With preparations for the Pope’s visit to Britain in disarray, the government called in Lord Patten to smooth things out. He tells Damian Thompson why he is up to the task
Prime Ministers do not always enjoy reading The Spectator and a month ago we ran a cover story that was — I am told — a ‘real eye-opener’ to David Cameron. We revealed that the Catholic hierarchy in England was hopelessly out of its depth organising the Pope’s visit to Britain and that the event was out of control. Its centrepiece, a Mass at Coventry airport to beatify Cardinal Newman, was about to be cancelled as a result of soaring costs. The first state visit of Mr Cameron’s premiership was in danger. Someone needed to take charge.
Lord Patten will say only that it was ‘around that time’ that he received a call from 10 Downing Street. ‘You had a very good story,’ he says. ‘The Church did have second thoughts about Coventry.’ He launches into a perfectly reasonable-sounding explanation that the trees would have blocked visitors’ lines of sight and that ‘people trampling through fields in the early hours of the morning seemed to be a bad idea’. So, instead, the Church chose Cofton Park, Birmingham, which can handle 80,000 visitors instead of the airport’s 200,000.
Ever the diplomat, Lord Patten — the last governor of Hong Kong, a former chairman of the Conservative party, Chancellor of Oxford University and a prominent liberal Catholic — is playing down the notion that he has been brought in to put out some kind of fire. But, as he speaks, he is seemingly unaware of a letter lying in front of him that tells a rather different story.
It is from Alan Rudge, a senior official of Birmingham City Council, and dated only two weeks ago. It says: ‘I am increasingly concerned about discussions of which I have become aware which suggest that — at this very late stage — the Midlands Mass on the 19th of September [should be moved] from Coventry airport to Cofton Park.’
Outside diplomatic circles, this sort of situation is called a ‘blind panic’. The Vatican is furious about the mess, especially as Catholics in Britain have been asked to pay for the trip, only to find the costs doubled thanks to the basic late-running and incompetence of the English Church. Mr Cameron, meanwhile, is aware that a logistical disaster would badly damage Britain’s international reputation; he also knows that the Queen is anxious that the visit should be a success.
Gordon Brown invited the Pontiff in February 2009 but then took little interest in the plans. In April 2010, news leaked of a Foreign Office memo suggesting that Benedict XVI should placate his critics by launching his own brand of condoms or dropping in on an abortion clinic. Lord Patten blames this stunt on ‘two idiots’ in the FO who detracted from its otherwise excellent work in setting up the visit. Then came the election campaign and the hiatus, leaving affairs in the hands of the main Church organiser, an ambitious left-wing monsignor called Andrew Summersgill. He floundered, and hasn’t been seen at recent press conferences.
Is Mgr Summersgill still the organiser? Lord Patten chooses his words carefully: ‘He’s still involved on the Church side of things.’
Actually, the Church and state sides of things are now hard to disentangle. The Most Revd Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, refuses to divulge how much extra money Catholics will have to find, though he’s ‘relaxed’ about it. That’s funny, when you consider how unrelaxed he was when Summersgill told him that Coventry would have to be called off. One explanation may be that Mr Cameron has authorised the government to meet costs that previously fell to the Church, such as security at the Masses; we do know that the state’s bill has risen by £4 million to £12 million.
What the government can’t do, however, is insure against other things going wrong: a PR disaster, for example, caused by a Catholic paedophile scandal that has been saved up by the media for Benedict’s arrival. What will Lord Patten do then?
He responds with the broad, cold smile with which he greets most questions. ‘There’ll also be a problem if Westminster Cathedral collapses. If I could just make this point: I’ve always found that the jobs I’ve done in politics were difficult enough without imagining even more difficult questions than the one I have to answer.’
But the Westminster Cathedral analogy is preposterous, and if Lord Patten hasn’t imagined a paedophile storm breaking over the visit, then he should have. So I press him on it. He starts to say that ‘most abuse of children takes place within families’ but then quickly backs away from that line of argument. ‘Sexual attacks on children [by clergy] are like attacks on Jesus. The way that some priests and bishops dealt with them was indefensible. This is not only a time, as Vincent Nichols and the English bishops have said, for repentance, but also for ensuring full transparency in England and greater dialogue within the Church and between the Church and others.’
True, but various newspapers have tried to suggest that Benedict XVI covered up abuse. Presumably, like me, he regards those claims as unfounded. ‘As far as I know they are unfounded,’ he says. ‘And I’m struck by the fact that somebody like Timothy Radcliffe has been so assertive in defending the Pope after disagreeing with him so vehemently when he was head of the Dominicans.’
Fr Radcliffe is a posh, progressive theologian, idolised by socially ambitious bien pensant Catholics. Conservative types may be irritated by the implication that the Pope must be innocent because Radcliffe says so — but hardly surprised. Radcliffe is the favourite priest of The Tablet, a liberal Catholic magazine unsympathetic to Benedict XVI, whose trustees include Dame Helen Ghosh, the head of Whitehall’s Papal Visit Team, Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, and Lord Patten of Barnes. Some Church sources suggest that, in order to distance themselves from Pope Benedict’s conservatism, the English bishops have forged an alliance with lay representatives of ‘Catholicism-lite’, whose most powerful spokesman is Chris Patten.
He certainly doesn’t pretend to be as orthodox as Joseph Ratzinger. ‘I’m like a lot of other Catholics,’ he says. ‘I don’t agree with everything that the Vatican says. But I admire this Pope intellectually and suspect he’s rather more open to dialogue with the 21st century than one or two of those who advise him.’
We quickly touch on a couple of contentious issues: the use of condoms to stop the spread of Aids, which Patten supports, and homosexuality. ‘The Catholic Church and other Churches are full of people who are devout and gay, and I assume that one reason that God loves them is that they have been subject to so much discrimination and persecution,’ he says. That’s a message that will play well on Channel 4 News, and it suggests that Lord Patten’s role extends beyond organisation: he’s a human shield, as it were, between the Church and a growing number of British taxpayers who regard Catholic moral teaching as hypocrisy — and aren’t in a mood to subsidise the Pope in an era of austerity.
‘Look, of all the organisational challenges I’ve faced in my career, I wouldn’t describe this as the greatest,’ he says. Perhaps not. Then again, he doesn’t know what the enemies of the Church in the media and on the streets are planning. Protecting Catholic bureaucrats from the consequences of their own incompetence is one thing, and Lord Patten has already done it. But can he protect the Pope?
Damian Thompson is a l eader writer for the Daily Telegraph and a director of the Catholic Herald.