Margaret Thatcher’s biographer talks to Peter Stanford about politics, Christianity, and the Pope – and his conversion to Catholicism following the Church of England’s decision to ordain women

Margaret Thatcher’s biographer talks about politics, Christianity and the Pope – and his conversion to Catholicism following the Church of England’s decision to ordain women

Some who join the Catholic Church from other denominations talk about the experience being like “coming home”. For Charles Moore, who converted in 1994 soon after the Church of England’s decision to ordain women, the overwhelming sensation was, he recalls, more a case of “leaving home”.

And the umbilical cord hasn’t entirely been cut. The former editor of The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph (where he remains the paper’s most popular columnist) says he is still “culturally” a member of the Church of England. “In our village [in Sussex], my wife is a church warden. I feel very in touch with it.”

He pauses to take a mouthful of lasagne. We are meeting in a favourite greasy spoon cafe of his in the backstreets of Victoria in central London, where despite his collar and tie (Private Eye sends him up as the fogeyish “Lord Snooty”) he looks thoroughly at home. His schedule is tight, the third and final volume of his acclaimed authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, Herself Alone, having just come out, so he is combining our interview with a late lunch – and manages to co-ordinate the competing demands of digestion and carefully chosen words with impressive elan.

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