Book review: Religion often mattered more than politics for Prime Ministers from Balfour to Blair

Nov 12, 2022 by Jill

by Andrew Gimson, Conservative Home:

God in Number 10: The Personal Faith of the Prime Ministers, from Balfour to Blair by Mark Vickers

Anyone interested in politics and religion should get this book. Mark Vickers examines a subject, the personal faith of every 20th-century Prime Minister from Arthur Balfour to Tony Blair, which political writers tend increasingly to neglect.

The result is a wonderful anthology. Mark Vickers writes in a sober, unsensational style, yet produces something surprising or even bizarre on almost every page.

He has consulted a vast number of unfashionable books, and establishes that for most of these 19 PMs, religion was far more important than one would think from recent accounts, or from the decline in religious observance towards the end of the 20th century.

The book opens with Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister from 1902-1905 and a senior and significant Cabinet minister until shortly before his death in 1930.

Balfour took a philosophical interest in religion and science, and how one reconciled the two, and also in spiritualism, not then, as Vickers says, “viewed as the preserve of the eccentric or deluded”, but as a way in which it might be possible “to provide scientific proof of personal immortality”.

Serious figures – Lord Rayleigh, winner in 1904 of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Henry Sidgwick, Knightsbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, both of them Balfour’s brothers-in-law – set up the Society for Psychical Research to carry out the rational investigation of paranormal phenomena.

Read here