Shaphan

Cameron's cardinal sin

David Cameron has a curious relationship to organized religion.  At least, I'm curious about it.  For example, if Garibaldi is his political hero, then is Cameron sympathetic to anti-clericalism, and, if so, how would that affect his premiership?

Yesterday, it was reported that Cameron has caused great offence to the Cardinal Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh.

David Cameron has been accused of insulting the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland during a courtesy visit to London. 

Cardinal Keith O'Brien, whose staff began to organise his itinerary four months ago, returned to Scotland yesterday fuming at the Tory leader's refusal to meet him. 

Sources close to the cardinal made no secret of their anger at what they described as a "real discourtesy" to one of the two most senior figures in the Catholic Church in the UK...

Need I stress that Cardinal O'Brien is quite an important man.  Snubbing him is not far removed from insulting the Pope;  it's all very Garibaldiesque but questionable behaviour from a possible future prime minister.

There's not much information about Cameron's religious views that I can find, presumably because the question isn't often posed.  But last November he was asked about God on BBC's Newsnight.

Paxman:   And one final question. Do you take guidance from God?
Cameron:   Well, I believe in God, um, and I try to go to church, um, more than Christmas and Easter but perhaps not as much as I should.  But I, I don't feel any 'direct line'.

So, he's a typical Anglican, attending church as infrequently as a Tory MP in Oxon can get away with.  Trust me, he's saying, I don't take it as seriously as Bush and Blair.

We know his views on Islam because he gave a speech last August to the Foreign Policy Centre.  He dun like it.  On Torah Judaism his thoughts are not known, but he's a friend of the Zionists, as he recently spoke at the Board of Deputies of British Jews.  As Tory leader, I can't find a reference to him visiting any mosques or temples, although he probably has(?).  But he did visit, in February this year, a Christianity-linked organization in Witney, his constituency.  It could be that constituency business made the trip unavoidable.  Or perhaps it was a deliberate PR move.  He took John Lloyd, of the FT, with him, which suggests the latter.  (I don't have an FT subscription, but Tory Diary reported on aspects of Lloyd's subsequent article.)

The organization Cameron visited was Open Doors with Brother Andrew (UK), the British section of the worldwide body set up to support the evangelical mission of a Dutch pastor, Brother Andrew [wikipedia], aka 'God's Smuggler'.  Some mystery and controversy surround this man and his work.  Bro. Andrew helped undermine the Soviet empire, he's been working on China, and now he's focused on Islamic states - so his political agenda fits well with Bro. Dave's speech on Islam last year, in which he compared Islamists to Nazis and Communists. 

A profile of Bro. Andrew, titled 'Secret Agent Man', appeared in Charisma magazine.

Today, Brother Andrew is eyeing the more formidable giant of Islam, which he considers more dangerous because of its 1,400-year history.

"As far back as 1978 I was telling people that Islam will soon be a much greater threat than communism ever was," he says.  "Russia never had more than 6 percent of its population following communism.  Meanwhile Islam has its own book and far more dedicated followers."

That does not mean he is cowering in the face of the Islamic Goliath.  Indeed, Brother Andrew has given the rest of his life to challenge it.  While Open Doors works in many parts of the world, Brother Andrew conducts almost all his efforts in Islamic nations...

And I was struck by this bit:

Just one week before Charisma's interview, three of his friends were murdered in Afghanistan.  Dealing with such tragedy is the most difficult part of his job.  Says Brother Andrew:

"Liberal Christians tell me I should just leave [Muslims] alone, but I know we must go to them.  People say to me, 'Isn't it cruel to win converts, and then see them killed?'  I tell the liberals that it is better that these [converts from Islam] are now with Jesus in heaven than for them to be in hell."

Better to be a dead Christian than to live as a Muslim in a Muslim society, worshipping the One God.  A Christian could reasonably oppose what Bro. Andrew is doing, without being a 'liberal'.  One could even question how authentic is the Christianity Bro. Andrew cloaks himself in.  His mission appears more to be to liberalize and westernize illiberal and non-western societies, using religion as a weapon and converts as ammunition.  Brother Andrew's agenda has always suited US foreign policy, and I've little doubt he is linked to the CIA or some such agency (as this site alleges).  Bro. Andrew has his 150-page KGB file, of which he is proud.  I'd bet there are many intelligence files worldwide, from many agencies, on this man and his mission.

So Cameron's record on Christianity is patchy.  He claims to be an untheologically committed Anglican;  he's just spectacularly insulted the leader of Scotland's Roman Catholics;  and he's identified himself with a political missionary whose approach to Islam is distinctly un-Christian.  Curious.

The Press Gallery's Masonic Lodge(s)

I wrote yesterday about David Cameron choosing arch-Mason Giuseppe Garibaldi as his political hero, and also mentioned how a previous speech of Cameron's had had a noticable Churchillian influence (and that Bro. Churchill was also a Mason).  What I didn't know then was that Cameron, at the same event, had also named Churchill as one of his inspirations.

Asked about his political heroes and heroines at a journalists' lunch at Westminster, Mr Cameron came up with the unsurprising names of Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill.

There was one intriguing name on his list, however - Giussepi [sic] Garibaldi, the Italian soldier and nationalist who led the fight for the reunification of his country.

Lest he be linked too closely with Garibaldi's frequently violent methods, Mr Cameron was anxious to point out that his choice was influenced by his fondness for Garibaldi biscuits.

I don't believe that last bit about the biscuits - it's like saying he admires Maggie partly because he likes thatched cottages.  And what above is described as a journalists' lunch was a speech-plus-lunch with the Parliamentary Press Gallery lunch club.

A Masonic story about the Parliamentary Press Gallery appeared in the UK Press Gazette earlier this year [link - scroll down].

Recipients of email to lodge complaint?

SPARE a thought for Fleet Street veteran Rob Gibson, who has learnt the hard way about the dangers of email.

The former Daily Express political editor and dedicated fund-raiser for journalists' charity the NPF now runs the highly regarded Gallery News at the House of Commons.  Gibson sends out stories daily to a host of outlets, including MPs at Westminster.

Unfortunately, Gibson sent out one email in error last week that was a little too "exclusive".

To the great man's consternation, it contained the minutes of the latest meeting of his Masonic lodge.  Now there's open government for you.

MPs at Westminster have had their own Masonic lodge since 1929, but the lobby journalists' lodge dates back to 1881.  According to Martin Short in Inside the Brotherhood (p.582):

[C]oncern [about the influence of Freemasonry in Parliament] has never been reported by Britain's Parliamentary press.  Its silence may have something to do with the fact that a second lodge operates in the Palace of Westminster.  Thirty-eight years before MPs had their own New Welcome Lodge [no. 1539], the press lobby had set up the Gallery Lodge (no. 1928).

Kevin Maguire added this, about the Gibson faux pas, in the New Statesman:

I read in the minutes of the parliamentary press pinny boys the names of an old Times hand, a couple of ex-Express scribes and my former boss at the Press Association news wire, yet disappointingly none of the Gallery galacticos.  Word was that the masons operated two lobby lodges, so perhaps chapter 1928 is the retirees.  Anyone who’d like to peruse what this funny-handshake brigade got up to at their 366th convocation should get in touch.

And former regional lobby journalist Paul Linford blogs:

Correspondents were frequently baffled to find the chairs in the Lobby Room rearranged with one facing the wrong way - a seating arrangement consistent with the masonic initiation ritual in which the candidate sits blindfolded with his back to the room.

On one memorable occasion, a notorious wind-up merchant in the regional lobby put out a spoof tannoy for the Secretary of the Press Gallery Freemasons' Lodge - such a body does exist.

It was answered by a very well-known Sunday newspaper political editor, who maintained he was simply curious as to who was on the other end of the line.....

Anyway, my point is that there is at least one Masonic lodge for the lobby journalists in the Palace of Westminster, in a tradition going back 125 years.  So, when David Cameron addressed the assembled hacks, his mentioning of Churchill and Garibaldi as political heroes would have gone down very well with all the Masons in the audience.

P.S. [2006.05.05]  I didn't know but the Parliamentary Press Gallery has its own website.  There's a list of every member of the lobby.  The aforementioned Rob(ert) Gibson is Chairman of the Press Gallery.

David Cameron, Garibaldi and Freemasonry

According to the Tory Diary blog, David Cameron has named Giuseppe Garibaldi as his political hero.  It's a striking choice.  Whilst it's true that, at the end of his life, Garibaldi described himself as a pacifist and a socialist, before then he and his men had killed countless thousands of people, all in the cause of a worldwide Freemasonic brotherhood.  It's that younger Garibaldi that Cameron admires.  Quite why Cameron would identify himself with a Masonic zealot is unknown, especially if he had been wanting to allay suspicions that he might himself be 'on the square'.

One of my few blog entries that gets occasionally Googled concerns the question of David Cameron and Freemasonry.  To recap:  before Cameron became a political star, and at the time of his first job within the Tory shadow cabinet, a poster to the Usenet newsgroup alt.freemasonry wrote, on July 3rd, 2003:

I'd like to congratulate my local Masonic lodge member, David Cameron MP for Witney, on his promotion to Deputy Speaker for the Conservative Party.  As an extremely young MP (thirties) I expect him to be party leader by the end of his political career...

Cameron's elevation was actually to Shadow Deputy Leader of the House, but that mistake somehow made the message more credible.  But a spokesperson from his office denied that Cameron was a Mason, so the veracity of that Usenet posting remains in question.

But Cameron has now linked himself with the 'First Freemason of Italy', Giuseppe Garibaldi. Wikipedia has this to say on the subject:

Garibaldi subscribed to the anti-clericalism common among Latin liberals and did much to circumscribe the temporal power of the Papacy.  His personal convictions bordered on atheism; he wrote in 1882, "Man created God, not God Man."  An active freemason, Garibaldi had little use for rituals, but thought of masonry as a network to unite progressive men as brothers both within nations and as members of a global community.

A novus ordo seclorum, in other words.  For some reason I'm reminded of a speech Cameron gave to the Foreign Policy Centre in August 2005, the one in which he compared Islamists to Nazis.  In it he repeatedly invoked the 1930s, and cast himself as a Winston Churchill figure, in his wilderness years, prophetically calling on Britain to strengthen its military and intelligence capabilities in order to fight and defeat the 'totalitarian' forces opposing the liberal world order.  Bro. Churchill was also a Mason -  Cameron does seem to admire leaders fuelled by Masonic beliefs.

Garibaldi "was initiated into Freemasonry in 1844, at the age of thirty-seven, in the 'L'Asil de la Vertud' Lodge of Montevideo", although he had earlier joined the Masonic revolutionary movement, the Carbonari, in Piedmont in 1834.  After lodging and fighting in South America, he went north and "attended the masonic lodges of New York in 1850 and London in 1853-54".  He is credited with unifying the two Rites of Memphis and Misraïm in 1881, and he became that Order's first International Grand Master.  For the full extent of Garibaldi's immersion in Freemasonry, see this page.

My point is that Cameron could hardly have chosen, as a political hero, someone more associated with miltant anti-clerical Freemasonry than Garibaldi.  Several thoughts follow.  Does Cameron see himself as a successor to Garibaldi and Churchill?  Does he share Garibaldi's belief that organised religion must be overthrown, to be replaced globally by Freemasonry?  If Cameron became PM, how would his relations be with a) the Queen, b) the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and c) the Archbishop of Canterbury?  Would he want to abolish them all?  So I hope, before the next election, interviewers will ask David Cameron, given his hero-worship of Garibaldi, his views on organised religion and Freemasonry.

Is David Cameron a Freemason?

And, if so, what effect would that have on his governance, were the MP for Witney (Oxfordshire) to be indirectly elected PM?  UK political blog Recess Monkey wrote this on 12th December:

While conducting deep investigative research (googling) into Opus Dave, I came across this strange reference in google cache.  allanparkinson69 has posted the following text on some sort of masons' chat board saying,

I'd like to congratulate my local Masonic lodge member, David Cameron MP for Witney, on his promotion to Deputy Speaker for the Conservative Party.

As an extremely young MP (thirties) I expect him to be party leader by the end of his political career...

Posted on 4th June, this message predates leadership election character assassinations, though also has a ring of american about it too, so I can't decide whether or not I think it's authentic...

I've traced the original message back to the Usenet newsgroup alt.freemasonry.  allanparkinson69 posted 118 messages to alt.freemasonry between May and September 2003.  The above message was posted not on June 4th 2005 but on July 3rd 2003.  That would make the message more credible, and alanparkinson69's 117 other messages generally indicate a sound mind that's British, not American.

As a sidenote, and coincidentally, the Sunday Times reported on 20 November 2005 that:

THE Conservative party has accepted a £93,000 donation from a fund run by one of Britain's most senior freemasons.

The donation was paid by the Midlands-based Leamington Fund.  No public records exist for the fund, which is an "unincorporated association". 

However, The Sunday Times has established that the fund's chairman is Michael Price, the provincial grandmaster of Warwickshire freemasons.  Price, 70, is the most senior mason in Birmingham and the surrounding area, and is in charge of 200 lodges and about 6,500 masons.  Warwickshire and Oxfordshire are adjoining counties.

ADDENDA

1.  I should note that Recess Monkey was contacted by a spokesman for Cameron who denied that his master was, or has ever been, a Mason.  Which sounds as if his office is quite sensitive about the allegation.  And I'm not sure that a denial that one's master is a Freemason is proof of the same.

2.  The original message referred to Cameron's elevation to Deputy Speaker for the Conservative Party, a non-existent post.  However, in June 2003, Cameron was appointed the Conservatives' Deputy Shadow Leader of the House. 

3.  [2006.01.01]  The Leamington Fund, it transpires, gave its £93,000 to the Birmingham, Solihull and Coventry branch of the Conservative Party, not to the national party, sometime in the third quarter of this year (ie between 01 July and 30 September).   

4. [2006.05.07]  Please see later posts:  David Cameron, Garibaldi and Freemasonry and The Press Gallery's Masonic Lodge(s).