Tony Blair spoke at Westminster Cathedral this evening. Our earlier reports are in this blog and this article. You can download the full speech here. But one thing of interest came early on, when he explained for the first time that I can recall why Alastair Campbell once said: ‘We don’t do God.’
The former Prime Minister said:
‘One of the oddest questions I get asked in interviews (and I get asked a lot of odd questions) is: is faith important to your politics? It’s like asking someone whether their health is important to them or their family. If you are someone ‘of faith’ it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn’t affect your politics.
But there is a reason why my former press secretary Alastair Campbell once famously said: ‘We don’t do God’. In our culture, here in Britain and in many other parts of Europe, to admit to having faith leads to a whole series of suppositions, none of which are very helpful to the practising politician.
First, you may be considered weird. Normal people aren’t supposed to ‘do God’.
Second, there is an assumption that before you take a decision, you engage in some slightly cultish interaction with your religion – ‘So, God, tell me what you think of City Academies or Health Service Reform or nuclear power’ i.e. people assume that your religion makes you act, as a leader, at the promptings of an inscrutable deity, free from reason rather than in accordance with it.
Third, you want to impose your religious faith on others.
Fourth, you are pretending to be better than the next person.
And finally and worst of all, that you are somehow messianically trying to co-opt God to bestow a divine legitimacy on your politics.
So when Alastair said it, he didn’t mean politicians shouldn’t have faith; just that it was always a packet of trouble to talk about it.
And underlying it all, certainly, is the notion that religion is divisive, irrational and harmful.’
So is he criticising Alastair, or simply accepting the need for pragmatic compromise? Anyway, he ’s not afraid to ‘do God’ now. He’ll be doing very little but God, if his new Faith Foundation takes off as expected. And let’s hope it does. There’s a vacuum in our national religious leadership at present which badly needs filling, and Tony Blair could be just the man to do it.
Ruth Gledhill is The Times Religion Correspondent.
