God in Number 10: The Personal Faith of the Prime Ministers, from Balfour to Blair
By Mark Vickers. SPCK Publishing. 2022. 512 pages

The faith, or lack of it, of the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom is an area that has suffered from widespread neglect by historians. Mark Vickers rectifies this omission in his well-researched and richly detailed volume which casts a very personal light upon the inhabitants of one of the most famous residences in the United Kingdom: 10 Downing Street.

The author, Mark Vickers, read history at Durham University and practised law in London before studying for the priesthood at the English College, Rome. He was ordained for the Diocese of Westminster in 2003 and is currently a parish priest in West London. God in Number 10 is his fourth published title.

The book follows a basic chronological order, starting with Arthur Balfour (PM 1902–5) and ending with Tony Blair (PM 1997–2007), dedicating a chapter to each PM. These do not comprise standard mini-biographies, but you do learn a great deal about the personal lives of each of the Prime Ministers – details that often do not reach the public sphere. More so, you get a taste of the political landscape of the UK throughout the twentieth century, as well as the changing role that Christianity played in British life over the course of that century, the relationship between Church and State, and the reasons for the declining influence of faith-based perspectives in public discourse.

Spirituality

At the beginning of the twentieth century, British society was in the midst of spiritual turmoil. The educated classes were suffering from a spiritual crisis as a result of modern biblical criticism and recent scientific discoveries. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species coupled with the horrors of war had prompted much doubt in the existence of an all-powerful and loving God, and the credibility of the Bible had been greatly damaged. The corridors of Cambridge and Oxford were very much hostile to the voice of faith. Yet, in spite of all this, Stanley Baldwin (PM 1923–4, 1924–9, and 1935–7), a mystic of sorts, still believed himself to be “God’s instrument for the work of the healing of the nation.”

In the early part of the century, Ramsay MacDonald (PM 1924, 1929–35) dabbled in palmistry and horoscopes. The mother of Anthony Eden (PM 1955–7) used a medium to speak to his brother, Jack, who was killed in the trenches during World War I. Arthur Balfour, who struggled to accept Christian teaching on the afterlife, regarded talking to ghosts as a more rational alternative. As Vickers writes, the spirits he met were “not politically neutral” as they informed him that “the return of a Conservative government under Balfour was essential to save the Crown from revolution.”

As Britons became richer, swapping the hardships of wartime rationing for package holidays and indoor toilets, Alec Douglas-Hume (PM 1963–4) hosted Billy Graham and Cliff Richard, and warned that prosperity was no substitute for “service and sacrifice.” He regarded faith as the “basic if subconscious influence in the life of the British people,” which he demonstrated through his loyalty to Christian teaching.

Labour leaders, on the other hand, sought to translate piety into social action. Clement Attlee (PM 1945–51) believed in the “ethics of Christianity,” but not the rest of “the mumbo jumbo”. I wonder what he thought of his wife’s dabbling in clairvoyance? For an atheist, Attlee took a surprising interest in ecclesiastical affairs, being of the view that the Church of England needed a serious overhaul. Many politicians despaired of the Church’s obsession with personal morality and feared it was out of touch.

Yet much of the Left retained a streak of nonconformist puritanism. One of the very few things Harold Wilson (PM 1964–70 and 1974–6) is praised for today is the liberalisation of abortion and homosexuality, but Vickers speculates that he found both distasteful. Perhaps he was sensitive to the views of his Huyton constituency, which contained many Catholics. By contrast, when James Callaghan (PM 1976–9) was seeking to represent Cardiff South, he had to reassure the locals that his name might be Irish, but he had been raised a Baptist.

Prominent

Of all the Prime Ministers of the twentieth century, two names are remembered, for better or worse, above all others: Winston Churchill (PM 1940–5 and 1951–5) and Margaret Thatcher (PM 1979–90). Their religious convictions will be of particular interest to readers. Churchill appears to have held ever-shifting beliefs about the existence of God, the nature of the afterlife, and the genuineness of Scripture. For some time, he had a personal astrologer, who advised him on government policy relating to industrial disputes and diplomatic crises. Yet, when the free world was facing the horrors of the Nazi war machine, Churchill repeatedly invoked God's blessing upon the Allied cause. When Churchill met with David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, the two men debated who was the greater: Moses or Christ. Ben-Gurion said Jesus. Churchill favoured Moses.

Margaret Thatcher was raised as a Methodist and even preached as such during her years at Oxford, before later becoming a member of the Church of England. Her Christian faith was personally important and, more significantly, it moulded her political policies and decisions. However, as Prime Minister, she repeatedly found herself in conflict with the Churches, not least in regard to her “Sermon on the Mound” address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988, where she shared some controversial thoughts on her religious and political thinking. Thatcher blamed some of the loss in Christian zeal on the Church of England becoming more political than religious. She didn’t hold back in reprimanding a “socialist CND-promoting vicar” that his views were the cause of his “lack of a congregation.”