Peter Stanford speaks about his experiences of talking to famous people about their faith and how having faith is viewed by society.

Peter Stanford (photo: Mykel Nicolaou)

Emily: Peter, first of all, tell us a bit about yourself and what your day to day looks like.

Peter: I am a writer and a broadcaster. It seems like an eternity ago I used to be the editor of the Catholic Herald newspaper. I now write features for the Daily Telegraph and I write a monthly interview column in The Tablet.

Where this book comes from really is 35 years of experience interviewing people. One of the things I did relatively early on in my career was go off and interview people, initially for church papers so talking to them about faith. Since then I've worked at the Guardian, the Independent and now I work at the Telegraph. The book is a collection of 40 interviews that I've done over those 35 years.

The reason for putting it together is not that I think I'm so wonderful that the world needs a second opportunity to read what I've written and they can all clap admiringly, but a very strong sense that these conversations that have gone to make up the interviews have been some of the most interesting, certainly in my experience.

I think there's a real sense in the world, and even amongst people of faith, that we have to keep relatively quiet about what we do; that it's private as opposed to public. I suppose a very good example of that would be our current Prime Minister, who is very keen to be seen photographed coming out of the church where her father is the vicar. She is very keen to tell us that her father was a vicar and he influenced her and then when you ask her to explain that in any detail at all, as I have four or five times, through her faith advisor (she actually has a faith advisor in 10, Downing Street), she declines the invitation. There's that notorious line that was said in 2003/2004 by Tony Blair's press spokesman, Alistair Campbell. He declined interviews about Tony Blair's faith (we know that Tony Blair was attending Catholic services) because, he said, "we don't do God." That line echoes all the way through. It's become a kind of orthodoxy that if you're a public figure (a politician, a well-known actress, someone in the public eye), you ought to keep quiet about your faith because it puts people off. The irony of it all is that at the very time Alistair Campbell was saying, "we don't do God," we know that Tony Blair was doing God. He became a Catholic shortly after leaving office. It was obviously part and parcel of the decision-making he was doing at the time.

There are a couple of politicians in the book. One of them is Michael Gove, Environment Secretary now, he was the Justice Secretary when I interviewed him and he is a devout Christian, churchgoer every Sunday and he said something very interesting. I said why are politicians so nervous to talk about faith? He said one of the reasons is if you talk about being inspired in your politics by your faith, it's almost as if you're claiming that God is on your side, that God approves of what you're doing. And that's a dangerous thing to do.

The other politician who's in there is Patricia Scotland who was the Attorney General. I think she was the first black woman to serve in cabinet and she's now the Secretary General of the Commonwealth. She talks very straightforwardly about her faith and how everything that has happened in her life has God's fingerprints on it. Every time she's offered a job or something comes up, it's something that she prays about and she talks about it very openly. I remember when the interview was published, which must have been four or five years ago, a few people said "Gosh, she's a bit odd, isn't she?" We thought Is she that odd? She's like a lot of people but she's just saying it.

So it's that culture and that was the idea of bringing the book out really; to tell these interesting stories and relive those interesting conversations, but also to challenge this taboo that we don't talk about faith.

Emily: You've spoken to all sorts of people and you've just given a number of examples. But there are other people in the book like Dermot O'Leary and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Fern Britton to name just a few. Was there anything about any of the people that you interviewed that really surprised you and gave you a different perspective?

Peter: The thing that surprised me about Desmond Tutu - obviously his humour, his intelligence, his love of God and his ability to ask challenging questions, none of those things surprised me. You meet a lot of people who talk the talk; it's people who walk the walk who are more inspiring. Shortly after the interview, Desmond Tutu gave a lecture which I had helped to organise and after he'd done it I was meant to send him a note to say thank you for giving the lecture, but I was delayed in doing it as my father died. So when I got back to my desk there was a message on the answering machine from Desmond Tutu saying "I heard that your father died and I just want you to know that he's in my prayers." And I thought how extraordinary. This man has the whole world listening to what he's saying, doing all these different things and he can find time to leave a message for me. A couple of days later I was at my desk when the phone rang and it was Desmond Tutu again and he said I don't like leaving messages; I like to speak to people so I'm just ringing to make sure you're all right. He's the real thing; he's the genuine thing.

Dermot O'Leary I came across because he made a television programme on Channel 4 called 'Some Of My Best Friends Are Catholics.' There was a whole series of these programmes, some of my best friends are dot, dot, dot, and he did one on Catholics and I was in it. It turned out he lived round the corner from me and I got to know him reasonably well. He did a couple of events at my children's school, which was very nice of him. The thing I really liked about Dermot O'Leary was he's Mister Saturday night, he's a kind of pin up - GQ magazine has said he's one of the 50 sexiest men in the country - and in that situation, I might have been a bit coy about talking about my faith. Sometimes it isn't the greatest attraction to your fans if you want to be a pin up, to say I'm profoundly religious. But Dermot O'Leary says the reason he talks about it is because people like him, the reason he is successful as a broadcaster and as a presenter is because people like his personality. They like something about him and he says part of what he is, is a Christian, a Catholic in his case, and therefore, why be quiet about that? Why hide something when people like him. It would not be being true to himself. So that was why he is very open about talking about these things.

Fern Britton, I'll be really honest, the Telegraph sent me to interview her because she had done a travel programme and gone to Jerusalem. My heart sank slightly. She's obviously a very nice woman but people who appear on the breakfast television sofa are often slightly bland. So I went along without any great expectations and then she started talking to me about her journey to Jerusalem. One of the reasons I was sent to interview her was because she had had a tattoo done in Jerusalem. Again I thought, God, another middle-aged person like me getting a tattoo done. What's interesting in that? But once she started talking she told me all about this history of tattoos being done in Jerusalem. It's a little tiny cross on her wrist. From the earliest days of pilgrimages to Jerusalem by Christians in the 3rd and 4th century, people had been having these very simple tattoos done. It was almost a sign, when you got back to where you'd come from, to other Christians. It was a bit like Muslims making the Hajj. It was meant to be a thing you did once in your lifetime and you retained on your body this symbol of it. So if you met other people at a social gathering they would see this sign on your wrist and would know that you were like them; it kind of identified people. I thought that was very fascinating. Then she told me her whole upbringing story. She said everybody knows everything about me, even down to my gastric band but there's one thing I've never really told people about. Her grandfather was an Anglican canon, her parents hadn't been particularly religious, when she was a little girl they would give her the money to put in the collection plate and she'd walk on her own to church on a Sunday. When she had various problems in her life as an adult that whole thing came back to her and she decided to be confirmed.

People's faith journeys, those stories, are fascinating. What I hope happens in the book - I chose them partly because people have great stories, and partly because most of the people in there you'll probably know their names, some of them you won't, but also because their experiences, I felt, echoed with experiences both people of faith and people who are curious about faith will have.

There is a selection of interviews in the book with people who have faith but are outside institutions - Nick Kay, the rock star, is in there. And people who have lost their faith, have moved out of organised religion, they say they have lost their belief in God but it seems to me that it directs everything they still do. A good example of that towards the end of the book is Jimmy McGovern, the award winning screenwriter who did things like Hillsborough. But what he was talking about was a series some listeners might have seen last year on BBC 1 called 'Broken', which was about a priest in an inner city parish. I remember very clearly at the end of the interview asking him "Why did you call the series 'Broken'? Are you talking about broken Britain? Are you talking about broken communities? Are you talking about broken priesthood? Broken Church?" "No, no," he said, "I'm talking about broken bread. When you break the bread in the Eucharist, it's God connecting with everyone in the community; it's God being there for them." And I thought gosh! I've been going to church for 55 years and that's never struck me quite so forcibly as when you said it. So it's those things that come through in those conversations and you carry them with you. Every time I go to a communion service now I think about what Jimmy McGovern said to me.

Emily: Over the years that you've been doing interviews, how have you found the perception of faith has changed? You mentioned the political arena earlier on and the battles there, but do you think it's harder to speak about faith in today's climate?

Peter: I think it is and I think people are less willing to do it. Delia Smith, who is in the book, is very well known as a cook and has a profoundly strong faith, but she doesn't like talking about it particularly in public - on her website there's no mention of it at all. If you wrote to her and said "will you talk to me about your faith?" I think she'd say no. She got involved in a campaign with one of the development agencies and I asked if I could come and talk to her about that and she agreed. Then once you start talking and ask "why did you do this? What made you want to get involved in this particular campaign?" the faith bit comes out. She told me about her daily routine; she spends 20 minutes every day in silence, in silent prayer. How fascinating!

So I think there's a kind of reluctance there and you have to come at it not quite so directly. I suppose the other thing that I feel, people will come from all sorts of faith backgrounds and none but certainly as someone who is a relatively publicly Catholic, I will often find in social gatherings that people will ask me what I do or have heard me on the radio or seen me on television or read something and will say, "you're that Catholic, aren't you?" Then they will go through a long list of things the Catholic Church has got wrong: clerical abuse, same sex marriages, treatment of women. It just becomes a long list of things they object to. I suppose there is a bit of a tendency in that situation, and this is me being a complete failure, to placate and withdraw from that conversation because it can be uncomfortable, people get quite aggressive around religion. There's that excuse all the time that people will know me by my deeds not by my words so I'll just keep quiet about it. I think that's a bit lily-livered. Sometimes we do have to say actually some of these problems you have with the Catholic Church, I know exactly what you mean. I've had them myself. But it's about something bigger. Talk about some of the brilliant examples of things they do. And some of the brilliant examples are in the book. There's an interview with an astonishing Irish nun called Sister Rita Lee who runs a food bank in Manchester. She's an amazing woman, has dedicated her life to the poor; she's their champion. She's the person who brings government ministers, drags them up to Manchester and makes them change the way these people are being treated by officialdom.

People are inspired to do extraordinary things by faith. Let's think about that as well when we point out the negative side. People can be inspired not only into action but into spirituality and prayer, which are so important in our world but so undervalued. They are undervalued partly because they are not talked about but partly because people don't explain them anymore, because we don't have a language, because we don't hear this language all the time. We don't hear people talking about it. I suppose in a very small way what I've been trying to do by writing the articles in the first place was challenging that and getting people to think about it.