Nearly two years ago, in April 2003, Tony Blair took part in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine to mark his 50th birthday in the course of which he was asked about his Christian faith. In one the most revealing episodes of his eight years in power, the Prime Minister was prevented from replying by his spin doctor, Alastair Campbell. "I'm sorry, we don't do God," interrupted the then press secretary, an avowed atheist who has been trying to stop Mr Blair discussing his faith ever since he became Labour leader in 1994. A couple of months earlier, Mr Campbell is also said to have ordered the removal of the phrase "God Bless You" from Mr Blair's TV broadcast on the outbreak of the Iraq War. It didn't deter BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman. Without Campbell present, he astonished Mr Blair by asking him on live television whether he had ever prayed with US President George W. Bush. Mr Blair's embarrassed response, "No, Jeremy, we don't pray together," is, for me, up there with Michael Fish's hurricane "prediction" as one of the greatest TV moments of all time. But in spite of his occasional reluctance to wear his religion on his sleeve, the Prime Minister is happy enough to talk about it when it suits him. Such was the case this week, when, in an apparent response to Michael Howard's raising of abortion as a pre-election issue, he made a speech in defence of the view that religion should play a greater role in national life. Speaking to the Faithworks group in London, Mr Blair sought to assert an ethical Christian basis for his own political beliefs. "At the heart of my politics has always been the belief that we are not merely individuals struggling in isolation from each other, but members of a community who depend on each other, who owe obligations to each other," he said. "From that everything stems: solidarity, social justice, equality, freedom. In the 21st Century I believe it is not merely the right moral sentiment but enlightened self-interest." And in what may or may not have been a coded rebuke to Mrs Thatcher, he added: "A selfish society is a contradiction in terms." The speech ranged over very different territory to that touched on by Mr Howard when he put the abortion time limit on the political agenda during a magazine interview earlier this month. But it nevertheless highlights the same issue - the extent to which religion should play a part in the forthcoming election campaign. Both the main party leaders apparently think that it should, but while Mr Howard's approach was to target a specific issue about which there is huge concern amongst Christians, Mr Blair's was very different. What he was trying to do was to make the claim that, taken as a whole, the Labour world view broadly owes more to Christianity than the Conservative one. Now for what it's worth, my own view on all this is that in their own ways, Mr Blair and Mr Howard are both right. The teachings of Jesus, with their emphasis on helping others and sharing, do indeed seem to imply a left-of-centre view of the world and undoubtedly form part of the basis of socialist thought. But on the other hand, they also imply a belief in the sanctity of human life which sits very uneasily with the current abortion laws. What this really demonstrates is that no one political party or political philosophy can really claim a monopoly on Christian thought, and none should attempt to do so. In this context, it is worth remembering that Mrs Thatcher's infamous statement "there is no such thing as society" came not in a speech to hard-nosed business chiefs but to Scottish church leaders. Unlike Mr Blair, and for that matter myself, she clearly believed that Christianity taught a doctrine of individual responsibility with no wider social dimension. It also explains why attempts to form a "Christian" political party in Britain have always foundered. The last such attempt, in the early 1990s, was something called the Movement for Christian Democracy - and, predictably, it sank without trace. But with the events leading up to the Iraq war once again under the spotlight, perhaps the more important question for Mr Blair is not whether Christianity has influenced his views, but whether it has influenced his behaviour. In one memorable example of him wearing his faith on his sleeve, he said he was "ready to answer to his Maker" for the war. Mr Blair now bases his defence of the conflict on the fact that Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein, irrespective of whether or not he had any weapons of mass destruction. But his apparent belief that the end justified the means, especially in his handling of the decision to go to war, gets him into what most Christians would regard as very tricky moral territory indeed. Was it "ethical," for instance, for the Government to have suppressed evidence that the Attorney General had doubts about the legality of the war, as has emerged this week? Was it "ethical" to have removed the intelligence service caveats about the reliability of the 45-minute claim, as was so devastatingly revealed in Lord Butler's report last summer? God willing, it will be many years before Mr Blair indeed has to answer to his Maker for a conflict which has cost thousands of military and civilian lives. But there are not many weeks to go now before he must answer to a potentially much harsher judge: the British electorate. | 
