Twenty-five years ago, the bishops of England and Wales invited a journalist to draft a statement on politics and economics that was to provoke fury among Conservative politicians and commentators - and would raise concerns among many Catholics, including Cardinal Basil Hume

In the first half of 1996, I was acting editor of The Tablet while John Wilkins was taking a sabbatical. One day I had a phone call from Nicholas Coote, assistant secretary of the bishops’ conference of England and Wales. They had a problem. Would I have lunch with him and David Konstant, Bishop of Leeds, to talk about it?

They explained that the bishops wanted to say something to address the issues that would be in play in the forthcoming general election, in which the Conservative government led by John Major was expected to face a stiff challenge from a resurgent Labour Party under the leadership of Tony Blair. I was roped in to help. A group of nine or so archbishops and bishops was assembled, and we started the first of many meetings together. Basil Hume was not among them. But he hovered. Once, when I met him in the corridor at Archbishop’s House, he muttered something about “all that Quadragesimo Anno stuff”. That encyclical on the Church’s social teaching had been published in 1931.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I was not the bishops’ first choice as the planned document’s principal author. Hume had wanted to hand the project to his brother-in-law, Lord Hunt, who had been Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service. John Hunt was married to the cardinal’s sister. Hume, wittily nicknamed GBH in his inner circle, was the son of Sir William Errington Hume, CMG MA MD FRCP, who married the daughter of an officer in the French army in 1918, hence the Catholicism, hence the touch of class. Hunt was also chairman of the Tablet board.