God and Mrs Thatcher (24 page)

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F ONE WERE
to trace the beginnings of the tense relations between the Thatcher government and the Church of England, it would be the fallout over the Thanksgiving Service for the Falklands War in St Paul’s Cathedral in July 1982. When Thatcher announced her decision to send a task force to the South Atlantic, the Anglican bishops had approved military action, but they were decidedly
less enthusiastic about the government’s proposed service in St Paul’s Cathedral to celebrate victory. As it was the Dean of St Paul’s who held the keys to the cathedral, so it was the Very Rev. Alan Webster, well known for his pacifist sympathies, who took charge. Webster had initially proposed that half the service be conducted in Spanish and that Pope John Paul II’s sermon on reconciliation, given on his recent tour of Britain, be included in the Order of Service. In scriptural selections he hoped might impress the Prime Minister, Webster chose a bidding prayer to ‘commit ourselves to be makers of peace in a divided world’ and an extract from Micah: ‘nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’.
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On seeing the dean’s plans, Defence Secretary John Nott thought the event should be abandoned altogether. The Bishop of London, Graham Leonard, was also concerned and went to see the Prime Minister. ‘Even when the form of Service had been agreed,’ ran the memo in expectation of the meeting, ‘there was no guarantee that the Dean of St Paul’s would follow it. On past form, he might well insert changes or additions at the last minute.’
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No. 10 agreed to put pressure on the Archbishop of Canterbury to rein in the dean.

In what might be interpreted as state-orchestrated Christianity, the Ministry of Defence and No. 10 challenged the dean on every aspect of the service from the choice of hymns to the selection of readers. They consented to the involvement of the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Mrs Rosalind Goodfellow, reportedly a ‘robust person of no pacifist leanings’, yet there were some misgivings over the President of the Methodist Conference, Rev. Kenneth Greet, who had recently voiced anti-Falklands sentiments in
The Guardian.
Contrary to popular opinion, Thatcher was sensitive to accusations that she was politicising the war and was thus keen for her own role in the service to be limited. She did not wish to read a lesson, believing with some justification that it would be ‘misinterpreted and leave a bad taste’.
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All agreed that there should be a place for Catholic Cardinal
Basil Hume, which in itself was an innovative step; Britain’s Catholic leaders had only recently been accorded a prominent role at national religious occasions. Hume, however, had legitimate concerns about the proposed title, ‘Liberation of the Falklands’ given that ‘liberation’ meant something quite different in Catholic theology. The Dean of St Paul’s had favoured ‘a service of reconciliation’, which the Ministry of Defence vetoed and eventually ‘thanksgiving’ was the title on which all were agreed. After much to-ing and fro-ing, the service was finally settled, although No. 10 had not thought it necessary to probe or censor the Archbishop of Canterbury on his sermon.

Would the nation’s spiritual leader reflect the sense of national jubilation and reunite the historic trinity of patriotism, militarism and Christianity? ‘War’, Archbishop Runcie declared from the pulpit of the parish of the empire, ‘is a sign of human failure.’
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Lest he be misunderstood, Runcie was clear to differentiate between the armed forces engaged in combat and those ‘armchair warriors’ at home whom he reprimanded for indulging in a distasteful enthusiasm for war.
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In a sermon that veered sensibly between sentiments of patriotic hope, peace and reconciliation, Runcie also sounded warnings about the international arms trade and nuclear rearmament (the purchase of Trident had just been agreed). In front of a congregation that included the Cabinet, the Prime Minister and the Queen, it was nonetheless to the military personnel that Runcie directed his message. It was a sermon that could only have been delivered by a soldier of the Scots Guards who knew what it meant to be under active fire. In seeking to pour water on the raging fires of Tory nationalism, Runcie was well aware that he risked incurring the wrath of the diehards. And so he did. Returning to the Commons terrace bar after the service, Denis Thatcher fed the loitering hacks a titbit that the ‘boss was livid’. But it was one of Thatcher’s backbenchers, hothead right-winger Julian Amery, who gave them the quote they wanted, lambasting Runcie’s sermon as symptomatic of the ‘pacifist, liberal wet establishment’, which was out of touch with the mood of the country.
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Up until that moment, great expectations had been pinned on the war-hero archbishop, whom it was hoped might inject some much-needed oomph into Christianity. After his Falklands moment, however, Runcie became a sitting target for the right-wing press and Tory backbenchers. Mood over content was what had counted and there was little doubt that the archbishop’s sermon struck a discordant chord against Tory triumphalism. The government obviously thought so and hastily organised a victory parade through the City of London two months later. Speaking at the Guildhall after the procession, Margaret Thatcher uttered sentiments which her archbishop had been unwilling to do: ‘The Falklands campaign was one of the most brilliant achievements of modern times – a triumph of endeavour and skill of planning and imagination.’ Thatcher then drew on the words of eighteenth-century Anglican priest, Sydney Smith: ‘I have boundless confidence in the British character … I believe more heroes will spring up in the hour of danger than all the military nations of ancient and modern Europe have ever produced.’ She signed off, ‘Today we know that is true.’
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‘Meringue to her roast beef’: Margaret Thatcher and her ‘wet’ Archbishop

THE BISHOPS IN
charge of the Church of England in the 1980s were predominantly (but by no means all) Anglo-Catholic liberals, ecumenical in outlook and centrist in politics. Most were drawn from the middle-to-upper class, had served in the army – either in the war or through national service – and had attended either Oxford or Cambridge. For this generation of clergy, there were normally three main routes up the ecclesiastical ladder: a don’s life; the challenges of ministry in exotic parts of the Anglican Communion (usually former colonies in Africa); or the harsh realities of an inner-city parish. At the helm was Robert Runcie who, as principal of Cuddesdon theological college during the 1960s, had transformed the college into a hub of liberal Anglo-Catholic influence, nurturing the careers of many who would later serve under him as archbishop. Runcie was accused of indecisiveness, but while it was true he was not a zealous reformer, he preferred considered options rather than hasty judgements in both ecclesiastics and in politics. This was undoubtedly a drawback in the world of media, which demanded instant opinions, and in a Church that was full of tensions. Runcie may not have been as openly partisan as some of his bishops, but this did not mean that he was not a political animal. Runcie always favoured the subtle approach; his strength was his gift for diplomacy, whether it was holding the Church of England together or mopping up after his politically outspoken bishops.

England cricketer and evangelical, David Sheppard, Bishop of Liverpool from 1975, was the archetypal man of the establishment who had had a smooth ride from Sherborne to Cambridge. He envisioned his ministry, which he first performed in the urban parishes of London, as demonstrating a Christian ‘preference for the poor’, although a more suitable label for Sheppard’s approach would be ‘patrician evangelicalism’. One of his lasting achievements in Liverpool was his close partnership with the Catholic archbishop, Derek Worlock, and it is largely down to their
efforts that this city did not become another Belfast in the 1980s. Bishop Stanley Booth-Clibborn arrived at Manchester via Sheffield and Kenya (where he witnessed the Mau Mau uprising first-hand) and would become a leading proponent against poverty, although as bishop he was never very good at drawing a line between showing spiritual concern and showing his support for the Labour Party. At Birmingham was Liberal Anglican Hugh Montefiore, bishop from 1978 to 1987. Born into one of the most eminent Jewish families in England (he was the great-great nephew of Victorian Jewish leader Sir Moses Montefiore), Montefiore converted to Christianity after seeing a vision of Christ while a teenage pupil at Rugby School. After Oxford, he joined the Royal Artillery and saw action in India before entering the priesthood. Montefiore never lost his capacity for controversy and as Bishop of Birmingham was a leading proponent for female ordination, an early crusader for environmental issues and an openly Liberal Party supporter. Another bishop with a knack for making the headlines for all the wrong reasons was David Jenkins, the Bishop of Durham, whose liberal Anglicanism had been nurtured at Oxford, the World Council of Churches in Geneva and the theological department at Leeds University. Jenkins, though, failed to grasp the fact that what passed for honest intellectual enquiry in theological or ecclesiastical circles had the potential to cause consternation when voiced in public. John Habgood, Archbishop of York from 1983, was a much more cautious man. His early training as a scientist had instilled a sense of rationality and complexity of thought, which he applied in his ministry. Liturgical reform was his passion and he had provided much of the impetus behind the modernisation of the 1662 Prayer Book. As Bishop of Truro, the Anglo-Catholic Graham Leonard had made few ripples, but when he was elevated to the bishopric of London in 1981 he became the leading conservative Anglo-Catholic bishop and a magnet for disaffected Anglicans and those slighted under Runcie’s patronage.

In the 1980s, the presence of twenty-six bishops in the House of Lords acted as a reassuring nod to the continual Christian character of the British
Parliament and its legal code. David Sheppard, however, was sceptical of his purpose in the chamber, confessing in a letter to the Bishop of Birmingham in 1983 that ‘it is difficult to know how much notice anyone takes of what one says’.
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Partly down to poor mobilisation but also because of competing pressures on their time, the bishops’ bench was rarely instrumental in deciding the fate of legislation. The British Nationality Act of 1981 (the final death-nail to immigration from the Commonwealth) and the abolition of the Inner London Education Authority in 1985 (when the Bishop of Leonard of London led a rebellion in the Lords), were the only two occasions when the Lords Spiritual proved pivotal. The voting patterns of the bishops’ bench are, however, revealing. Between 1979 and 1990, only 27 per cent of the bishops’ votes were in support of the government. The Archbishop of Canterbury voted on a ratio of 6:1 against, while the Archbishop of York opposed the government on every occasion he entered the division lobby.
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Of greater importance, however, was their work behind the scenes lobbying on behalf of all Christian denominations and any other group – charities, the poverty lobby, public sector unions or local councils – that aligned with the Church of England’s interests. The bishops cut distinctive figures in the second chamber not least because they were one of the few groups in the Lords who could claim to have an active constituency.

This generation were more likely to be openly critical than to whisper their views behind shielded cloisters, and enjoyed more exposure and publicity than their predecessors as a result. The Church still had the capacity to set the agenda. A controversial sermon would make front-page news. Synod debates, like those of Parliament, were reported verbatim in the press, while the religious correspondent of
The Times
acted as the de facto correspondent of the Church of England. Much of this reportage was negative of course, especially in the right-wing tabloids where ‘bishop bashing’ became an almost daily feature. Much like the Prime Minister’s reportedly frosty relationship with the Queen, the press indulged in any hint of a friction between Thatcher and the
old guard, particularly the Church. Runcie tried to enforce some PR control by employing John Lyttle, formerly of the Social Democratic Party, to head up public relations at Lambeth Palace, but given that bishops considered themselves autonomous beings with a free rein from Lambeth Palace, these efforts proved to be largely in vain.