Conservative History Journal

Tory Historian does not find it particularly shocking that the Leader of Her Majesty's Mostly Loyal Opposition should suddenly find his own God or religion after a lifetime of secular atheism as several elections start looming. The one that really matters will be next year but it is as well to prepare oneself in time.

Mr Miliband has not only decided to "do God" in political terms - an unwise decision in TH's opinion - but has announced that he was looking forward to being Britain's first Jewish Prime Minister. There was a general outcry of people who seem to know basic facts of this country's political history better than Mr Miliband. Have we not had a Jewish Prime Minister already in the nineteenth century? And did not Mr Miliband quote him or, to be quite precise, misquote him not so long ago, when he told the listening world that Labour was now the party of "One Nation", a phrase usually though erroneously associated with Benjamin Disraeli.

Ah yes, we are told, not least by Mr Miliband and his media minions, but Disraeli had been baptized in the Anglican Church and was, indeed, a practising member of it. Well, Mr Miliband was brought up as a secular, Marxist atheist and has, until now, been certainly a practising member of the last group. (We can discuss the Marxist part separately.) Where is the difference? Certainly, Disraeli's contemporaries thought of him as Jewish and called him that, whether in admiration, as Bismarck did, or not so much as various Liberals in Britain did.

Furthermore, Disraeli was all his life fascinated by Judaism and inserted ideas about it into his speeches and even more into his novels. Until this moment nothing has been heard from Mr Miliband on the subject.

It is, perhaps, time for Tory Historian to alert ambitious women politicians in the Labour Party: should one of them become Prime Minister one day (at present an unlikely contingency but events might intervene), she will not be the first woman Prime Minister in Britain. As with the Jewish one, the Conservative Party got there first.