in life, she and Denis regularly attended the Chapel of the Royal Military Hospital in Chelsea (founded in 1681 to care for those ‘broken by age or war’), which some say was down to her enduring fondness for the military, forged in the Falklands War. Margaret Thatcher’s ashes would later be buried alongside her late husband in the Royal Hospital cemetery.

Thatcher may have made the journey from Methodism to Anglicanism but she remained ‘low-church’ in her tastes. She always refused Communion given that she was never confirmed into the Anglican Church; perhaps it was the thought of having to kneel in front of a bishop that dissuaded her. She was not a great enthusiast for contemporary worshipping forms; Jonathan Aitken remembers seeing her looking rather perplexed during George Carey’s inauguration ceremony at Canterbury in 1990 when the congregation was instructed to shake hands in an offering of peace.
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Like Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher was a keen reader of religious works. Again, Jonathan Aitken remembers browsing her private bookshelves in the 1970s (when he was dating Carol Thatcher) and was surprised to find, in his words, ‘more Bible than Burke’. Unlike Blair, who has always taken a keen interest in the early Church, those books on Thatcher’s reading list were predominantly of a scriptural rather than historical nature. They included C. S. Lewis’s wartime lectures
Mere Christianity
(which Thatcher had heard on the wireless in her youth), the collected sermons of John Wesley, works by evangelical Stuart Blanch, the Archbishop of York, and Roman Catholic Archbishop, Cardinal Basil Hume, as well as books on Jewish ethics. In 1988, she read all thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, which she would reportedly quote at length to her civil servants. Margaret Thatcher’s faith was always rooted in Scripture rather than sacraments, as her official biographer, Charles Moore confirmed: ‘She is a highly religious person in a highly English way. What I mean by that is that she doesn’t have any sense of sacraments, liturgy, Church history, nor Catholicity, nor theology, but she is orthodox in religion without thinking.’
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‘Her faith was quite real to her,’ according to former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey. Drawing upon the contrast with Tony Blair, he offered: ‘Margaret’s [faith] appealed to me much more than Tony’s. I couldn’t see where his was going … whereas I could see her thinking was quite theological in many senses.’
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Carey seemed to
suggest that while Blair’s faith was an appendage, which was liable to slip, Thatcher’s faith was an unshakeable, underlying core, even if he sometimes disagreed with its political manifestation. According to Bernard Ingham, Thatcher had five key qualities as leader: ideological security (she knew what she wanted to achieve); moral courage (a determination, in the words of her father, not ‘to follow the herd’); constancy; an iron will to stick to the task; and, finally, she did not wish to be loved. When, on one occasion, Denis Thatcher heard Ingham give a talk on this subject, he offered a corrective: ‘You should have a sixth: she has a deep religious faith.’
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It was not uncommon for Margaret Thatcher to turn to prayer during the testing moments of her political career. Carol Thatcher has hinted how her mother found strength in worship during the Falklands War, while Denis remarked that the conflict ‘marked her soul and mine’.
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Her assistant, Cynthia Crawford, has also recounted how on the night of the Brighton Bomb, while they were holed up in a dorm at the local police college, Margaret Thatcher had pondered ‘this was the day I was not meant to see’ and suggested they both kneel and recite the Lord’s Prayer.
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Later that week, Thatcher wrote to her head of communications, Harvey Thomas, confiding, ‘It would have been difficult to have gone through last weekend without a very strong faith.’
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Before joining the Conservatives, Harvey Thomas had spent fifteen years organising ‘conversion’ tours for Billy Graham and had been charged with bringing the same evangelical fervour to the Conservatives’ election campaign in 1979. Of Margaret Thatcher’s belief, Harvey was certain: ‘Good, straightforward, practical evangelicalism. It was quite a driving thought in her mind.’
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As someone who had worked for the world’s most prominent evangelical organisation, one assumes that Harvey would be able to tell a believer from a doubter. In the wake of Brighton, Margaret Thatcher received several letters of condolence and support, including one from the Archbishop of Canterbury and a number of other Anglican bishops. It was a note from
conservative evangelical Maurice Wood, the Bishop of Norwich, that was particularly appreciated by Margaret Thatcher, who thanked him for reminding her of the extract from Romans: ‘Neither death nor life shall be able to separate us from the love of God, in Christ Jesus.’
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The tragic events in Brighton appear not to have stirred an inflated sense of manifest destiny in Margaret Thatcher, which some say consumed Ronald Reagan after the assassination attempt on his life in 1981, yet, undoubtedly and understandably, it was a moment when she drew on her faith to help her through one of the gravest moments of her premiership.

WHETHER OUT OF
a sense of propriety or indifference (or maybe both), Margaret Thatcher refused to be drawn into the internal divisions between conservatives and liberals in the Church of England. She made brief references to it in the 1970s, but as Prime Minister wisely trod a diplomatic line. On the key issue, which split conservatives and liberals – the ordination of women – Thatcher clearly sided with the liberals: ‘No one ever stopped them being missionaries’, she told the
Catholic Herald
in 1978, before adding: ‘What you do has got to be somehow in touch with and in tune with the times, otherwise you cause friction and you mustn’t cause friction if you have a positive message.’
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Ten years later, when the Church was finally heading towards a decision, she publicly declared herself in favour but privately remained concerned about the possible consequences for the Church. Certainly, it would have seemed odd for a female prime minister to oppose female ordination, but Thatcher was always careful to distance herself from the debate. One area of ecclesiastical policy in which she did take a considerable interest, however, was in selecting her bishops.

The process of appointing Anglican bishops does not hold the same allure or mysticism of a papal conclave; there are no puffs of smoke or priests holed up under lock and key. It may operate under a similar veil of secrecy but the process is of a more pedestrian and distinctly English kind. George Carey, for example, remembers being ordered to the rather un-saintly surroundings of Pratt’s Hotel, Bath, where he was handed the official letter offering him the See of Canterbury. The procedure for appointments had actually been updated in 1976 under Jim Callaghan, which had given the Church a greater say over the selection of diocesan bishops. For those of York and Canterbury, the prime minister would select a prominent lay Anglican as head of a commission made up of clerical and lay figures. The views of the diocese were taken into account, although the committee would meet in secret and eventually pass two names to the prime minister, who was free to select either candidate or reject both. On this aspect of prime ministerial patronage, Margaret Thatcher was particularly reliant on Robin Catford, her rather forceful evangelical appointments secretary. Known as ‘God’s talent scout’, Catford would conduct lengthy tours of the diocese before producing long-winded Trollopian-esque reports on the personal characteristics and suitability of the candidates, which Thatcher would scrupulously read over. Catford’s role may have been purely advisory, but his conservative evangelical bias was never in doubt. Within Lambeth Palace, he was disparagingly known as ‘Cat food’.

Speculation and gossip were rife, but on only two occasions did Thatcher refuse the commission’s preferred candidate: in 1981 when she appointed the High Anglican conservative Graham Leonard over the liberal John Habgood for London, and in 1987 when she rejected the openly left-wing Jim Thompson in favour of Mark Santer for the bishopric of Birmingham (who, unbeknownst to her, shared Thompson’s politics). There is just one instance of outright nepotism when she awarded Philip Goodrich, the brother of an old
school friend, the Bishopric of Worcester. ‘You are looking for a person who propounds, expounds, explains and preaches the Christian faith,’ Thatcher later said on the qualities of the bishop.
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But despite her obvious evangelical preference, Thatcher never broke with protocol even on one occasion when Jim Callaghan reminded her that she could reject both names. Margaret Thatcher was always conscious of upsetting the Church, particularly given its frosty relations with her government, and was wary of the potential media outcry had she be seen to be delving too deeply into ecclesiastical appointments. This did not seem to bother Harold Macmillan, who in 1961 promoted his favoured candidate, the Anglo-Catholic Michael Ramsey for Canterbury, much to the displeasure of the outgoing Archbishop Fisher. ‘I thought we had had enough of Martha … and it was time for some Mary,’ judged Macmillan, who refused to be bullied by Fisher on a matter he considered to be a legitimate sphere of prime ministerial influence.
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Times had changed since the early 1960s though. With the Church now having greater autonomy over its governance, appointments and doctrine, it was deemed imprudent for prime ministers to demonstrate too much interest in the Established Church.

Ultimately, Margaret Thatcher exercised little influence over ecclesiastical appointments, except that is, in 1990 with the election of George Carey to Canterbury. By selecting evangelical layman Viscount Caldecotte to chair the Crown Appointments Commission, Thatcher had done her best to ensure that it would go to a low-churchman, but few expected that it would be the little-known Bishop of Bath & Wells. According to those close to her, Thatcher was, however, disappointed in Carey, who turned out not to be the evangelical she had hoped for. In 1976, the prime minister’s role in ecclesiastical appointments had been reduced due to pressure from the Church. In 2007, on the initiative of Gordon Brown, it was announced that the prime minister would now go with the first-named candidate rather than
select between the two. The prime minister’s role was now to endorse the appointment on behalf of the Queen.

Margaret Thatcher’s input into ecclesiastical affairs may have been minimal but she was head of a party that continued to take an active interest in Church matters. The first difficult moment came in 1974 when Parliament was asked to endorse the Worship and Doctrine Measure, granting the Church full control over its liturgy. Most MPs regarded it as a natural extension of powers following the establishment of the Synod, but a small, determined band of Anglican Conservatives decried this further curtailment of parliamentary authority over the Church. One MP thought it signalled the ‘denationalisation of the Church of England’ while Enoch Powell, in bullish form, was intent on putting up a fight: ‘The only representative of that Church of England are those who created the Church of England by establishing it by law, namely, this House.’ Powell’s point was highly contestable; the Church of England was not the creature, nor was it the creation of Parliament.
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Conservative Anglicans’ chief worry, however, was not Parliament’s diminishing authority but the reforms the Synod was likely usher in once it had complete power over its liturgy; namely the replacement of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.