Peace looked promising for awhile, but those freaking Protestants keep stirring the pot. It looks like the next leader of the Tories will be a Catholic. Maybe he'll be Prime MInister someday. Wonder what the Ulster Defense League will make of that? <g>
The Tory party and creeping Catholicism
Monday September 3rd 2001
IT now looks pretty certain that the Conservative and Unionist Party, for the first time in its history, is going to be led by a Catholic.
The result of the ballot of its 300,000 members will not be formally announced until Wednesday, September 12, but all the signs are that Iain Duncan Smith has beaten the former chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, and will be formally declared the successor to William Hague.
Like the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story which famously attracted belated attention for not barking, the most remarkable thing by far about the religious factor in Duncan Smith's victory is the complete absence of any remarks about it. Nothing better illustrates the extent to which, during the past 20 years, Catholicism has become almost as much a part of the accepted fabric of English public life as the established Church of England.
Duncan Smith describes himself as a practising Catholic. Tony Blair is not formally a Catholic but frequently goes to Mass with his wife and children while Charles Kennedy, the Liberal leader, was brought up a Catholic.
Numerous prominent Tories, including Ann Widdecombe, the feisty right-wing supporter of Ken Clarke, have converted to Catholicism in recent years but Duncan Smith's faith comes from his mother, Pamela (nee Summers), who is Irish and was dancing with a ballet troupe in war-time Naples when she first met her future husband.
It is a curious coincidence that Duncan Smith, like John Major, should have a family background in the entertainment industry but, in the case of Duncan Smith, that background is considerably more exotic. In order to combat charges that he is a racist, Duncan Smith has just revealed that he is one-eighth Japanese. His mother's grandfather, Leonard Shaw (a remote cousin of the famous writer, George Bernard Shaw) was an Irish sea captain who married a Japanese girl back in the 1880s.
These days becoming leader of the Tories is a long way from becoming prime minister but if Iain Duncan Smith ever does get to Number 10 Downing Street his position as the first Catholic to lead the country since the days of Henry the Eighth would be an intriguing one, to say the least. For a start, he would be responsible for appointing the Archbishop of Canterbury. Moreover, under existing law, his daughter, who is at a Catholic day school in London, would not be allowed to marry Prince William unless the latter was willing to renounce the throne for the sake of romance.
Problems like these could no doubt be sorted out. Duncan Smith could delegate the appointment of senior Church of England clergy and the odds against his daughter getting engaged to William are even greater than those you could have had on Saturday morning against England beating Germany 5-1.
The difficulties for Duncan Smith are likely to be much more acute on the practical issues of integrating his evident commitment to his faith with the pragmatic requirements of leading a political party that needs to get votes from a much wider cross-section of the electorate than practising Catholics like himself.
These problems have already started to arise. Duncan Smith has had to make it clear in interviews, for instance, that while he is opposed to abortion he is "willing to accommodate the present reality". He is also opposed to the repeal of Section 28, the controversial sexual morality legislation which forbids "the promotion of homosexuality" by local councils. But, when cross-questioned on this last week, he started instinctively to abandon his former absolutist stance and remarked that the clause in question was "a totem which is about saying to a group in the community: 'We actually rather dislike you'. That is a problem and a party like ours has to think how to resolve that".
Ken Clarke says bluntly that Smith is "a hanger and a flogger" and Ann Widdecombe has caustically derided the dodging and weaving on sex and drugs during the past few days. Clarke has also tried to gain headway from the revelations about the involvement of right-wing British National Party activists in the Smith camp and the embarrassing ousting of one of his key supporters in Wales.
But the 300,000 Tories who are voting for their new leader are a right-wing bunch, by and large, and while they would publicly condemn extremist organisations they are nothing like as exercised about the matter as the moderates who are hoping to see Clarke succeed.
Kenneth Clarke's leadership campaign was doomed by the European factor.
Despite the vociferous support he got from much of the shadow cabinet, Tory members could not see how he would reconcile his enthusiasm for the euro while leading a party overwhelmingly opposed to it.
Clarke eventually had to admit that on key European debates, such as the endorsement of the Treaty of Nice, he would simply have to make sure he was not in the Commons on the day of the vote.
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