Our first Catholic prime minister?

If Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister next month, he will become Britain’s first Roman Catholic premier, in any meaningful sense. Boris Johnson was baptised a Catholic but confirmed in the Church of England, while Tony Blair converted to Catholicism only after he had left office.

That is not to portray Burnham as especially devout. He attends Mass only very occasionally, and once told a journalist, “to use a Scouse phrase, we don’t lick the altar steps”. What sets him apart is not just that he was raised a Catholic, but that he would be the first Prime Minister who had grown up instinctively and unconsciously steeped in Catholic worship and a Catholic culture.

As a young man, Burnham used to tell people that the three institutions which had shaped him were Everton Football Club, the Labour Party and the Catholic Church, “in that order”. It could be dismissed as the kind of glib, matey response I hate, but it is also revealing. It represents Catholicism not as a matter of doctrine so much as community and culture.

Morgan Phillips, Labour’s post-War General Secretary, said that the party owed more to Methodism than to Marxism, and Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson and Philip Snowden had been Methodists; Labour also drew strength from the wider Nonconformist traditions like Baptism (Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Aneurin Bevan’s paternal family) and Congregationalism.

Where there had been large-scale Irish immigration, however, Labour found fertile ground among working-class Catholic communities: Glasgow, Paisley, Dundee, Birmingham and Burnham’s heartland of Liverpool and Manchester. Burnham may not now be very observant, and has spoken of his disagreement with Catholic teaching on homosexuality and women’s rights, but he attended St Aelred’s Catholic High School in Newton-le-Willows and served as an altar boy at St Lewis’ Church in Croft. He said in 2015 he still believed in “the values and the grounding [Catholicism] gives you”.

“I used to sit there in church on Sunday morning,” he told a journalist, and “what I heard I just equated with the values of the Labour Party. I made a very direct link between the two, and still do”. When he last stood for the leadership, he said, “Catholic social teaching underpins my politics. We did have to read the catechism at school but it is powerful and strong and right”.

This is significant because of the way Catholicism, and legal disabilities placed on Catholics, are so tightly woven through the fabric of the last 500 years, since Henry VIII summoned what became the Reformation Parliament in August 1529. Over the following centuries, Catholics had their rights and their freedom of worship heavily circumscribed, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89 was explicitly anti-Catholic, designed to define England as a Protestant nation.

If Burnham becomes Prime Minister and the current Parliament runs to its maximum length, he is likely still to be in office on 13 April 2029, the 200th anniversary of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 receiving Royal Assent from George IV. By removing the requirement to swear an oath denying the central Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation — the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist — it swept away barriers to Roman Catholics holding a range of public offices and positions.

Those disabilities were broad. It was not until the passage of the act that Catholics could be elected to the House of Commons or Catholic peers could take their seats in the House of Lords. Catholics could not hold commissions in the army and navy. But still the act was not absolute.

Catholics were still unable to serve as Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Lord Lieutenant or Chief Secretary of Ireland, or Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The role of Prime Minister was not provided for because it did not formally exist — premiers held office simply as First Lord of the Treasury — but the act said that no Roman Catholic could occupy a position:

Touching or concerning the Appointment to or Disposal of any Office or Preferment in the United Church of England and Ireland, or in the Church of Scotland.

The Prime Minister was involved in selecting Anglican bishops and clerics until Gordon Brown, a Presbyterian, surrendered the power in 2007. Until then there were significant constitutional debates over whether a Catholic could by law lead the government.

It is important to mark and understand our history

In most of the UK, setting aside Northern Ireland, the West of Scotland and Merseyside, it is difficult to say that Catholics are now subject to any serious discrimination. But it is important to mark and understand our history: how can we as a society say who we are and in which direction we want to go if we lack a proper grasp of who we were and what made us that way?

The potential coincidence of a Burnham premiership and the bicentenary of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 would remind us of how change sometimes comes about.

The act was introduced by the Duke of Wellington’s government, in which the Home Secretary and outstanding minister in the House of Commons was Sir Robert Peel. Both had served as Chief Secretary in Dublin, the city of Wellington’s birth, and neither had favoured granting relief to Catholics. But both saw what George IV did not: that, as Peel wrote to Wellington, “though emancipation was a great danger, civil strife was a greater danger”.

Andy Burnham would not blaze a trail for the downtrodden or disenfranchised in becoming Prime Minister. Clearly Margaret Thatcher as a woman and Rishi Sunak as a British Asian Hindu marked more important “firsts”, and one could add David Lloyd George as the first whose native language was not English, and Andrew Bonar Law the first born outside the British Isles. 

In a nation which has tended to shy away from revolutions but has wrestled with the relationship between government and the governed since at least 1215, rights and freedoms can come in increments. The UK was hardly perfect after Catholic emancipation, and it would be another three years before the passage of the Representation of the People Act 1832, the so-called Great Reform Act. Female suffrage then had to wait another 86 years.

But the Roman Catholic Relief Act matters because it mattered at the time, a measure which removed legal disabilities on a community which had been under various sanctions for more than 250 years. It was part of a long journey to normalise a form of religious observance which had once been seen as a direct and existential threat to the state. It may be fitting for the commemorations — and they should certainly take place — to be led by someone for whom being raised a Roman Catholic was as natural as learning to walk or read.