God and Mrs Thatcher (42 page)

The concerns in Whitehall were quite different. Here the priority
was to get the protocol and arrangements correct, especially with regard to the Queen in her role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The outbreak of the Falklands conflict weeks before the Pope’s arrival would eventually force Margaret Thatcher to withdraw entirely from the visit, but, even before this, when the initial arrangements were being made, the Pope appeared distinctly reluctant to meet Britain’s state representatives. Buckingham Palace’s proposal for a luncheon was reduced to a half-hour call, while the Thatcher’s suggestion of a gathering at Downing Street was also rejected. Even before the Falklands War had been declared, Thatcher had decided against attending the proposed service at Canterbury Cathedral for fear that the papal tour was becoming too politicised.
31
Runcie, however, urged her to reconsider and, in an attempt at flattery, added that her presence was crucial in order to ‘put the Pope in context’.
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Runcie was keen for the British state to be as visible as possible; he consciously wanted to avoid the event being turned into a celebratory papal road show. The fact was, though, that both Church and state were entirely at the will of the Vatican: ‘[They are] effectively presenting us with a
fait accompli,
’ wrote Mr Vereker of No. 10 in frustration at Rome’s handling of the PR for the visit.
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The Catholic Church had agreed to cover costs, although the bill for policing and security – necessary given the recent assassination attempt on the Pope – would have to be met by the Home Office. Thatcher was warned to keep a close eye on the coffers. ‘I have no doubt especially as the Roman Catholics in this country are, apparently, so short of money, there will be further requests of one kind or another for public expenditure,’ wrote a civil servant in the Home Office.
34
Another administrative headache was trying to find an appropriate venue for the Pope’s scheduled Mass near London, which was expected to attract one million people. Epsom Downs Racecourse was suggested but soon rejected, not for of its association with gambling but because it would clash with one of the most important days
in the racing calendar. ‘Nobody in their senses would alter the date of the Derby!’ cautioned a Miss E. Chaplin of the Protocol and Conference Department.
35
Richmond Park was proposed as an alternative but, as Michael Heseltine pointed out, the Pope’s visit would take place precisely when the park’s deer would be dropping their young, while it was also feared that the crowd would likely cause damage to the nearby golf course.
36
Wembley Stadium was eventually chosen, but the fact that officials and ministers spent their time fretting about the possible consequences for the Derby, Richmond’s deer and the local golfing fraternity revealed the level of paranoia in Whitehall over an event for which there was no precedent.

When the visit was formally announced, Ian Paisley, unsurprisingly, wrote a letter of protest to Margaret Thatcher pointing out the illogicality of welcoming a religious leader who considered the Church of England a blasphemous inception. ‘Best to be brief, rather than pursue all Dr Paisley’s hares,’ wrote Colin Peterson, who drafted the Prime Minister’s response.
37

Meanwhile, Enoch Powell, then an Ulster Unionist MP, used an address to the East Grinstead Young Conservatives Association to press home some obscure points of historical fact: ‘Either the Pope’s authority is not universal or the Church of England is not the Catholic and Apostolic Church in this land.’
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Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary, Ian Gow, sent a copy of the text to No. 10 with the accompanying note: ‘JEP, whose brain I revere, really is off course here.’
39

Paisley’s and Powell’s concerns could not easily be dismissed though. Anti-Catholicism may not have been as endemic as it had once been but it was still evident, particularly in Liverpool and Glasgow where the Pope was due to visit. Runcie himself had been on the receiving end of such abuse weeks before the visit, when anti-papal protestors had hijacked a service he was giving in Liverpool. As a pre-emptive move, Bishop David Sheppard met representatives from the Orange Order to seek assurances that they would not cause undue disruption. Clergy and
MPs’ postbags revealed enough discontent for Downing Street to draft a standard response to ensure a consistent line on a sensitive issue. Even some within the Church of England were uneasy. Writing to Runcie, the Bishop of Birmingham confided that he was reluctant to ‘dance attendance on the Pope’ for fear that it compromised the oath that all diocesan bishops have to swear before the Queen: ‘no foreign potentate or prelate hath any jurisdiction in this realm of England’.
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Letters of opposition were one thing, but the real concern was the likelihood of any violence. Police intelligence concluded that protests by Paisley and his supporters were to be expected but that terrorist attacks from Northern Irish paramilitaries were not. The People’s Opposition to Papal Edicts (POPE), consisting of women’s and gay liberation groups and humanist societies were also not thought to pose much of a threat.
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(Tellingly, when Pope Benedict XVI visited the UK in 2010, the loudest protests came from atheists and gay activists. It was Richard Dawkins and Peter Tatchell rather than ‘non-popery’ Protestants who in 21st-century Britain led the charge against Rome.)

In the end, it was not anti-popery protests that nearly sabotaged the event but the fact that Margaret Thatcher went to war with a Catholic country weeks before the Pope was due to arrive. A determined Cardinal Hume immediately flew to Rome to plead with John Paul II not to cancel, although he combined this with a subtle warning that the decision would be construed as a comment on the Falklands War and might fan the flames of anti-Catholicism in Britain.
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The government agreed to stay away, although it remained wary of what the Pope might say, sending a note of advice to Cardinal Hume for John Paul II to ‘stick to general principles … the need for peace, freedom and a just and lasting solution to the problem in the South Atlantic’.
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This he did. By the time that the Pope touched down at Gatwick, though, the Argentinians had already surrendered at Goose Green.

Few could deny the symbolic importance of the ecumenical service at Canterbury Cathedral, when Pope John Paul II and the Archbishop
of Canterbury led a joint service in the home of English Christianity. Runcie would subsequently meet the Pope on several occasions, nurturing a bond that soon went beyond the ceremonial, becoming a working relationship that was historic in its own right.

In Runcie’s view, in many ways the Pope’s presence north of the border and his meeting with the Moderator of the Church of Scotland was equally significant as his visit to Canterbury, especially given the level of sectarianism within Scottish society. The fact that the Pope’s tour took place at all demonstrated the dilution of the nation’s Protestant identity, yet its success reflected the enduring strength of Christianity in Britain. It also signalled the fact that Roman Catholicism had finally achieved its place at the centre of British public life.

MARGARET THATCHER NEVER
wavered in her belief that nuclear weapons were a guarantor of peace and stability rather than a route to war. On entering No. 10, she immediately set to the task of finalising a deal with the Americans, which had been initiated by her predecessor: negotiating the replacement of the Polaris system with Trident. Some may have considered that, given Britain’s dire economic situation, such a move was a bit like a family purchasing the latest car when they could not afford their mortgage, but for Thatcher it ensured Britain’s independence and a prominent seat at the international table; two things on which it was impossible to put a price. In this and in her later commitment to allow the US to stage cruise missiles on British soil, Thatcher was merely continuing what had been the post-war status quo pursued by both Labour and Conservative governments.
44
What made it politically sensitive was the resurgence of the anti-nuclear movement both within and outside Parliament between 1980 and 1983. CND, having experienced a lull in the 1970s, underwent a renaissance with its membership increasing to 90,000
national members and additional 250,000 in its local branches. CND had always been a broad movement comprising of churches, unions and left-wing activists, but in the 1980s its Christian character (in its leadership at least) was more prominent than ever before, with Catholic priest Father Bruce Kent as its head and Anglican priest Paul Oestreicher, its Vice-Chairman. At this point, CND demonstrations could attract well over 250,000 protestors; a fact that has led historian James Hinton to reflect that it was ‘one of the largest political organisations in Britain and probably the largest peace movement in the world’.
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CND may have attracted the numbers but it was the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Protest, stationed at an RAF camp in Berkshire – home to the US Cruise Missiles – that dominated the headlines. The women protestors, who tended to be caricatured by the right-wing press as hippy communist lesbians, surpassed the moderate men of the cloth as symbols of the movement.

In public, Margaret Thatcher casually dismissed unilateralists and peace demonstrators as fantasists while positioning herself as the ardent realist. And yet, as a meeting of the Lord President’s Council in November 1982 reveals, the Conservatives were concerned that the public consensus on Britain’s defence policy, which had remained intact since the 1950s, seemed to be ‘in danger’.
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In particular, it was floating voters – those who would normally endorse Conservative defence proposals – that seemed to be drifting towards a position of unilateralism. Margaret Thatcher’s tactic was to appoint the self-assured Michael Heseltine at the Ministry of Defence, with the explicit purpose of fighting a propaganda war against CND and setting public opinion back on course. One of Heseltine’s first initiatives was to establish the Defence Secretariat 19 whose aim, he told the Commons, was to explain the ‘facts’ to the public about its nuclear deterrent and defence policy, although as Heseltine later admitted in his memoirs, it principally involved a change of tone and language; ‘Trident’ was dropped in favour of ‘Britain’s independent deterrent’, while unilateralists were dismissed as ‘one-sided disarmers’. Another tactic was to portray the anti-nuclear movement
as more left-wing than it actually was. The press fulfilled this function by running scare stories about Soviet funding and Marxist infiltration, which the government hoped might put off moderate sympathisers. The portrait of CND supporters as communist-funded radicals could not have been further from the truth, of course, as the following observations of a CND demo in June 1982, produced by the Conservative Research Department (CRD), proved: rather than incendiary Marxists, the researcher from the CRD observed that it was a ‘rather folksy, relaxed atmosphere’, and amongst the 150,000-strong crowd were mostly women and families, religious groups, along with ‘miscellaneous gay, feminists and punks … archetypal
Guardian
-reading parents eating their nut cutlet picnics under the trees while the children watched a Punch (President Reagan) and Judy (Mrs Thatcher) sideshow.’
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The fact that such a report was commissioned, not least by party chairman Cecil Parkinson, revealed the Conservative Party’s overriding fear that defence, and especially the nuclear issue, was likely to play a pivotal part in the 1983 election. This was made all the more urgent when the Labour Party adopted an unequivocal policy of unilateral disarmament. Labour’s policy had not been conceived out of naive hope but was a policy that the party genuinely believed was in tune with popular sentiment – polls at the time suggested that approximately 30 per cent of Britons were in favour of full disarmament.

The Church of England’s ‘The Church and the Bomb’ report, which had taken nearly three years to compose, would probably have been ignored had it not been published just as the debate about Britain’s nuclear policy was coming to a head. To the surprise of most bishops and the government, the committee advocated the phasing out of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, in effect an endorsement of unilateral disarmament. Just as the Labour Party had departed from the defence status quo, so it seemed the Established Church (a much more worrying prospect from a Conservative’s point of view) appeared to be following suit. Conservatives, aided by the right-wing press, did their
best to rubbish the report and, in a rare act of solidarity with the government, so did the senior clergy. The pro-Conservative Bishop of Norwich made the point to
The Times
that there were ‘no unilateralists in the Kremlin’, while Richard Harries, the future Bishop of Oxford and leading advocate of multi-lateralism, offered a more focused assessment, remarking that the report contained ‘no discussion of the role of power in human affairs and no theology of power’.
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In February 1983, four months before the election, the General Synod held a five-hour-long debate on the report which was relayed live on BBC2; a sure sign of its considered importance and something not yet possible in the camera-shy Houses of Parliament.

In a move that indicated the seriousness with which the government considered the Church’s influence, the Ministry of Defence sent out propaganda literature to every Synod member before the debate.
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When the report’s policy of unilateralism was put forward, it was effectively quashed in a unifying act of prelate pressure. Graham Leonard of London, who as Chairman of the Board for Social Responsibility had actually commissioned the report, played a significant procedural role in undermining it. Likewise Runcie, to whom the Synod has always showed due reverence, while the Archbishop of York played the ‘declinist card’, forewarning what disarmament would mean for Britain’s status as a world power.