THE late Norman Tebbit’s response to the 2018 appointment of the Very Revd Joe Hawes as the brand new Dean of St Edmundsbury was characteristically provocative: “I find it difficult to simply accept a sodomite as a member of the clergy,” he said, and vowed never to attend services.
Dean Hawes and his partner, the Revd Chris Eyden, decided not to reply publicly, and as an alternative set about attempting to “win back” the outspoken former government minister and shut ally of Baroness Thatcher, who died this summer. What followed was a tale of reconciliation, inspired by a surprising friendship.
Dean Hawes sent Lord Tebbit a private invitation to his installation service, which the latter declined in a handwritten note signed off with a spiky rejoinder about believing what was written within the Bible. “That was round one,” Dean Hawes said, in an interview last month.
He spotted one other opportunity to have interaction with Lord Tebbit when the latter was invited to deal with a men’s group that meets on the church round the corner to the cathedral. Dean Hawes went along, and listened to Lord Tebbit discuss how caring for his wife, Margaret, who was paralysed within the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing, was, for him, the fulfilment of his marriage vows.
BEFORE the talk, when Dean Hawes got here to say hello, Lord Tebbit “grunted and avoided me”, Dean Hawes said. But afterwards he listened when Dean Hawes said how moved he had been by Lord Tebbit’s talk, and the way it reminded him of his father’s look after his mother when she had Parkinson’s.
“He said: ‘I still give money to the cathedral,’ and I said ‘We’re really grateful to you.’ And he said: ‘I’ve remembered you in my will.’ And I said, ‘We’re grateful for that as well.’”
Owen Chad CoxThe Dean of St Edmundsbury, the Very Revd Joe Hawes
“Well, you higher come and see me,” Lord Tebbit growled, and “that was it,” Dean Hawes said. When he called around, Lord Tebbit gave him a duplicate of his cookbook, and the Dean in turn brought over a game pie cooked based on his recipe.
Lord Tebbit returned to worship on the cathedral, although he didn’t want any fuss remodeled it — and pointedly forbade the Dean from holding his hand when leading him to his seat. When Lady Tebbit died in 2020, Dean Hawes sent a letter of condolence, and said that he was completely happy to make himself scarce and invite his predecessor, with whom the Tebbits had got on famously, to take the service. The phone rang: it was Lord Tebbit, brusquely dismissing the notion, and asking (or perhaps instructing) the Dean to conduct the funeral.
IN HIS sermon at Lord Tebbit’s own funeral this July, Dean Hawes described the 2 water pistols that sit on the window ledge in his kitchen. They are, he said, a part of the “Norman-Tebbit-patented pigeon-deterrence method”: a present from the person once dubbed the “Chingford skinhead”, after he discovered that the Dean shared his intolerance for the pigeons that plagued their gardens.
Lord Tebbit’s daughter, Alison Hovesen, described the pair as sharing a “form of boyishness”, delighting of their water pistols and game pies at the same time as they disagreed on politics and what Christianity teaches about homosexuality. “I don’t imagine Dad modified his views on homosexuality, or anything like that, but Joe was his friend,” Lord Tebbit’s son John said in an interview after his father’s funeral. “And he wanted people to know that he and Joe had change into friends.”
Dean Hawes suggested that there have been similarities with the experience of participating within the Living in Love and Faith working groups. The process brings together people of divergent views on problems with sexuality and the Church — not unlike him and Lord Tebbit — in discussions which might be attempting to chart a way forward for the entire Church.
“Listening to one another’s stories, being in the identical room, feeling the air move as people were honest — what has modified is the standard of our interactions. They’ve been marked by more care and courtesy,” he said.
FOR Lord Tebbit, reconciliation with Dean Hawes, and his relationship with the cathedral, was a vital a part of the ultimate years of his life, and his family say that he was infuriated that his Wikipedia article included a reference only to his “sodomite” comment, and never to what followed.
“Through that friendship was tolerance,” John Tebbit reflected. “You are usually not going to get everybody on this country agreeing on all the pieces, but what is totally vital is that tolerance of other people.”
“It’s the essence of Englishness,” Mrs Hovesen observed. “Good manners, and a way of humour, and tolerance.” The community on the cathedral had shown such tolerance to her father when it could easily have made his life awkward, given his comments concerning the Dean.
Before retiring to Bury St Edmunds, the Tebbits had not attended church frequently for a very long time, she said. But the community had made them welcome, and the history of the cathedral, and its patron saint, had appealed to Lord Tebbit.
WHILE the Tebbits were keen that the record be updated on their father’s relationship with the cathedral and its Dean, they warned against a portrayal of the story that veered into hagiography. “Whatever you do, don’t make him a saint,” John Tebbit said.
In his appearance on Desert Island Discs within the early ’90s, Lord Tebbit described himself as an atheist. During the 4 hours that he and Lady Tebbit lay trapped under the rubble of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, intermittently suffering electric shocks, he noted that he hadn’t once considered praying.
As a politician, he had a repute as a bruiser. The Labour leader Michael Foot’s description of him as a “semi-house-trained polecat” was already a tough epithet to forget, but Lord Tebbit, with knowing self-deprecation, made sure that it might be remembered by incorporating a polecat into his coat of arms when he was made a life peer.
UNUSUALLY for a Tory grandee, Lord Tebbit had a working-class background, and never lost his ability to relate to people from all walks of life. Those attending his funeral included members of the House of Lords, in addition to staff from the Bury St Edmunds branch of Waitrose.
The Tebbit familyNorman Tebbit and Margaret Daines on their wedding day
Speaking concerning the comments that began the brouhaha on the cathedral, Mrs Hovesen said that her father “had friends who were gay men or women, and was very respectful to them. But I feel he found it very hard that Joe had a partner, and it was public, and he got really uptight about it. Once dad gets a bee in his bonnet, he goes for it, and he absolutely refused to go to church. I remember having conversations with him about it, saying that the church just isn’t only one man, and should you love the church just go whenever you don’t think Joe’s there.”
The door to further interaction was kept open by the “cogs that work within the background of the Church of England, the little things — like he used to go along with the carers for coffee on the Pilgrim’s Kitchen [in the cathedral], and had an official visitor who got here to see him,” she said; but still Lord Tebbit remained proof against making a private reference to the person he’d so publicly decried.
“It was stories of human interactions that made our friendship possible,” Dean Hawes said. “He didn’t agree with me about issues around sexuality, and I didn’t agree along with his politics, but someway that didn’t matter a lot. What mattered was our friendship, a slightly extraordinary friendship.”
