There are some people, lucky things, whose prayers are nearly always heard. A friend of mine, Herbert McCabe, a distinguished Dominican theologian at Blackfriars Oxford, was one of them, and he made the mistake of telling me so. This was brilliant: a hotline to heaven. So whenever things were really tricky, I would get on his case.
Just to prove what you might call his bedesmanship, I challenged him to do something that I knew was really hard: to get the paper for which I worked to publish a piece by me about foreign policy: an attack on the foreign secretary of the time. It was the most unpropitious subject at the most unpropitious time, but I wanted desperately to make my point. And, by God, the article went in.
