The FT Magazine has a cover boy today: Tim Montgomerie. It’s about how “a small group of Christian Conservatives are rewriting party doctrine,” and has positioned Tim in such a way that there appears to be a halo behind his head with his eyes heavenwards. Something tells me this was not the picture Tim was expecting. The front cover tease sounds like one of these conspiracy theories you get in America: the capture of a political party by a small band of idealogues etc etc. Read on, and the piece is fair and instructive: it tells the important – but hardly controversial – part of a key aspect of Conservative development. It starts in 1990, when Tim founded Conservative Christian Fellowship, on principles which went on to guide his career. Such principles informed Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice – which, of course, is now perhaps the single most influential think-tank on Tory policy.
So, how “Christian” is all this? The CSJ is about concern for the poor, about the basic duty to look at politics in terms of what it can do for the least advantaged.
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