Baroness Thatcher leaves St Margaret's Church in Westminster, London, after the memorial service of former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Biffen who died last August. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA
You may not read what they used to call the Court Circular pages in the Times. But in the past few days they have recorded two great tribal events for the Conservative party, memorial services for a pair of Margaret Thatcher's more interesting cabinet members, both admired by the lady - and both sacked by her.
Lord Gilmour, formerly Sir Ian Gilmour, represented the Tory left ("the wets" as we called them), John Biffen ("dries" never caught on as a label) the free market right. But both were intellectuals and romantics in politics, too fastidious in their distinctive ways for some of the rough and tumble, but widely respected beyond their faction and party.
Like lots of political reporters I liked both of them and on successive Tuesdays trotted across to St Margaret's, the parish church of Westminster which lies in the shadow of the abbey - and has done in its present handsome form since the 16th century. Labour doesn't often do such events, preferring drunken funeral wakes, though the leftwing Eric Heffer, a High Anglican like Biffen, had one at St Margaret's. Mrs Thatcher came to pay her respects to another conviction politician she had routed.
It would be neat to report that those who turned up for Gilmour represented one half of the Tory party, for Biffen the other half. You can spot a bit of that in the Times lists of attendees - Biffen's list is in today, Gilmour's last Wednesday - but also a lot of overlap. Death is a healer. Old wounds heal.
For those who don't remember those old battles, Gilmour was a tall (6ft 5), handsome, socially liberal Keynsian, a wealthy baronet married to a Duke's daughter. He once owned the Spectator. In Thatcher's first cabinet as No 2 at the FCO he helped broker the Rhodesia settlement but made increasingly vocal attacks on her monetarist economic policies as unemployment rose. He was sacked in 1981 and wrote a book - one of many - called Dancing With Dogma. The cover photo showed him dancing with his party leader. Ho ho.
Biffen's case was different. A discipline of Enoch Powell ( though not of his views on immigration) he was as courteous and diffident as Gilmour, but the clever son of a Somerset tenant farmer who never bothered to shed his West Country accent as folk did then. A natural sceptic he lacked Thatcherite zeal and ended of being described as "semi-detatched" by Bernard Ingham, the Alastair Campbell of his day. Biffo was thrown overboard in 1987 having become the most admired Leader of the Commons in recent times: unfailingly fair, you see.
I always remember him telling MPs that the Thatcher government's historic task was (I quote from memory) to "make this country fit for social democracy and free from the legitimate but misguided ambitions of the Honourable Gentleman for Bosolver" - a reference to Dennis Skinner who was a fierce embodiment of Clause IV socialism, as he reminded us this week when Alistair Darling nationalised the Northern Rock. You can see why Maggie ditched him. But I expect Dennis Skinner liked him too: Biffo was an unbending anti- European.
The Eton-and-the Guards Gilmour, of course, was just the opposite (ardently pro-Palestinian too), though as his son, David Gilmour the writer, reminded the congregation, he never managed to master any European languages ("Movez le lorry si vous plait"). Interestingly, Gilmour referred to his beloved but rather grand parents as "Dad" and "Mum." Dad was everything I ever wanted to be, he said. More waspishly, Chris Patten said that Gilmour - unlike most colleagues quoting Burke or Hume - had read the great Tory thinkers "in more extensive editions than the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations."
Yesterday Owen Patterson, who took over as Tory MP for rural North Shropshire when Biffo went to the Lords, said what a kind man he had always been - far too polite to ask people which way they would vote when knocking on their doors without notice during an election - "a gross discourtesy," he would explain. He would discuss the weather, the height of the grass and which council's job it was to cut the verge. He won his byelection in 1961 and nine general elections thereafter.
In another address (each had two) Anthony Howard, former New Statesman editor and a friend for 50 years, told his audience that Biffen was "far too fair-minded" ever to enjoy a political argy-bargy. Irony and mischief were his preferred weapons. As for his successful late marriage at 49 to Sarah - an example of an MP making his secretary his wife, not the other way around - Howard recalled bachelor Biffen worrying about marriage on the grounds that he was not ambitious: "I fear a wife would tend to egg one on."
In short the two occasions were much like wedding and funeral rituals in communities anywhere in this country, albeit possibly a little grander than some, but the opportunity for nostalgia and some laughter. Family members read the lessons and secular contributions, from Byron and Enoch.
I expect you want to know who won the battle of the hymns. Lovely music on both occasions, Gilmour was a Mozartian, Biffen an Anglo-Catholic. Biffo won on my count. The Gilmours (Ian had been resigned to the necessity of a funeral, "but can I be spared a memorial service") had chosen I Vow to Thee My Country, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind and Thine Be the Glory. The Biffens picked Guide me Oh Thou Great Redeemer, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.
Quite what America's Battle Hymn of the Republic, surely the ultimate example of 19th century Protestant triumphalism, was doing at a service for a fastidious Tory ultra-Englishman of High Anglican views is best not asked. But it is always a belter. Perhaps it was Biffen's last bit of mischief.
