The former Prime Minister accused religious leaders, particularly Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, of failing to provide "spiritual sustenance", pushing people to overeat instead.

Speaking to GB News, Rees-Mogg agreed that Britain faces a "spiritual desert". Drawing on his experiences, he said "The Church - and it's not just the Anglican Church, it may be our (Catholic) church too - and the Methodists, aren't filling that void".

Johnson's comments, part of the Nourishing Britain report co-authored by Henry Dimbleby and Dolly van Tulleken, painted a stark picture of the country's health.

The former prime minister said that when he was younger, it was "very rare for there to be a fatso in the class. Now they're all fatsos, and I'd be shot for saying they're fatsos, but it's the truth".

He criticised the Most Rev. Justin Welby and other religious leaders for going on about slavery reparations rather than addressing the "spiritual void" in people's lives.

Johnson said this failure was leading to a decline in church attendance.

"The living bread is being provided by Tesco" he said.

"And they're gorging themselves on the real living bread."

Decisive action on obesity

Rees-Mogg's endorsement comes amidst broader political criticism. A government spokesperson distanced Downing Street from Johnson's remarks, stating the government has already taken "decisive action" on obesity, which strains the NHS and the economy.

Figures underline the scale of the issue: 64% of adults in England were overweight or obese in 2022-2023. Among children, 22.1% of Year 6 pupils were classified as obese in 2023-2024.

The Nourishing Britain report interviewed three former prime ministers and ten ex-health secretaries, all admitting they hadn't done enough to tackle obesity while in office.

The report urges current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to take tougher action on diet-related ill health in the UK.

Sources

GB News

The Times

The decision to cancel the flight capped three days of frantic court challenges from immigrant rights lawyers. They had launched a flurry of case-by-case appeals to block the deportation of everyone on the government's list.

Britain in recent years has seen an illegal influx of migrants from such places as Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Iraq and Yemen.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced in April that certain asylum seekers arriving in the UK would be sent to the African country, Rwanda.

Johnson made an agreement with Rwanda that people who entered Britain illegally would be deported to the East African country. In exchange for accepting them, Rwanda will receive millions of pounds (dollars) in development aid. The deportees will be allowed to apply for asylum in Rwanda, not Britain.

The bishops of England and Wales described Johnson's new policy as "shameful".

"The UK's plans to forcibly deport to Rwanda some of those seeking refuge in our country is shamefully illustrative of what Pope Francis has called the ‘loss of that sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters on which every civil society is based'," the prelates said in a statement published on the website of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales.

Johnson had emphatically defended Britain's plan, arguing that it is a legitimate way to protect lives and thwart the criminal gangs that smuggle migrants across the English Channel in small boats.

Responding to the decision, Patel said she was "disappointed" by the legal challenge. She made pointed criticisms of the ECHR ruling and noted that the policy would continue.

"We will not be deterred from doing the right thing and delivering our plans to control our nation's borders," she said. "Our legal team are reviewing every decision made on this flight, and preparation for the next flight begins now."

The Rwandan government said it was still committed to taking in asylum seekers sent by the UK. "We are not deterred by these developments. Rwanda remains fully committed to making this partnership work," government spokeswoman Yolande Makolo told AFP.

"The current situation of people making dangerous journeys cannot continue as it is causing untold suffering to so many. Rwanda stands ready to receive the migrants when they do arrive and offer them safety and opportunity in our country."

Johnson hinted that the UK could leave the ECHR to make removing illegal migrants from the UK easier.

Asked whether it was time for the UK to withdraw from the ECHR after the government's difficulty in implementing its Rwanda policy, the prime minister said: "Will it be necessary to change some laws to help us as we go along? It may very well be."

Sources

The Guardian

Crux Now

MSN

It was a characteristically florid speech from Johnson, who is also the COP26 host.

Amid apocalyptic warnings about the cost of inaction on climate change, there was a sweet shout-out to some New Zealand scientists.

"Two weeks from now, smoke stacks will still belch in industrial heartlands, cows will still belch in their pastures even if some brilliant Kiwi scientists are teaching them how to be more polite." Read more

The controversy began when it came to light that the twice-divorced Johnson was allowed to wed Carrie Symonds, his longtime girlfriend and the mother of his baby, Wilfred, in Westminster Cathedral, Catholicism's London headquarters, on May 29.

Biden has been known as a lifelong Mass-goer — he recently attended Mass in the parish church of St. Ives, the little seaside town next to the venue for the G-7 summit in Cornwall — but Johnson has not.

Now, though, it seems that for the first time, the chief politicians on either side of the Atlantic are both Catholic.

Baptized into the Catholic faith of his mother, Johnson appeared to move away from it in his youth, being instead confirmed an Anglican at Eton. His first two marriages were civil ones — both invalid in the Catholic Church's view, which allowed him to marry for the third time in a Catholic ceremony — and there was little indication until he popped out of the cathedral that he was committed to the Catholic faith.

In retrospect, there were signs.

In September, for instance, Wilfred was baptized as a Catholic.

But it was only after Johnson and Symonds were married that the Diocese of Westminster declared that both were baptized Catholics and parishioners of the cathedral.

For the very first time, it seemed, the U.K. has a Catholic prime minister.

According to the constitutional expert Peter Hennessy, professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary, University of London, and himself a Catholic, having a Catholic prime minister in Downing Street is a watershed moment after hundreds of years of post-Reformation discrimination in Britain.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, said Hennessy, Catholics have edged their way into positions of influence, being appointed as Cabinet secretary, director-general of the BBC and as the heads of Oxbridge colleges.

"Appointment as prime minister is the completion of the Catholic stealth minority's rise to influence," said Hennessy.

The U.K. may look to have religion at the heart of its public life — the Church of England is the established church, with its bishops sitting in the House of Lords and Queen Elizabeth II at its head.

But Britain is also among the world's most secular countries, where increasing numbers of its citizens have no faith at all, even as members of other religions, including Islam, Judaism, Sikhism and Buddhism, become ever more prominent, and vocal.

Roman Catholicism alone still has a contested place in Britain: By law, the monarch cannot be a Roman Catholic (although other members of the family can belong to the church). And the implications of a Catholic in the country's highest elected office are still considerable.

To take one example, the prime minister plays a role in the appointment of Church of England bishops.

Under the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, no "person professing the Roman Catholic religion" is allowed to advise the monarch on the appointment of Church of England bishops.

A Muslim or Jew can — but not a Catholic.

It looks likely that Johnson will deputize the Lord Chancellor, Robert Buckland, on this matter.

Johnson's faith could also affect the future of Northern Ireland.

When Tony Blair delayed converting to Roman Catholicism — the religion of his wife, Cherie, and their four children — until he left office, the appointment of bishops was a factor, but even more so was how a Catholic PM might be received in Northern Ireland, where the 1998 Good Friday Agreement had finally achieved peace between nationalists and unionists who are split along Catholic-Protestant lines.

Today, after more than 20 years of peace, Northern Ireland is again in turmoil as the reality of Brexit hit. Johnson's deal with the European Union to avoid the return of a "hard" trade border on the island of Ireland has outraged unionists who feel the deal compromises the island's links to the United Kingdom.

At a rally earlier this month in Northern Ireland, hundreds of unionists in paramilitary-style clothing accused Johnson of betraying them.

If tensions increase over Brexit, said Steve Richards, a British political commentator and author of "The Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to Johnson," "the perceptions about him and the mistrust could grow. The issue of his Catholicism could play into that."

Even Conservative Party allies of the mercurial Johnson were taken aback by his ability to persuade the Catholic Church that he was returning to their fold to get married.

"Tories I spoke to remarked on his chutzpah," said Richards.

"It's very Boris. They saw it as a contrivance. Its greatest political implication will be if it unravels, and then there's a question about his ability to stick at something."

At the recent G-7 summit, while Biden found time to head to Mass on the Sunday of the meeting, Johnson did not, preferring to go for a swim in the nearby Celtic Sea.

"They wonder if the wool was pulled over priests' eyes," Richards added.

When a TV political interviewer asked Johnson at the end of the G-7 gathering whether he is now a practising Catholic, Johnson answered, "I don't discuss these deep issues."

In saying that, he was following in the footsteps of many recent prime ministers.

Asked on the eve of the Iraq War in 2003 if he prayed with then-President George W. Bush, Blair looked highly embarrassed, shifted in his seat and eventually answered no.

Since then, however, Blair's informal "we don't do God" policy has waned, as prime ministers and their advisers see the potential for reaching faithful voters.

Johnson has appointed a faith engagement adviser to produce a report on how government might better engage with faith groups.

Church organizations and other bodies have been recognized by politicians as working effectively on homelessness and substance abuse problems. But unlike in the U.S., matters of personal morality, such as abortion, do not play powerfully in the British public arena.

If he is asked about it, look for Johnson to be taking another dip in the sea.

• Catherine Pepinster is an author at Religion News Service.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.
• Image: RNS

A spokesperson for the Diocese confirmed that baby Wilfred was baptised in a small private service on 12 September by Father Daniel Humphreys.

Mr Johnson was himself baptised Catholic as a child, on the wishes of his mother Charlotte Fawcett who is Catholic - making him the first baptised Catholic to become prime minister. (His godmother was Lady Rachel Billington - daughter of Lord Longford.) He was later confirmed an Anglican, while studying at Eton. Read more

We once discussed Christian and Muslim ideas of martyrdom, and he was suddenly reminded of a hymn he liked at Eton which he proceeded to sing to me down the phone.

His tone towards religion in general was, as you'd expect, a bit guffawing: here's a prime site for flippant jokes and the puncturing of earnestness. But, knowing that I took religion seriously, and seeing that we had an article to discuss, he was a tad constrained.

The intellectually serious side of him saw that the show-off side should pipe down a bit, for here was an interesting subject that he had paid relatively little attention to.

In relation to religion I would characterise him as an eighteenth-century Whig, full of confidence in the classical world as the source of enlightened culture - and ready to laugh, with Edward Gibbon, at the gloomy excesses of monotheism.

Also, there is some macho scorn for the less than entirely virile ethos of the New Testament.

In fact in one discussion I mentioned my thesis that Christianity remained at the heart of secular humanist values and he bullishly put the case for the greater influence of the classical world.

His columns have been careful to avoid the topic. But he once strayed into it and I responded.

Boris argued that religion was a useful force in the reformation of violent young men.

His implication, I said, was that the irrationality of religion remains a necessary force in the disciplining of the plebs, but is not needed for calm rational minds like you and I.

It reminds one of the position of Voltaire, that rationalism should not be taught to the lower orders, in case it erodes their crude morality. Continue reading

• Image: The Spectator