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In this interview, Terry Rooney discusses how he became involved in politics, was elected to Parliament, and represented a district with a significant Muslim minority. He relates how an internationally known singer campaigned against him in his first race for public office as a city councilor. He tells about the difficulties he had with one church public affairs officer who objected to his being a Labour MP, as well as the challenges to church standards he faced and how he dealt with them. He also narrates his role in helping the church during his time in office. This interview was conducted on April 13, 2021, by Richard Davis, BYU professor emeritus of political science.

Richard Davis: Terry, it is delightful to be able to talk with you. Tell us about your background.

Terry Rooney: OK, well, I was born and raised in Bradford; I’ve lived here all my life, and so that was an incredible privilege to represent the city of my birth. My children were all born and educated here—our three children, nine grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. I just love this city. It’s had its issues; it’s had its problems. In 1999 we had massive riots—that was broadcast all around the world. So there have been ups and downs, but I wouldn’t leave. I love the place. I’m too old to leave now anyway. So is that enough? Do you want more?

Richard Davis: Are you a convert, as well, to the church?

Terry Rooney: Yeah. So my wife joined when she was about eleven years old. We got married when I was nineteen, she was still eighteen, and I was baptized when I was thirty-two. Apparently that is a very rare event—that nonmembers join after marriage. I was told that at the time. So I’ve been a member now just over forty years last month.

Richard Davis: So your wife has certainly set an example for you, and then you joined the church after that?

Terry Rooney: Well, she would say I joined despite her. But there’s some sad things, like my two oldest daughters were baptized before I joined. I joined in time to baptize my son, but I’d have loved to be involved in that.

Richard Davis: So when did you first become interested in politics and government?

Terry Rooney: Right. I was nine years old. So I’ve got five younger brothers, and I had a sister who died when she was three months that I don’t remember; I was only two at the time. So you get to beginning of May 1960. It is me and four brothers at that point. My mom is about to go into hospital to have the youngest one. My dad asked his employer for a week off work to look after us. Because I’m nine, I’m the oldest and in those days when you gave birth you were in hospital for ten days.

So, you know, this is an obvious problem, and they refused. They said, “No. That’s not a good enough reason to have time off.” So he went to the doctor and got himself what we call a signal; he signed up as ill. So his employer sacked him. And I just thought, “This is a massive injustice.” And throughout my life since, and especially in political life, I’ve had a big interest in industry relations, human resources, whatever they call it these days. But that was my first political interest. That set me off, and from then on, I was an avid reader of the newspapers. I watched current affairs programs, watched the TV news, and I really, really, really took an interest in the outside world, never thinking that I would become elected in politics. But I just had a deep interest and a deep sense of injustice.

The other, which ties in with one of the later questions: In 1965 the British government legalized abortion. I was fourteen and I thought, “This is wrong.” No religious connection with it, I just thought to myself, “This is not right.” And that you know, that was a big consciousness moment, if you like. So those two things have enwrapped my life.

Richard Davis: So what was your profession before you went into Parliament?

Terry Rooney: My last profession, I was what we call a welfare rights adviser, so essentially helping poor people to get what is their entitlement. Prior to that I was a commercial insurance broker dealing with multimillion-pound accounts, and I had two years where I was training to be a schoolteacher and realized this wasn’t for me. I’d probably kill a child because they’re so badly behaved.

Richard Davis: How long did you serve in Parliament?

Terry Rooney: It was twenty years. And I was the first, and only, LDS member of Parliament for those twenty years. In 2010, when I left, there were two that got elected.

Richard Davis: So you were elected for the first time in 1990?

Terry Rooney: Yes, it was—

Richard Davis: Was it a by-election?

Terry Rooney: You call it a special election. You know, you have a by-election or special election when somebody dies.

Richard Davis: Right.

Terry Rooney: Now, being on the ground, I was chairman of the local level party. I was a headline figure. I was deputy leader of the council. I was in the right place at the right time, but Heavenly Father organized that, or his hand was in it.

Richard Davis: So what was the first office you were elected to? It was in the council?

Terry Rooney: It was to the local council. We call them wards, the seat for each part of the council, right. And in this particular ward, there had been wholesale corruption of the membership. And there’d been a major inquiry and investigation, and about seventy to eighty people got expelled for being part of this corruption, which meant there were only about twelve people left. And they had to choose the candidate from these twelve.

The other eleven all worked for the local authority, the council. You could not stand for election if you are an employee. So I was the only one who didn’t work for the council. So by default I became the candidate. This was never in my mind; this was never planned on, you know, never thought about it. And so I got elected with the biggest majority in the city that day. This was a ward that was 95 percent Muslim. And of the remaining 5 percent, most of those were refugees from Eastern Europe after the Second World War. So, you know, it wasn’t a natural constituency for me, if you like. But, you know, these are just human beings to me. I didn’t look at them as Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Muslim, you know. Heavy workload because it was a very deprived community, but a good learning curve.

Richard Davis: And so, when you ran for the council, this was a very Labour constituency, is that right?

Terry Rooney: The year before, Labour had lost it.

Richard Davis: Oh.

Terry Rooney: I don’t know how much you know about British politics, but you’ve got the launch of the SDP, Social Democratic Party, which was launched by four ex-Labour cabinet ministers. And in that surge of publicity and newness, they won that seat. But my majority was about three thousand, which is huge for a council election.

Richard Davis: Did your religion come up in your election for council or any other election?

Terry Rooney: Right. Do you remember a pop singer called Cat Stevens?

Richard Davis: Yes.

Terry Rooney: Right, well, Cat Stevens converted to Islam. And he came and campaigned in my little council election against me because I was a Latter-day Saint. It had no impact. I mean, I don’t know how he found out because it wasn’t widely known at that time what my religion was because I’d not been in the public arena. I was just working in the background. But somehow he found out and he came up, and he spent two or three days there canvassing, telling people that I was an infidel.

Richard Davis: Would he have done that if you’d been in the Church of England?

Terry Rooney: Doubt it very much. So I was encouraged by what he was doing because I thought, “Well, Heavenly Father will deal with him; I don’t need to worry.”

Now, prior to getting on the council, I thought all councilors must be really bright and intelligent. It was quite a shock to find out they are not. And I had a similar feeling about Parliament. I thought, you know, “You must be really bright and clever to become a member of Parliament.” And when I got elected, I found out they weren’t. I mean I’m not the world’s greatest genius or anything, but I’ll share this little anecdote with you.

So I got elected, and you get put on different committees. So I get put on this committee, which looks at expenditure of maintenance and dustbin collection and all that. So I go to this first meeting, a councilor comes about a church clock in his ward that stopped and it’s going to cost 750 pounds to repair. They spent an hour and fifteen minutes discussing this, and the outcome was what I’d seen would happen within two minutes of this time—that if the church would pay half, the council would pay half. We could have got to that decision seventy minutes earlier. The very next item is four million pounds on new vehicles and the chairman says, “But we all agree with this, don’t we,” and all the hands went up and said, “Yes.”

Richard Davis: So when you ran for Parliament, did your religion come up? Did people talk about it? Did it affect how they felt about you? Did you hear anything about it?

Terry Rooney: I don’t think it was an issue. Two or three national newspapers splashed that if elected, I would be the first Mormon MP, not Latter-day Saint, Mormon MP [member of parliament]. As always happened with by-elections there were an awful lot of candidates and there were seven candidates whose party affiliations were different aspects of Islam. They were basically standing as Muslim candidates. And they got probably three hundred votes between them. So it didn’t affect the result at all; it never became an issue. When it’s a by-election it’s taken out of your hands, you know, head office does everything. They run it and were really, really, really furious that on Sundays I wouldn’t go out canvassing. It was known to me they were spending an absolute fortune on this by-election. They spent about 160,000 pounds, and I think their attitude was, “Well we’re spending all this money, you should play ball.” But I just had—I was out twelve hours a day, Monday to Saturday, and even had I not been religious, I would have wanted some time just to regroup and see my family, you know, things like that. And so, from when I first got elected to council, I made it very clear I would never do anything on Sundays. I made this an absolute rule, and when people rang me up, I’d say “Sorry, can’t help you. Ring me tomorrow.”

There was one exception. The nearest Sunday to the 11th of November is what we call “Remembering Sunday”—remembering the First and Second World War day. And you have a parade, and I used to always go on that. But that was the only exception, and in pretty quick time this was not an issue. People recognized this is what I did—six days a week to contact me.

Richard Davis: Yeah, so who has influenced you, both religious, political leaders that you have seen as models, examples, and influences on you.

Terry Rooney: People who I’ve admired, mainly Harold Wilson and Nelson Mandela, both of whom I’ve met. There’s only three people I’ve ever met who had an aura around them: Nelson Mandela, Gordon B. Hinckley, and Bill Clinton. Now, you know, Bill Clinton is not a nice man at all. And I think he did some wonderful things, but his morals left an awful lot to be desired, but he did have an aura about him. I met him in the Oval Office, not for long, during a group of us visiting in Washington. We had an organized tour of the White House for us, and we were just going down this corridor, and he just came out. He said, “Who are these?” And we said, “The British Parliamentarians.” “Come in,” he said, and we had about fifteen minutes with him. But he did have an aura, but not a man you would want anywhere near your wife, daughter, cousins.

Mandela, you know—for all that he went through—once he got released all he wanted was to forgive people. It wasn’t an interest in retribution or revenge, and he just wanted to forgive people. He set up those hearings, where people came and confessed what they’d done wrong. And I thought that was just a masterstroke because at the end of the day he could not run South Africa without the white population. You know, not least because the Black population had been excluded from all the use of power for—since forever. I don’t know if I could have been that forgiving if I’d have gone through what he did. I might have wanted to punch somebody on the way but . . .

Richard Davis: Did you get to meet President Hinckley at any point?

Terry Rooney: Yes, twice. When they had the dedication for the Preston Temple; President Hinckley did that, and [my wife] Susanne was the public affairs person for that event. Even though it’s eighty miles from where we are, she was asked to do it, so we met him at the groundbreaking and at the dedication, because that’s where he served his mission.

So that’s why he always wanted to come back. In fact, I don’t think we’d have gotten a temple in Preston if he hadn’t served his mission there. I think it might have been in Scotland. But you know—I mean I really, really, really love President Hinckley, but my thought about him always is, he could have made it an absolute fortune as a comedian. You know, he was just so genuinely funny.

Richard Davis: So you mentioned the Sunday campaigning. Were there other gospel standards that became a problem for you? How did you handle other issues?

Terry Rooney: Well actually, when I was elected I got christened by the campaign team “O. J.” O. J. Simpson—O. J., Orange Juice. Now I can honestly say in my twenty years in Parliament if I’d have ever tried to get a drink, people would have stopped me. They knew. So it was a bonus. I had dozens of conversations about the church, with people coming to ask me, you know. The first question is always, “Are you a Christian?” To which I say, “Just look at the name. Read the name. Yeah.”

Richard Davis: So how do you balance church callings?

Terry Rooney: I served as bishops’ counselor four times before being bishop. I was elders quorum president and counselor. I was high priest group leader, ward mission leader, all while I was serving. It really surprised me when I met American politicians who are Latter-day Saints, that they have no church callings and considered it almost an insult that they should be even considered for a calling. And I really, really didn’t get my head round this.

Richard Davis: Was that difficult for you, because you spent a lot of time in Parliament in Westminster, instead of in Bradford? So what were you doing, going back and forth?

Terry Rooney: Well, routinely I used to travel down late Sunday night and come back Thursday afternoon. So four days in London, three days up here. And I say I did about twelve to thirteen years as the bishops’ counselor, so they obviously were quite happy with what I was doing. Seven years after I retired, I was called as a bishop.

Richard Davis: OK, why did you choose the party that you belong to? Do you think that has anything to do with the gospel, with your approach to the gospel?

Terry Rooney: I’ve never seen my politics affecting the gospel. And I’ve never seen the gospel affecting my politics. Going back to my first political experience, right. That was, in crude terms, the bosses against the workers. Bosses are represented by the Conservative Party, the workers are represented by the Labour Party, so I was Labour.

You know, and before that—well obviously a nine-year-old, you don’t have opinions, do you? But that experience, really, really, really moved me. It—and you know, I repeat it often. I was a sad child who became a politician at nine.

Richard Davis: So you made the decision to be with Labour long before you joined the church.

Terry Rooney: Oh yeah.

Richard Davis: So here’s a question about your relationship with other members of the church. Did you find any conflict? Were they unhappy that you were Labour? Did they criticize you for that?

Terry Rooney: Locally, no problem. There were people who were lifelong conservatives who voted for me, who campaigned for me purely because I was a Latter-day Saint. There was only one person who was a problem. He’s passed on now, but he was the church’s national public affairs officer. And he said to me, in company, “It’s a sin that a Latter-day Saint gets selected as a Labour MP.” And I’d never done anything to him, never had any conflict with him, and all the time that he was still employed, he did his best to undermine me. To no effect, I have to say.

Richard Davis: To no effect?

Terry Rooney: He took it deeply personally; and just one really silly example: In 1992 the government then were about to cancel all the visas for the missionaries in Britain, right, on a total misunderstanding. They thought these were working people who were getting paid. This guy whose name eludes me, his son worked for a firm of London solicitors. So he persuaded whoever he needed to, that they should use these firm solicitors to approach the government to try and get this sorted out.

They had zero experience of immigration law, and of dealing with government. It got to within two days of this ban coming in when somebody from church headquarters in Europe rang me and said, “Is this something you could help us with?” And honestly within twenty-four hours, it was sorted. But this man would not come to me because he thought a sin had been committed that a Labour man had got elected. You know, that’s how bad it was; it was awful.

Richard Davis: So General Authorities didn’t have any problem?

Terry Rooney: No. Neal A. Maxwell sent me a signed book. As I said, I used to meet President Holland regularly. I got letters from around the world from General Authorities and other church leaders. There were three or four articles in the Ensign. You know, when we first went to Salt Lake, Jeffrey Holland organized a dinner for us, and there were five or six General Authorities there.

You know, it was never, ever, a problem with anybody; everybody was massively supportive except this one man.

But no, I mean—as I see it, in America, probably 90 percent of Latter-day Saints are Republicans. And it’s probably 90 percent of Latter-day Saints in England are conservatives. Yeah, but so what?

Richard Davis: It didn’t affect your relationship with local members?

Terry Rooney: No. Not at all. In fact, just the opposite.

Richard Davis: So I wanted to ask you about partisan polarization here. So, you know, parties have more of a role in Great Britain than they do in the United States, although we are becoming more like Britain, in that sense. Do you see that as a problem? And if so, how can Latter-day Saints maybe address it?

Terry Rooney: I get asked this a lot. Sorry. And I say to members, “You should seek to influence the political process.” It’s too big a step for most Latter-day Saints to actually join a political party. But I say to them, “It’s not beyond you to try and influence that political process.”

Yes, there is increasingly a fairly stupid polarization, and—I’m only an observer in American politics, but the fact that the Senate Republicans have said, “We’re going to oppose everything irrespective. We’re just going to oppose to destabilize Biden,” just strikes me utter idiocy. And we’re getting that.

In fact, it’s been developing for about twenty years now, maybe longer. Margaret Thatcher started this. It’s an “us and them,” “if you’re not with us you’re against us,” and it’s stupid because all political parties have good ideas. All political parties have some pretty stupid ideas, you know. And politics only works if you have a strong opposition. If you have a weak opposition, you get elected dictatorships. And it’s very dangerous. In America it’d be very dangerous if the president, the Senate, and the Congress were all the same party. Very dangerous.

You know, and in 1997 Labour had the majority of over two hundred, you know, absolutely huge. Not good. In ’83 and ’87 the Conservatives had a huge majority. Not good. Because they stopped listening. They surround themselves by people with the same opinion and just reinforce each other. That is just wrong.

Richard Davis: So do you think it’s a bad idea for people to vote party? Should Latter-day Saints, for example, not vote party?

Terry Rooney: That’s a hard one because, you know, they don’t vote the way I would like them to. Again, going back to Doctrine and Covenants 134:3, it says that you should choose people of good character and honesty. So maybe life is a lot easier if you just attach yourself to a party. But, if Latter-day Saints, particularly where votes can make a difference—you know in marginal seats—if they’d actually look to each of the candidates—you know, if you get somebody whose been married six times and has got three mistresses and has been bankrupt, do you really want that person representing you, you know? And maybe occasionally you need to think differently.

Richard Davis: So what lessons have you learned about politics that you’d like to share with young Latter-day Saints?

Terry Rooney: Anything is possible if you’re determined enough. You arm yourself with the right information, you do good research, and you hold true to your principles. If the fight is worth it, you will triumph. You’ve got to be patient; you can’t expect to do things overnight.

Richard Davis: Wonderful advice! Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you’d like to say?

Terry Rooney: Probably, but it’ll all come to me later. I’d just like say in general, I loved my life in politics; I loved my life in the church more. For the first thirty-one years of my life, I wasn’t a Latter-day Saint. For the last thirty-nine I have been, and the second half of my life has been better than the first.

Richard Davis: But those two are not incompatible. I think you’ve shown that you can make a difference in government and be a good Latter-day Saint.

Terry Rooney: Well, you need good grounding. You need principles. Whether you’ve got religion or not, you need to have principles. You need to be true to yourself. Unfortunately, too many people enter politics and make a judgment, “Which party is likely to be in government; which party will have the best chance of climbing the greasy pole?” And you can spot them—career politicians, who made a choice for their own personal aggrandizement. As I said, the absolute joy of representing the city I was born in and grew up in is, you know, you can’t buy that.