Sometimes the Right, when outraged, can be as ridiculously narrow-minded as the Left. Indeed, on the subject of Tony Blair’s knighthood, they seem to be united. Of course Mr Blair should be made a Knight of the Garter. Unlike most honours, the Garter is the personal gift of the Sovereign, not part of the patronage-controlled Honours “system”. Each prime minister is so called because he or she is the Sovereign’s first minister. If the Queen decides Mr Blair deserves it, that should be good enough for the rest of us. 

Besides, he does deserve it. This is not because he was necessarily right: I personally have written tens of thousands of words about the numerous times he was wrong. It is because he was successful. He was one of only three of his party’s leaders ever to win overall Labour majorities in Parliament, and the only one to win enormous majorities all three times he fought. He brought Labour out of an 18-year wilderness. He fulfilled a key condition for our democracy’s functioning, which is that more than one political party should be capable of government. 

Tony Blair was patently up to the job. He outclassed all his Tory opponents and all his own party’s rivals, a fact which drove his eventual successor Gordon Brown (will he accept the Scottish equivalent, the Order of the Thistle?) round the bend. He was capable of leading, deciding, explaining, persuading. He made more difference than any other post-war prime minister except Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. 

My only criticism is of Sir Tony himself for accepting the honour. Part of his “New Labour, New Britain” riff was an uncritical admiration of “modernising”. He was abysmally ignorant of history and careless about our institutions – hence his bungled reform of the House of Lords and his mishandling of devolution. The Order of the Garter is a medieval, religious and monarchical institution. If Sir Tony were consistent with his Year Zero beliefs, he would disdain the Queen’s offer. (There is precedent: Harold Macmillan, of all people, refused it twice.) 

Archbishop Tutu’s Surrey sojourn 

In the warm obituaries of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I was sorry not to read more about his time as a curate in Surrey in the mid-1960s. The Guardian said that “initially stand-offish Tories took him to their hearts”. No one else said anything much.

In fact, Tutu’s 18 months in the Home Counties were quite important in his formation as an Anglican priest, and I know of no evidence that Tories (or anyone else) were stand-offish. 

The part-monastic Anglican Community of the Resurrection was a strong influence on the young Desmond, especially through Bishop Trevor Huddleston, after whom Tutu named one of his sons. After Tutu’s first curacy in Golders Green, his friends cast about for an inner-city post for him while he completed his Masters degree (on Islam, interestingly) at King’s College, London. 

At this point, however, my wife’s cousin Uvedale Lambert, stepped in. He was a devout Anglican, a member of the Community of the Resurrection’s lay fraternity, a Guardian of the Shrine of Walsingham, and a High Church “bells and smells” man. He was also a Master of Foxhounds and squire, if such a word can still be used, of the then rural Surrey village of Bletchingley (which he insisted was rightly spelt Blechingley). 

Uvedale and his wife Melanie used to hold annual weekends of spiritual study and reflection – known as their “gin and God” parties – in their house, South Park, and its adjoining private chapel. They organised many Christian pageants and missions. Uvedale helped secure the Bletchingley curacy for Tutu, and made sure he and his family were properly housed. 

It was from this little world that Desmond learnt more about the ecumenical catholicity of the Church of England. At the gin and God party during his time in the parish, Fr Tutu gave a talk on “Obedience”, and later another on “Merit”.

According to Uvedale’s daughter, Dame Sarah Goad, Desmond Tutu made a great and favourable impression. The content of his individual sermons was not especially memorable, but he was “joyous” and “radiated the love of God”, as did his whole family. Sarah’s daughter, the future jeweller, Cassandra Goad, became a close friend of one of the Tutu daughters, Mpho. Years later, Tutu returned to marry Cassandra and her husband in the South Park chapel.  

Sarah remembers no example of racial feeling against the Tutus in the village, but that he liked to joke about his colour. “You can’t see when I blush”, he would say, and pointed out that when he mounted into the darkness of the pulpit, only his teeth were visible. 

He was also “fairly hopeless” with money. When he returned to South Africa, the parish bought him a car and later, for his ministry in Lesotho, a horse.  

I find no evidence that the African curate ever indulged in Uvedale’s passion for fox-hunting, but when he returned as a bishop to visit Bletchingley he appeared in his episcopal robes to bless Richard Gurney, the son of Uvedale’s groom, before the hunt Meet. Like Tutu, Mr Gurney benefitted from Uvedale’s support early in life, and is now a Master of Foxhounds himself. 

There is some evidence that the very lack of racial animosity which Tutu experienced in England helped embolden him to try to change the terrible divisions in his native South Africa. I like to think his Surrey sojourn did its bit.