By inclination, training and philosophy, Dave is a PR flak. So it’s only natural that he should apply the techniques of marketing communications to his current job – the poor lad doesn’t really know any better.
When planning a campaign, a PR executive thinks in terms of a balance between depth and breadth. The former is maintaining the brand’s appeal to its core supporters; the latter, expanding the market beyond that group. Striking the right balance is a fine art: the more you please the core group, the more you risk alienating the broad market – and vice versa.
Lately Dave must have been sensing – and his innermost feelings are usually shaped by the findings of focus-group research – that his core support has been slipping. Not only do real conservatives reject most of his policies, but they are beginning to be disgusted by him personally. Policies can of course be changed, that’s what politics is all about, but the revulsion penetrating the viscera of his party may be there to last until the next election. Clearly, something has to be done to reverse this alarming trend.
Hence Dave’s attempt to strike a conciliatory tone in his meeting with church leaders. Dave knows that real conservatives, even if they are atheists, respect Christianity because they see it as one of the few adhesives strong enough to keep the nation together. Such conservatives are alarmed by what they correctly identify as a frontal assault on Christianity launched and maintained with the government’s tacit, or not so tacit, support. Something is clearly rotten in a land where a doctor wishing a colleague a peaceful Christmas may be censured for committing an act of aggression, or where wearing a tiny cross to work may be grounds for dismissal.
But Dave thinks that ‘there is something of a fightback going on’, and presumably his plans to introduce homosexual marriage are part of this laudable counteraction. A sensitive man, Dave realises that clergymen, or indeed any sane people, are unlikely to see this obscene insult to society’s fundamental institution as a measure promoting the cause of Christian rectitude or indeed social cohesion. A backlash is inevitable, but he hopes he and the sane people ‘won’t fall out too much over gay marriage’. If this is the best he can do to protest his inner goodness, then methinks the lad doth protest too little.
‘The values of the Bible, the values of Christianity are the values we need,’ he said, presumably provided these values don’t prevent Christianity from being ‘relevant to the agenda of the whole country’, as he put it back in December. And relevance has to mean knee-jerk hostility to everything Christianity stands for.
Dave’s understanding of what it is that Christianity stands for is even shallower than his understanding of England’s ancient constitution. In a separate Easter statement, he invoked the New Testament that according to him described Jesus ‘as a man of incomparable compassion, generosity, grace, humility and love.’ He is confusing the New Testament with Ernest Renan who in his The Life of Jesus extolled Jesus’s human qualities while mocking Christ’s divine essence.
Dave, or anyone else, doesn’t have to believe in Jesus’s divinity. Nor does he have to understand the fine points of the Incarnation, the Trinity and the dual nature of Christ, though some rudimentary awareness wouldn’t go amiss in the first minister of the Crown, whose realm is constituted in explicitly Christian terms. But one wishes he refrained from making vulgar and transparently political gestures that are more likely to appal than to appeal.
Such an adverse reaction will not be softened by Dave’s limp arguments in favour of homosexual marriage. His flagship policy, he claims, will “change what happens in a register office, not what happens in a church.” I hope we’re not being governed by a prime minister who sincerely believes any such nonsense.
Surely Dave must realise that the secularised church he sees in his mind’s eye, the one that worships Jesus’s fine human traits, can’t be immune to secular pressures. Isn’t that what ‘relevance’ is all about? The moment the first registrar officiates a homosexual marriage, and the first vicar refuses to do so, the vicar will be sued for discrimination faster than you can say ‘European Court of Human Rights’. After that, whoever is the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time will be bound to issue a statement to the effect that, lamentable though such developments are, the laws of the land have to take precedence.
In this the Church of England will probably follow, with appropriate changes, the fine example of the Mormons, whose leader Willford Woodruff in 1890 reluctantly banned polygamy, declaring that his ‘advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriages forbidden by the law of the land.’ Dave will be made aware of this history of compromise because by the time he pushes his policy through he may well be in regular contact with a Mormon president of the United States (God forbid).
Words won’t heal the rift that’s deepening between this government and those intuitive and historical Tory supporters who are beginning to consider their options, scarce as they are. Only deeds can do that, and Dave is giving no indications that his actions will ever follow any other than the ‘relevant’ course.