How the Conservative Party lost their religion to the pull of the market.
Asking what the point of the Conservative Party is has long been a dangerous exercise. What we can definitely identify – albeit with the aid of those pesky historians – is what it was for.
The Church of England (CofE) was once referred to as the ‘Tory Party at Prayer’, which remains the case in the emptying pews of the rolling shires. But in the vicarages and bishops’ palaces, a quiet revolution has long taken since taken place. Openly Tory clergy are an endangered breed, and openly Tory bishops have gone the way of the dodo. Institutionally speaking, the Church of England and the Conservative Party have been engaged in open warfare since the days of Thatcher. It was then, memorably, that Alan Webster, dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, conducted a piece of Premier League trolling by proposing that the Lord’s Prayer be spoken in Spanish at the Falklands War victory celebration service.
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