The biography of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, published shortly before he led Labour to its massive General Election victory on July 4, reveals the Christianity in his background.
The author of Keir Starmer, The Biography is Tom Baldwin, a national newspaper journalist and former communications director for the Labour Party. He recounts how Starmer's late mother Jo, who died in 2015, was a regular member of St John's Hurst Green, a village near Oxted in Surrey.
Jo Starmer, a nurse and mother of four children, endured life-long health problems with extraordinary courage. She continued going to her local Church of England parish church after she had her leg amputated because of an accident in the Lake District in 2008.
Baldwin describes how Starmer's late father, Rod, a professing atheist like his son, took her to church in her wheelchair: "Each Sunday Rod would wheel Jo into church, before sitting outside until the 'religious mumbo-jumbo' was over, then complain to some of the other congregants about how they'd parked their cars on the pavement and made his job of getting the wheelchair in more difficult."
The book reveals that "one of Starmer's regrets is that his children never got to know her or feel the love she had given him". Starmer is quoted describing his mother's reaction after she fell over at a road junction, with the family dog, while meeting him and his sister on their way home from primary school. Unable to get up due to the impact of Still's disease on her joints and ligaments, she had to be helped onto her feet by a passing motorist.
"Mum was never one to make a fuss. When she was back on her feet, she joked about what had happened, paid lots of attention to the dog, and took us home," Starmer recalled.
Baldwin includes an interview with Shaun Fenton, the headmaster of Reigate Grammar School, which Starmer attended in the 1970s. It is now a private school and is about to be severely hit by Labour's plan to remove private schools' exemption from paying VAT on their fees.
Fenton is quoted as saying: "Keir will remember having to sing our school song at assemblies, 'To Be a Pilgrim', which is all about going on a special journey with a purpose. My advice to him is to go on and be a pilgrim and do good in the world."
The hymn, based on words by John Bunyan, the 17<sup>th Century Puritan author of the Christian classic, The Pilgrim's Progress, states in its opening verse: "He who would valiant be 'gainst all disaster, let him in constancy follow the Master. There's no discouragement shall make him once relent his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim."
It concludes with a call to courageous Christian discipleship: "Since, Lord, Thou dost defend us with Thy Spirit, we know we at the end shall life inherit. Then, fancies, flee away! I'll fear not what men say, I'll labour night and day to be a pilgrim."
In an article for The Spectator on July 6, Dan Hitchens, a former editor of The Catholic Herald, asked: "Does Keir Starmer's atheism matter?"
Hitchens argued that what he termed "Starmer's insensitivity to religion" might well matter: "Take his policy of introducing VAT on school fees. Eton and Harrow can take it. But what about the Christian, Muslim and Jewish institutions with attendances below 300 and fees of, say, £6,000 a year, which run on goodwill and prayer?"
Hitchens also cited Labour's plan to ban conversion therapy "abandoned by the Tories partly because every way of framing it was an obvious threat to religious freedom".
He quoted the Evangelical Alliance's warning that an expansive ban "would place church leaders at risk of prosecution when they preach on biblical texts relating to marriage and sexuality" and could "criminalise a member of a church who prays with another member when they ask for prayer to resist temptation".
"Labour's manifesto promises to institute a ban, without explaining how they would avoid putting traditional religious believers on the wrong side of the law," Hitchens wrote.
So, there is considerable irony in the fact that Starmer used to sing Bunyan's hymn regularly as a school boy. Unless Labour relents on its plan to impose arguably the most draconian restriction on British religious liberty since the 17<sup>th Century, orthodox Christians who hold to the Church's traditional sexual ethic are likely to need just the kind of spiritual and moral courage that To Be a Pilgrim calls for.
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
