Tim Luckhurst: Farewell to a cleric who thrived on the weakness of liberals

'Winning rode into battle naked. He was clothed by the craven minnows of the Scottish establishment'

Ecclesiastical superstar. People's priest. Great Scot. No eulogy has been spared in the media campaign to canonise the late Cardinal Thomas Joseph Winning. The praise has been ladled out in great dollops and from a consensus so diverse it includes every strand of opinion against which he railed with awe-inspiring passion.

Well, every time I encounter consensus I reach for my machine gun. Cardinal Winning was to liberalism and tolerance what the Taliban is to gender equality. His views on marriage, abortion and homosexuality promoted suffering no humanitarian should be prepared to tolerate, let alone celebrate. He was a lone voice of implacable reaction in a society too terrified to oppose him, a man every decent progressive should have fought with tooth and nail.

A caveat. None of this was Winning's fault. When a leader with no democratic mandate first claimed to speak for 750,000 Scottish Roman Catholics, there was an obvious objection. He had no idea what his flock thought. He treated them all like sheep and spoke without consent for even the huge proportion who do not attend mass and cheerfully use contraception. Winning's constituency was a mirage which he deployed with stubborn determination.

He was Cardinal, so he was right. No politician could contemplate such certainty. Truth is it did not exist. Winning rode into battle naked and unarmed. He was clothed and tooled-up by the craven minnows of the Scottish establishment.

He spoke and they listened and so, like any idealist, he spoke more and they listened harder. Abortion was deliberately omitted from the competency of the Scottish Parliament because Donald Dewar feared Winning truly, madly, unfathomably. Abolition of Section 28 was corrupted and diluted because Tom said it must be.

Winning's influence on the Scottish Labour Party was astonishing even when he made his imperial displeasure clear by flirting ostentatiously with the once proudly Calvinist SNP. The idea that the Cardinal, speaking ex cathedra, could direct tidal waves of votes with the tip of his tongue was contradicted by every psephological evidence, but still accepted by Scotland's wee cowerin' timorous MSPs.

Winning recognised vulnerability when he saw it, and Scotland was as vulnerable as an ugly piglet in a foot-and-mouth cull. History was on his side. Scotland's treatment of her Catholic minority was, until recently, unspeakable. His natural enemies knew they had much to be ashamed of, decades of bigotry to atone for. So, when Tom Winning claimed to represent the poor and dispossessed, rebranded the opiate of the people as the people's champion, official Scotland felt too guilty to resist.

The tactic worked brilliantly. Even Donald Dewar, the acclaimed father of the nation and a man possessed of a democratic mandate to die for, accorded Winning the respect due to an unexploded mine. On issue after issue Winning found his views granted a profile and influence they simply did not deserve.

If there is a political parallel to the rise and rise of Cardinal Winning it is the career of Charles de Gaulle. Alone and friendless in 1940, Le Grand Charles convinced the world that he spoke for a France in which 90 per cent of the population did not know him from Adam. He did it by will alone. Ditto Thomas Winning with biretta in place of kepi.

It would have taken a visceral fortitude long excised from democratic Scotland to oppose him and guts were in short supply. I remember telephoning one proudly independent Labour MP shortly before the general election. Winning had made the depraved anomaly of separate schools for Catholics and Protestants a defining issue once again. I anticipated reason from the honourable member who had once insisted that separate schools reinforced bigotry in every town in the country. He dropped the receiver as if I had infected it with plague bacilli. Speak out against Winning just months before an election? Was I mad? He'd rather advocate a legal ban on football. The myth had become reality.

I'll sign a book of condolences for Thomas Winning. He was sincere. He was talented. He was devastating. His defence of everything I find vile was a tour de force. But to the liberals, progressives and socialists now queuing to be recorded as his friends I have this message. He was laughing at you. He played you for pathetic, vacillating fools. It was your fear of moral certainty that turned his lonely, clarion voice into a bugle leading a charge.

Thomas Winning understood the fragility of liberalism, its preference for compromise over truth and its cringing horror of confrontation. He played a poor hand magnificently but please let's tell his successor that we don't want to live in his type of Scotland. We want the sort of tolerance Winning misrepresented as depravity and, if we are really honest, we know many of our Catholic friends, the ones who have struggled to escape the rigid cage of guilt and self-doubt Tom Winning called faith, crave that too.