God and Mrs Thatcher: Conviction Politics in Britain’s Secular Age

This wide-ranging and extensively researched book, which draws on previously undiscovered archives, interviews and memoirs, offers a radical new perspective on the interrelationship between religion and politics in Britain’s secular age, revealing how Britain created Margaret Thatcher and, ultimately, how Margaret Thatcher recreated Britain. Few people are aware that Margaret Thatcher was a devout Christian or that she was a preacher before she was a politician. As a child, she would sit in the pews listening to her lay-preacher father, Alf Roberts, hammer home sermons on the Protestant work ethic, God-given liberty and the sanctity of the individual. As her father’s archives reveal, it was in the pulpit of Finkin Street’s Wesleyan Chapel in Grantham where Thatcherism was born. When Thatcher recited the prayer of St Francis of Assisi on the steps of No 10, it signaled a new era of conviction politics.