Michael Gove once offered to sign in his own blood that he would never run. We should have taken him up on it

What Jeremy Hunt is to NHS staff, Gove is to state system educators. If the next election is to be won on the smug, arrogant, contemptuous know-nothing know-all platform, either would be a banker for the Tories

If only someone had taken up Michael Gove on his offer, the Chamber of Horrors would possess what could soon be as priceless an artefact as the original Runnymede copy of Magna Carta.

“I don’t know what I can do,” he declared with typically sincerity when asked about his ambition in 2012, “but if anyone wants me to sign a piece of parchment in my own blood saying I don’t want to be prime minister, then I’m perfectly happy to do that”.

In fact there is something else, and bloodless, he might have done. In his defence, it does rely on hindsight. And it is fiendishly obscure. It makes the most obtuse round on Only Connect look like that old GMTV competition question about the Academy Awards (are they commonly known as a) The Olives, or b) The Oscars?) So you understand how it escaped his powerhouse intellect.