Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast.

I'm Damien Thompson.

This week is likely to see the appointment of Britain's first baptised Catholic as Prime Minister.

Yes, Boris Johnson was baptized into the faith of his Catholic mother.

But don't get too excited or alarmed.

Boris was confirmed as an Anglican at Eton and these days he says it's pretentious to suggest that he's a serious practicing Christian.

But is he perhaps more theologically literate than some other prime ministers?

And could he be the first prime minister to take action against the persecutors of Christians?

I'm drawn by Harry Mount, Editor of the Oldie, and also the author of The Witten Wisdom of Boris Johnson,

knows all about him. Harry, one reason I suggest he's theoretically literate is that, at the very least, he likes to

pepper his columns with biblical references and quotation.

That's right. Whatever you may say about Boris, he's

incredibly clever and very well educated at

Ashdowne House Prep School and at Eaton and Balliol College, Oxford.

He was in college at Eaton.

So he would have had an extremely good education at these conventional institutions in the 60s and 70s and 80s at a time when those places had yet to be dumbed down. And that

education would have been very much largely Christian. And so as you say, he peppers his

columns. I worked on his columns at the Telegraph for five years with two great strains of thought,

classical thought, which he of course studied classics at Oxford, and Christian thought.

So although he famously said about his religious views, that they're like the signal for classic FM in the Chilterns.

Magic FM.

Magic FM.

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