The rumblings about Tony Blair’s conversion to Catholicism are getting louder. Now, the British press is pounding the drums, and sounding awfully certain:

Tony Blair will convert to Roman Catholicism within weeks when he is received into the church by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, according to the Catholic magazine the Tablet.

There has been speculation for months that the former prime minister would be received into the church following his resignation from office. A report by the magazine’s editor, Catherine Pepinster, says the ceremony will take place during a private mass in the cardinal’s official residence behind Westminster Cathedral in Victoria, London.

Mr Blair, now a Middle East peace envoy, was baptised as an Anglican but has been known to be interested in Catholicism for many years. He refrained from conversion earlier because of constitutional sensitivities. The Blair government pursued a number of policies which the church opposed: introducing civil partnerships, authorising stem cell research, extending equality regulations to adoptions by gay couples, failing to restrict abortions and going to war in Iraq. Famously, Mr Blair accepted the advice of his press secretary that “We don’t do God,” cutting a reference to the Almighty from a prime ministerial broadcast on the eve of the war.

Although there is no bar to a prime minister being a Catholic and both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have had Catholic leaders in recent years, there has never been a Catholic in Number 10. Only the sovereign and heirs to the crown and their spouses are legally barred from membership of the faith because of the Act of Settlement following the Glorious Revolution, which overthrew the last Catholic monarch, James II, in 1688.

Mr Blair’s wife Cherie and their four children are Catholic and he himself accompanied them to Sunday mass while in office. Mr Blair also attended mass alone and took communion in the 1980s before being warned off by Cardinal Basil Hume.

The Tablet report says Mr Blair has been receiving instruction in the faith from Fr John Walsh, an RAF chaplain, and Fr Mark O’Toole, the cardinal’s secretary. It adds: “The cardinal’s involvement as if he were Mr Blair’s parish priest would suggest that the process of conversion did in fact begin during his tenure of Number 10.” It quotes an unnamed friend of Mr Blair as saying the imminence of his conversion was “a rumour not without substance”.