If you ask me whether I was deeply Christian, the answer is that I went to college chapel and had a strong polemical Christianity... It could well be… - Maurice Cowling

[T]he [Conservative] party has to do two things. It has not only to propose policies which derive from principles, it has also to create a pork-barrel interest which will persuade groups of electors severally and in detail that they would gain financially from a Conservative government. Secondly, as beneficiary of the public's dislike of the euro, it has to avoid giving offence to electors who agree with it on this issue only and at the same time has to respond to the culture of political mistrust which is the most important feature of the present situation – more important, probably, than hostility to the euro, because it strikes at the new era of sincerity and good feelings of which Mr Blair and Mr Ashdown have been the leaders.

It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939... [F]rom the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.

What needs to be explained is not particularly why Roman Catholics go to church, but why Protestants don't. Somehow the gut seems to have gone out of English Protestantism. It's turned into these post-Christian moralistic sentiments.