I don’t pretend to have had extensive discussions about religion with our new Prime Minister, but I did have a couple of brief ones when he edited my first Spectator articles. We once discussed Christian and Muslim ideas of martyrdom, and he was suddenly reminded of a hymn he liked at Eton which he proceeded to sing to me down the phone.
His tone towards religion in general was, as you’d expect, a bit guffawing: here’s a prime site for flippant jokes and the puncturing of earnestness. But, knowing that I took religion seriously, and seeing that we had an article to discuss, he was a tad constrained. The intellectually serious side of him saw that the show-off side should pipe down a bit, for here was an interesting subject that he had paid relatively little attention to.
In relation to religion I would characterise him as an eighteenth-century Whig, full of confidence in the classical world as the source of enlightened culture – and ready to laugh, with Edward Gibbon, at the gloomy excesses of monotheism.
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