British history is littered with elections and Elections. The first type, common or garden elections, are fought with prosaic issues at their core. Readers might remember the 2001 general election, which saw such pressing topics as the fate of Kidderminster hospital pushed to the fore. The 1865 general election was also considered uneventful by contemporaries. Even contests nominally involving major changes can be just ‘elections’. The tedium of 2024, featuring cynical electoral bribery, with the result a foregone conclusion and the stated policy platforms of the two main parties largely similar, is a prime example.

What, then, are the other type: the Elections? These are existential ones in which visions for the country are put to the test, where the electorate are asked to think and vote on what they believe rather than who can bribe them most effectively. Unsurprisingly, many have had religion at their heart. The first modern general election was one such, when the Tories surged to a landslide in 1710 with the rallying cry of ‘The Church in Danger’. The Liberal landslide of 1906 was helped by a canny manipulation of nonconformist votes in Wales. While explicitly religious Elections have been rarer postwar, both Attlee and Thatcher deployed the vocabulary, syntax and grammar of religion in the wake of their victories, as if electoral mandate and divine vocation were one and the same.

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Tony Blair’s victory in 1997 was infamous as the start of ‘not doing God’. Yet as the political world Blair shaped is swept into the dustbin of history, two things are increasingly clear: our next national poll will be an existential Election, and religion will play a bigger role than it has for years. Britain’s politics is back ‘doing God’ again.

The Labour party is a case in point. Perhaps the most telling divide among its MPs is between those who understand religion and those who don’t. Ministers like Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting are open about faith as a motivation for their political engagement. Two of the most effective backbenchers, who have forced numerous U-turns, are Rachael Maskell and Florence Eshalomi, both devout Christians (Maskell a Charismatic and Eshalomi a Catholic). More cynically, Angela Rayner has kept quiet about her own beliefs but has tried to show........

© The Spectator