An Iron Lady of Christian faith
By Tim Montgomerie
Follow Tim on Twitter
One of the best pieces you'll read in the papers this morning is in the Daily Mail from Cynthia Crawford - 'Crawfie' - Lady Thatcher's personal assistant during her time at Number 10 and her lifelong friend. In a intimate portrait Crawfie - as Lady Thatcher called her - writes about Mrs Thatcher the private person - including her love of fashion and, in this extract, her personal faith:
"It was the private face of Lady T that I knew best. I saw her humanity. I was with her when she wept privately for our soldiers killed in the Falklands. I knelt beside her when — careless of her own close brush with death — we prayed together at our bedsides for the bereaved on the night of the Brighton bomb."
In The Times (link to follow) we also have a piece from her former Head of the Number 10 Policy Unit, Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach. Brian writes about the Iron Lady's faith. Here's an extract:
"For Margaret Thatcher the Christian faith was not only intensely personal, it was also the basis of her approach to economic and social policy. She was a politician not a theologian but she had an instinctive grasp of orthodox Christian theology. She placed great stress on the Old Testament and referred to her perspective as Judaeo-Christian rather than simply Christian. Christian social doctrine was in the Old Testament, while its spirit and deeper meaning were set out by Jesus in the gospels. She had great regard for the Chief Rabbi, who was later ennobled and more generally for the commitment to family, public service and charity shown by the Jewish Community. By taking key elements from both the Old and New Testaments she argued that we gain “a view of the universe, a proper attitude to work and principles to shape economic and social life”. The creation mandate, care for the environment, private property rights, the rule of law, economic justice, provisions for the elderly, the sick and the disabled were all principles which influenced her policies and which grew out of her Judaeo-Christian world view."
Comments