Michael Gove – or Red Mike – on the side of the downtrodden people against the EU elite

The 'Lord High Chancellor' was reborn in tonight's Sky EU programme as the Brexit warrior for socialism that Jeremy Corbyn might secretly want to be

John Rentoul
Saturday 04 June 2016 09:15 BST
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If we leave the European Union and Spain invades Gibraltar, what will you do then? That was one of the questions Michael Gove didn't answer. He didn't really need to. He could just say, It's not going to happen and because it is a hypothetical question no one can really contradict him.

So he had, as predicted, an easier night than David Cameron. If we left the EU, he would be able to save the Port Talbot steel works, make it easier for young people to get on the housing ladder (although he shied away from saying house prices would be lower), Scotland would stay in the UK, VAT on fuel would be cut, the NHS would be restored to its glory and poverty would be abolished.

It was this last, the transformation of neocon Thatcherite turned Blairite Gove into socialist Michael, more left-wing than equivocating sellout Corbyn, that offered some of the most striking sound bites of the evening. "You're on the side of the elite," he told Faisal Islam, "I am on the side of the people." Islam fought back by addressing him as "Lord High Chancellor", which was too comic opera for such a serious interview on a serious subject, and Red Mike warned him rather pompously not to "skate over the misery" of the working poor.

He described the EU as a jobs-destroying machine, and attacked JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs as banks that had "done very nicely thankyou" out of it – "a market rigged in favour of the rich and biased against the poor".

Gove is a brilliant debater, but he knows it, and he could not suppress a grin each time he felt he had outsmarted Islam in the interview section of the programme. It wasn't a wholly persuasive performance, and he didn't get the better of Islam as often as he seemed to think he did.

Islam was quick to pick him up on his dishonest claim that high unemployment in Spain and Greece was an argument for Britain to leave the EU. "We're not in the euro," Islam pointed out.

Gove was also wrong to pretend, in answer to another soft-ish question from the audience, that if he could stop Poles coming to the UK he would be able to allow more people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Caribbean to come. If the Leave campaign is to get net immigration below 100,000 a year, that would mean cutting all categories of immigration from everywhere, and Gove knows it.

It was a disciplined, well-prepared performance. The messages were clear: take back control; on the side of the people against the elite; Britain can be great again. But it was undermined by a suspicion that the new "Red Mike" persona was an act constructed for the purposes of debate.

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