BADLY KEPT SECRET:

Revealed: Tony Blair's Catholic secret (Damian Thompson, 09/04/2005, Daily Telegraph)

The scene: the nave of Westminster Cathedral, its Byzantine mosaics glistening below bare brick walls that are still unfinished after a century. The occasion: Solemn Vespers for His late Holiness Pope John Paul II.

Enter Tony Blair, the (Protestant) Prime Minister of the (Protestant) United Kingdom, who makes a little bob of genuflection before the Catholic Blessed Sacrament.

Tony and Cherie Blair
Cherie Blair wearing her mantilla

Enter the Prime Minister's wife, a feminist Catholic who did not even wear a hat to the funeral of the Princess of Wales.

She is not wearing a hat this time, either: dangling from her head is a black lace veil known as a mantilla. She looks like a Sicilian widow about to fling herself on her husband's coffin.

In the pews, the editor of one Catholic newspaper turns to the chairman of another.

Editor: "Is Cherie wearing what I think she's wearing?" Chairman: "Good God. I haven't seen a mantilla for 20 years."

As last Monday's congregation assembled, the Cardinal, bishops and priests of the cathedral blinked in disbelief.

In the front row sat the heir to the throne, who had just postponed his own wedding so that he could fly to Rome for the Pope's funeral yesterday.

The Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles said that they took this decision "immediately" on learning that the Windsor ceremony would clash with the papal obsequies - though, as we shall see, there are reasons for taking this claim with a pinch of salt.

On entering the pew, the Prince leaned forward awkwardly in the time-honoured manner of Anglicans who cannot quite bring themselves to kneel in a Catholic church.

Next to him was his fiancée; then the Prime Minister and Mrs Blair - who, unless the cameras lied, gave Mrs Parker Bowles a distinctly old-fashioned look from underneath her veil.

Behind them sat the leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, and representatives of the Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist and Baha'i faiths. As for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, he was not in the pews at all, but robed in a place of honour in the sanctuary.

"Last time I looked, Britain wasn't a Roman Catholic country," wrote Vicki Woods in The Telegraph the next morning. And, of course, it isn't. But last Monday, it wasn't doing a very good impression of a Protestant one.

"It was like a miracle," says Fr Michael Seed, ecumenical adviser to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. "Tony Blair, Prince Charles, Lady Thatcher, John Major, Michael Howard, Charles Kennedy, the Lord Chancellor, half the Cabinet and the entire diplomatic corps, plus the Union flag at half mast and prayers in mosques... This is a time of God's blessing on the earth."

After the service, however, many worshippers were still fixated on the mystery of Cherie's headgear. Wearing a mantilla in London is the equivalent of a modern City banker sporting a bowler hat - a head-turning anachronism.

"I know she's proud of her faith, but she didn't have to rub our noses in it," grumbled one Catholic grandee.

In fact, there was an innocent and rather sweet reason why Cherie was wearing a mantilla: she wanted to remind herself of the time she wore it - as convention demanded - when Pope John Paul celebrated Mass for the Blair family at the Vatican in February 2003.

That story has never been properly told; bits of it emerged at the time, only to be swiftly - and untruthfully - denied by Vatican sources.

Next week, however, an authoritative account of it will appear in Garry O'Connor's new papal biography Universal Father, based on a 90-minute interview with Cherie Blair. Only one key detail is missing.

If Europeans could only process the obvious they'd not have so much trouble understanding Tony Blair.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 8, 2005 10:57 PM