Crossley, James G. "45 Minutes from Doom! Tony Blair and the Radical Bible Rebranded." Harnessing Chaos: The Bible in English Political Discourse Since 1968. London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2014. 210–241. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 26 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9780567659347.ch-008>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 26 September 2021, 17:24 UTC. Copyright © James G. Crossley 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Chapter 8 45 MINUTES FROM DOOM! TONY BLAIR AND THE RADICAL BIBLE REBRANDED 1. Spiritual and Religious: The Political Theology of Tony Blair By the turn of the millennium, the Thatcher revolution in political think- ing was over, both in the sense that she was now a ¿gure often deemed ‘toxic’ and that the general tenets of Thatcherism had simultaneously been accepted by the main political parties and culturally normalised. Indeed, Thatcher famously claimed that her greatest legacy was New Labour. By the time Tony Blair (b. 1953) came to power in 1997, issues surrounding Christianity and the Bible had changed.1 Thatcher faced a Church of England prepared to confront her on issues of social justice, inner-city tensions, and welfare. After her third election victory in 1987, and the ¿nal stage of her embedding of Thatcherism, the Church shifted its attention more abstractly towards the worries about the perils of materialism. In the longer term, high-pro¿le concerns with poverty would become more internationally focused (e.g. Make Poverty History, Jubilee 2000) and more consensual, with politicians walking side-by-side with anti-poverty campaigners, in addition to more specialised concerns for issues of human rights and ethics. While the relationship between Church and State became less antagonistic, the 1990s and the 2000s saw identity politics become more of a serious problem for the very authority of the Anglican Church, in particular the rise of those most polarising of debates: women priests (and later bishops) and homosexuality. Such issues were of increasing prominence, of course, because of the wider acceptance of more liberal attitudes towards homosexuality and gender equality. Questions about ‘Englishness’ in relation to race and immi- gration had also changed. Whereas questions of colour and race were pushed to the fore, not least by Enoch Powell, liberal multiculturalism had become much more ¿rmly embedded in English politics by the time 1. For a more detailed summary of what follows see e.g. Filby, ‘God and Mrs Thatcher’, pp. 212-31. See also Steven, Christianity and Party Politics, pp. 105-20. 8. 45 Minutes from Doom! 211 Blair took of¿ce. Of course, this still meant tolerance on the assump- tion that liberal capitalist democracy is the norm, and a stark reminder of this quali¿cation came on September 11, 2001. And September 11 now brought ‘religion’ and Islam to the fore in the dominant discourses surrounding debates on immigration as well as international politics. The Cold War was certainly over; the War on Terror was about to begin. A product of a private education, socialist-cum-Tory atheist father, Protestant mother of Irish descent, rock music, music management, and the legal profession, Blair grew up wearing his Christianity and politics lightly, at least in public. It was only from his time at St John’s College, Oxford (1972–75), that Blair began to start thinking more seriously about politics (even Marxism) and religion (‘I was brought up as one, but I was not in any real sense a practising Christian until I went to Oxford’).2 Con¿rmed as an Anglican at St John’s, here he would articulate the importance of Christianity in terms of social relevance, social change, and social mobility, but stressing the relationship between the individual and the community as Thatcherism was in the ascendancy. There were a number of formative inÀuences on Blair’s political and social theology, typically coming from a centre-left form of Christian Socialism, and including Peter Thomson, John Burton (Labour Councillor and Blair’s agent for 25 years), Cherie Booth whom he would of course marry, and the ideas of communitarian thinkers such as John Macmurray,3 though whether communitarian ideas were rigorously implemented or properly understood is moot.4 But it was Thomson who Blair would describe as probably the most inÀuential person in his life.5 Thomson was a Christian 2. R. McCloughry, ‘Practising for Power: Tony Blair’, Third Way (September 14, 1993), http://web.archive.org/web/20070927142102/http://www.thirdway.org. uk/past/showpage.asp?page=43. 3. For summaries see e.g. J. Rentoul, Tony Blair (London: Warner, 1996), pp. 36-48, 72-75, 293-95; A. Seldon, Blair: The Biography (London: Free Press, 2004), pp. 32-46, 515-32; F. Beckett and D. Hencke, The Blairs and their Court (London: Aurum, 2004), pp. 28-44; P. Stephens, Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader (London: Viking, 2004), pp. 15-36; J. Burton and E. McCabe, We Don’t Do God: Blair’s Religious Belief and its Consequences (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. ix-47. 4. S. Hale, Blair’s Community: Communitarian Thought and New Labour (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Cf. Beckett and Hencke, The Blairs, pp. 27-31. 5. T. Blair, A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2010), p. 78. Cf. Burton and McCabe, We Don’t Do God, p. 8: ‘Tony hadn’t really thought deeply about religion and politics until he met Peter’. For further detail on the inÀuence of Thomson on Blair see e.g. Rentoul, Tony Blair, pp. 36-45; Burton and McCabe, We Don’t Do God, pp. ix-xi, 4-13, 58. 1 212 Harnessing Chaos Socialist and Australian Anglican priest and was a mature student at St John’s when Blair met him. He helped Blair articulate the fusion of what Blair would categorise as religion and politics in that ‘religion’ is deemed something which comes ¿rst and prioritises humankind and values while ‘politics’ prioritises the analysis of society and how it can be changed. Blair overlapped both categories but still stressed that for him and Thomson religion would always come ¿rst.6 Andrew Rawnsley claimed that ‘No Prime Minister since William Gladstone read the Bible more regularly’.7 Even so, prior to becoming Labour leader in 1994, Blair was fairly quiet about his Christianity and love of the Bible, though under the inÀuence of the then Labour leader John Smith he joined the Christian Socialist Movement in 1992.8 On becoming leader, Blair was still relatively quiet, particularly after the experience of the media jumping on his religious beliefs in reaction to an infamous interview with the Sunday Telegraph in 1996. Alastair Campbell claimed in his diaries: I could see nothing but trouble in talking about it. British people are not like Americans, who seem to want their politicians banging the Bible all the time. They hated it, I was sure of that. The ones who didn’t believe didn’t want to hear it; and the ones who did felt the politicians who went on about it were doing it for the wrong reasons… I felt fully vindicated. As I said to TB…Never talk about God… GB [Gordon Brown] called and we agreed God was a disaster area.9 But intense media interest in Blair’s Christianity would resurface again during the ‘war on terror’, particularly because of Blair’s close associa- tion with the evangelical Christian, Republican, and American president, George W. Bush. As this might already imply, precisely what the ‘socialism’ was in Christian Socialism would change over time and the stress on individual responsibility and social mobility would bring his political Christianity and exegesis close to Margaret Thatcher’s. Prior to becoming a Labour Party MP in 1983, Blair had certainly read Marxist literature and was 6. Blair, Journey, p. 78. A typical Blair soundbite is as follows: ‘Blair said politicians should not ignore religion, calling for a “religion-friendly democracy and democracy-friendly religion” ’. See ‘Tony Blair, former Prime Minister, did order Number 10 staff to pray’, Huf¿ngton Post (July 24, 2012), http://www. huf¿ngtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/24/tony-blairm-former-prime-prayer_n_1699362.html. 7. A. Rawnsley, The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour (London: Penguin Books, 2010), p. 447. 8. Rentoul, Tony Blair, pp. 47, 293. 9. A. Campbell, The Blair Years (London: Hutchinson, 2007), pp. 111-12. 1 8. 45 Minutes from Doom! 213 interested in Marxism. But ultimately he would not become (or remain?) a Marxist in the sense that he perceived it to be a useful resource rather than an ideology requiring absolute ¿delity. By the early 1980s Blair would be regarded as something of a ‘soft’ leftist of the Kinnock variety. Like other Labour MPs of his generation, he was inÀuenced by the peace movement and was a supporter of CND. Yet his general drift to the right of the Labour Party was becoming gradually clear and he ¿rmly opposed Benn’s bid for the deputy leadership in 1981, though only supporting the candidate of the right, Dennis Healey, as an anti-Benn option.10 But, accompanying the electoral failures of the 1980s and 1992, Blair would look into ways of attracting the non-traditional Labour voter and move further to the right of the party, particularly on becoming leader after the death of John Smith in 1994. Along with Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, Blair would develop a form of social democracy that would embrace Thatcherite economics, reject a number of iconic Labour policies from the 1980s such as unilateral disarmament, rethink the role of the welfare state, and, most noisily, drop Clause 4 (a commitment to common/public ownership or nationalisation) from the Labour Party constitution – all of which reÀected the Giddens-inspired ‘Third Way’.