THE late Norman Tebbit’s reaction to the 2018 appointment of the Very Revd Joe Hawes as the new Dean of St Edmundsbury was characteristically provocative: “I find it difficult to 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 respond publicly, and instead set about trying to “win back” the outspoken former government minister and close 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 personal invitation to his installation service, which the latter declined in a handwritten note signed off with a spiky rejoinder about believing what was written in the Bible. “That was round one,” Dean Hawes said, in an interview last month.
He spotted another opportunity to engage with Lord Tebbit when the latter was invited to address a men’s group that meets at the church next door to the cathedral. Dean Hawes went along, and listened to Lord Tebbit speak about how caring for his wife, Margaret, who was paralysed in the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing, was, for him, the fulfilment of his marriage vows.
BEFORE the talk, when Dean Hawes came 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 how it reminded him of his father’s care for 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 better come and see me,” Lord Tebbit growled, and “that was it,” Dean Hawes said. When he called around, Lord Tebbit gave him a copy of his cookbook, and the Dean in turn brought over a game pie cooked according to his recipe.
Lord Tebbit returned to worship at the cathedral, although he didn’t want any fuss made over 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 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 two water pistols that sit on the window ledge in his kitchen. They are, he said, part of the “Norman-Tebbit-patented pigeon-deterrence method”: a gift from the man 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 “sort of boyishness”, delighting in their water pistols and game pies even as they disagreed on politics and what Christianity teaches about homosexuality. “I don’t believe Dad changed 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 become friends.”
Dean Hawes suggested that there were similarities with the experience of participating in the Living in Love and Faith working groups. The process brings together people of divergent views on issues of sexuality and the Church — not unlike him and Lord Tebbit — in discussions that are trying to chart a way forward for the whole Church.
“Listening to each other’s stories, being in the same room, feeling the air move as people were honest — what has changed is the quality 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 an important part of the final 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 not to what followed.
“Through that friendship was tolerance,” John Tebbit reflected. “You are not going to get everybody in this country agreeing on everything, but what is absolutely important is that tolerance of other people.”
“It’s the essence of Englishness,” Mrs Hovesen observed. “Good manners, and a sense of humour, and tolerance.” The community at the cathedral had shown such tolerance to her father when it could easily have made his life awkward, given his comments about the Dean.
Before retiring to Bury St Edmunds, the Tebbits had not attended church regularly for a 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 in the early ’90s, Lord Tebbit described himself as an atheist. During the four 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 thought of praying.
As a politician, he had a reputation as a bruiser. The Labour leader Michael Foot’s description of him as a “semi-house-trained polecat” was already a hard epithet to forget, but Lord Tebbit, with knowing self-deprecation, made sure that it would 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, as well as staff from the Bury St Edmunds branch of Waitrose.
The Tebbit familyNorman Tebbit and Margaret Daines on their wedding day
Speaking about the comments that started the brouhaha at the cathedral, Mrs Hovesen said that her father “had friends who were gay men or women, and was very respectful to them. But I think 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 is not just one man, and if you love the church just go when you don’t think Joe’s there.”
The door to further interaction was kept open by the “cogs that work in the background of the Church of England, the little things — like he used to go with the carers for coffee at the Pilgrim’s Kitchen [in the cathedral], and had an official visitor who came to see him,” she said; but still Lord Tebbit remained resistant to making a personal connection with the man 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 with his politics, but somehow that didn’t matter so much. What mattered was our friendship, a rather extraordinary friendship.”
