When Damian Collins received his first Holy Communion in the 1980s at St Mary’s Catholic secondary school in rural Herefordshire, he was made an altar boy almost straight away. Seeing that he was a natural in his new role, one of the older parish ladies exclaimed: “Damian will be a bishop before he knows it.”
But despite being educated at Belmont Abbey – where he won a scholarship – and reading history at St Benet’s Hall in Oxford, he didn’t end up pursuing an ecclesiastical career. Instead, he chose politics and is now at the front of the pack of the Tory “new blood” talent that we can expect to see on the front benches in years to come.
Collins entered the Commons in 2010, in the same intake as Jacob Rees-Mogg, now widely talked about as a possible next Conservative leader. But it was Collins, not Rees-Mogg, who was first quickly promoted by David Cameron, being appointed in 2012 as parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to the then Northern Ireland secretary Theresa Villiers, and then PPS to the then foreign secretary Philip Hammond.
Last November, Collins was once again elected by his fellow MPs to the high-profile role of chairman of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee. He has led the committee’s inquiries into “fake news”, corruption, doping and homophobia in sport, as well as the “impact of Brexit on the creative industries and tourism”.
As chairman, he has to closely monitor BBC coverage, not the least in terms of religion. When I meet him I ask whether he feels the Beeb is dumbing down religion, given that it spent more than £1 million on an animated Christmas advert that made no reference to Christianity. “Christmas is not a winter retail festival,” he says. “It is first and foremost a religious festival, and the Christian faith is a central part of our story as a nation, and many of our laws, customs and practices are built around the fact that we are, at heart, a Christian country, albeit one that is open and tolerant and inclusive of other religions, too.”
Collins is one of more than 60 MPs who identify themselves as Catholic. He has not been as outspoken about his own beliefs as some. But while the convictions of Jacob Rees-Mogg, for example, are widely known after he came out very publicly in opposition to abortion, that doesn’t mean that Collins doesn’t hold his own strong beliefs or wrestle with his conscience as an MP.
The time when he felt Catholic MPs were most divided was during the same-sex marriage debate. “Obviously the Church took a very strong position on it,” he says. “It wasn’t one I shared, but I think there were some very interesting discussions amongst Catholic MPs about that.”
Collins was born in Northampton in 1974. His Irish grandparents had emigrated to England after the war. While his parents were Thatcher supporters, his Irish grandparents were Labour voters. “My father’s family were Irish nationalists,” he recalls. “My grandfather carried messages on his bike during the war of independence in the 1920s, so that’s certainly very different from the upbringing of many Conservative politicians.”
His parents were drawn to the policies of Margaret Thatcher because they could see that her government “was giving people more control of their lives and helping them get on”. This was certainly the case with his own family, whose example instilled in Collins a strong work ethic and desire (partly born out of the ethos of his largely Catholic school education) to give something back to others. “I grew up in an environment where politics mattered. Politics make a difference, and the place where you can make a difference being in active politics is obviously the House of Commons. That’s where our laws are being made.”
When Collins was confirmed he took St Thomas More as his saint. The reason was that he admired More’s ability to put up a moral fight for something he deeply believed in. “What captured me about the story of Thomas More was that he was a very clever lawyer who tried desperately to find a way out of the conundrum that he was in. And when he couldn’t find a way out, rather than just giving in, he accepted the consequences of not just his faith but what he thought was morally right and wrong, and he accepted it anyway. That is a great example of moral courage.”
At the time of the same-sex marriage debate, Collins wrote an article entitled “What would Thomas More do?” He argued that More would have recognised that this was a classic example of the separation of church and state. The state had the right to legislate in this way, to put civil marriages on an equal footing. But what it didn’t have the right to do was make people who disagreed accept it. “So it is absolutely right to say that, as far as the law of the land goes, we’ve got to put marriage on an equal footing, but also that the churches are free to conduct marriage in a way that they believe it should be conducted, based on their own teachings.”
The state doesn’t have the right to dictate to the Church what it should believe about marriage, adds Collins. But at the same time, the Church shouldn’t be able to dictate to the Government how it enforces the civil law of the land. “I believe that Thomas More would have understood that distinction. What would have been wrong would have been for the Government to dictate to the churches what they had to do and what they had to believe. It wasn’t seeking to do that. It was rightly saying that civil law had to be equal.”
Collins’s father worked as a senior sales executive for Bulmer’s cider in Herefordshire. Damian’s mother was a Catholic convert. As a former star pupil of Belmont Abbey, he has remained in close touch with the abbey where he returned last year for the funeral of Fr Antony Tumelty, who celebrated his wedding and baptised his daughter.
Did he ever consider becoming a priest? No, not even when he was an undergraduate at St Benet’s Hall (the only Benedictine-run college in Oxford and often used to train priests). Instead of fraternising with clergy, he spent more time dining out with Conservative Party figures as president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. It was at one of his supper meetings that he first met Michael Howard, whose Folkestone seat he was to take over.
At St Benet’s, he met David Blair (now a speechwriter for Boris Johnson) who had worked at the Conservative Research Department. Collins soon followed and by the 1997 election was learning some important political lessons. “Anybody who was an active Conservative from 1997 to 2001 knows that you can never take the views of the electorate for granted,” he says.
As a high-profile Catholic MP, Collins makes it clear that he is unimpressed with the Government for “dragging its feet” over the 2017 manifesto pledge to lift the 50 per cent cap that in effect prevents the Church from opening new Catholic schools.
“The case is pretty clear that we should allow Catholic education to thrive and for the places available at Catholic schools to meet the demand for Catholic education as well. A lot of people who’ve moved to this country are from Catholic countries. I think the demand for Catholic education is growing. Catholic schools are often popular, and therefore we need to make sure that the growing Catholic community in the UK has the opportunity to access Catholic education for their children.”
Collins confesses that his “Mass observance” has been slightly disrupted by his son’s football. “He’s been signed by Crystal Palace and plays in the academy football team, so a lot of my Sunday devotion at the moment is standing on the side of a cold football pitch,” he explains.
Collins lives between a house in his constituency of Kent and a charming little town house in a Georgian square in the Elephant and Castle area of south London. The square is sandwiched between a council estate with some fairly rough-looking spit-and-sawdust pubs and some nice gastro-pubs around newly gentrified neighbouring streets.
One gets the feeling that Collins quite likes this juxtaposition between his smart house and scruffy neighbourhood: as a comprehensive-educated Catholic boy with Irish roots – until he won his scholarship – much of his life has straddled two worlds. Unlike Rees-Mogg, he was not born to a life of nannies, butlers, Rolls-Royces and gentrified privilege.
In many ways, however, this gives Collins the upper hand as an MP. He is arguably better able to understand not only constituency surgery concerns but also, having worked in advertising for M&C Saatchi before becoming an MP, he is well placed to help the Tory Party, under its new chairman, rebrand itself and overhaul its digital strategy so as to appeal to younger (and female) voters.
Collins has been firing off letters on House of Commons paper to the billionaire digital moguls of Silicon Valley, inviting them to cooperate with his committee’s requests for information on the monitoring of their own sites, and “the role of foreign actors abusing platforms to interfere in the political discourse of other nations”. In plain English, this means asking the likes of Twitter and Facebook to hand over any evidence they have that Russians – or anybody else – may have tried to interfere with the Brexit vote of June 2016 or the election of 2017.
When we met, Collins was still hopeful that the social media giants would cooperate. After some delay, Facebook, Google and Twitter have now agreed to appear before the select committee next month.
If pursuing today’s social media tycoons didn’t keep him busy enough, last year he wrote an acclaimed book on the life of the 1930s socialite politician Philip Sassoon. Partly because of his background as a modern Irish historian, Collins is regarded as an authority on the country and its troubled political history. But before you ask, no, he is not related to Michael Collins.
Collins spent much of the last Tory party conference chairing seminars as chairman of the Conservative Arts and Creative Industries Network. Although he voted Remain, he doesn’t think Brexit will damage Britain’s creative industries with an exodus of film and other talent. “Culture underpins London’s success as a city,” he says. “There’s no reason why post-Brexit, we can’t remain an important cultural hub that welcomes talented people.”
William Cash is editor-in-chief of Spear’s
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