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The nation needs saving from political degeneracy, but Michael Gove is certainly not the man to do it

Gove’s utter failure to engage with his own deeds on anti-immigrant scaremongering shows that he knows it is a sin from which he will never be able to escape

Tom Peck
Political Sketch Writer
Monday 28 May 2018 16:29 BST
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Michael Gove imagines politeness can be used as a cover for wild dishonesty
Michael Gove imagines politeness can be used as a cover for wild dishonesty

As if the past three years have not been a vivid enough demonstration of the fact that those who write about, talk about or merely do politics for a living spend their lives with their noses pressed so hard against the glass that they cannot see the blindingly obvious, it appears a very straightforward truth might again have to be learnt the very hardest way.

It is this: of all the questions currently ripping the country apart, there is none to which the answer is Prime Minister Gove.

For reasons of utter delusion, reports have emerged that senior Tories are planning for a “succession pact” between Michael Gove and Ruth Davidson, one that would involve Gove taking over from Theresa May, presumably at the precise point at which the catastrophe he personally delivered renders the country fully ungovernable. And then Gove hands over to Davidson in time for her to contest the next election.

First of all, we must overlook the fact that succession planning in politics never works. As has been amply demonstrated, gazing into the political future is a pointless business. It is like trying to predict the outcome of a football match, only to then discover the game will take place in zero gravity in the middle of a meteor shower. However true the love between Gove and Davidson, the course of it will not run smooth.

But there are more fundamental aspects even than this. It is startling that the nameless “Tory grandees” behind this pact they describe as a Tory “dream ticket” cannot see that Britain needs urgent rescuing from its degenerate politics.

Political life currently operates in a realm beneath shame. Blatant, utterly transparent dishonesty is a daily reality and it comes free from consequence. British democracy has descended to a place that is common the world over, but has never been normal here, which is that the ordinary public looks at politics and struggles not to throw up.

The general public struggle to cope, for example, with seeing the people of Ireland voting overwhelmingly for the legalisation of abortion, and remembering that the same medieval headbangers that deny that right to Northern Irish women are also holding our own government to ransom. It is vomit-inducing.

It is possible that Davidson may be the person to save us from this degenerate state of affairs, but Gove, as a key progenitor of it, simply cannot be the midwife of this particular chapter of history.

Last week, I was in the audience when Gove gave a speech on the “state of the union” between the four nations of the United Kingdom. He spoke of how since Brexit, Britain had become “one of the most welcoming places for immigration in the world”.

Michael Gove says there are 'significant question marks' over timescale and deliverability of customs arrangement

The atmosphere in the room was one of unconcealed rage. Gove’s evidence for this was some recent polling, which shows little more than since the referendum vote, both Leavers and Remainers have become concerned by the amount of misery the Brexit vote has heaped on Europeans living in Britain, that misery having been heaped on them by Gove himself.

In the question and answer session at the end, one questioner made mention of little more than Gove’s “brass neck” in praising the Brexit effect on Britain’s attitude to migration.

Several questioners brought up the Turkey aspect of the notorious Vote Leave campaign. The one that was fronted with a poster claiming “Turkey is joining the EU” beneath footprints sneaking into an open door marked “UK”.

When Vote Leave published a report on the EU “paving the way from Ankara to the UK”, Gove fronted the launch.

To the most angry questioner of all, a former Tory MP called Keith Raffan, who accused Gove of “dog-whistle politics of the nastiest kind”, Gove politely replied with some obfuscatory garbage about both of them having attended the same school.

As a political sketch writer, I spend an unhealthy amount of my time watching frontline politicians for ticks and tells, for little character traits that, should they ever step beneath the most piercing spotlight of all, the one that only comes with the top job, will be exposed in an instant for all to see.

In Theresa May’s case, for example, it was patently obvious, three days into the job, from the moment she was plainly too terrified even to record a short TV clip about an attempted military coup in Turkey, that she would be found woefully short on vital telegenic gifts that are needed in her job. And sure enough, it was this that cost her everything in a snap general election just under a year later.

​Gove’s most glaringly obvious one is that he imagines politeness can be used as a cover for wild dishonesty. Gove likes an argument. If he imagines he has even half a per cent of right on his side, he will gladly engage. His utter failure to engage with his own deeds on anti-immigrant scaremongering shows nothing more than that he knows it is a sin from which he will never be able to escape. You can talk yourself up as a liberal, but by your deeds shall ye be known, and at the moment of the most heightened pressure, Gove took the coward’s option. It is a choice he is stuck with.

The other, and it’s related, is that he has never intellectually escaped from the epistemology of the Oxford Union. For Gove, life is no more than a clever argument. A dropped name. He could not, for example, interview Donald Trump without mentioning books he had read that Trump hadn’t. There is no surer sign of a lightness of intellect than the heaviness with which it is worn.

It is no surprise that the collapse of British politics has coincided with its hostile takeover at the hands of people who willingly chose to spend their university days in that abysmal hellhole. That Britain’s decent to international laughing stock has coincided with the rise of men like Boris Johnson, Daniel Hannan and Michael Gove is no coincidence.

The idea that Gove is an intellectual is hilarious. To paraphrase something more often said about Stephen Fry, Michael Gove is Michael Gove’s idea of an intelligent person.

This month, we have again been treated to some more blog posts from his former adviser Dominic Cummings, another supposed great intellectual, who again makes clear his view that Brexit could only be successfully implemented through the entire restructuring of the entire Whitehall apparatus. He likes to talk about the probability of various “branching histories”. Quite why he could not see the probability of this particular branch being precisely zero is a question he is yet to answer.

In the meantime, he has done little more than to attempt to steal the Large Hadron Collider by ram-raiding the mountain under which it is hidden.

The country deserves better than men with undergraduate degrees who have conferred the status of intellectual upon themselves for no greater reason than that they spent their late teenage years in black tie, making clever counterintuitive arguments and then did the same in some newspaper column

Soon, it will start to demand better too.

Last week, Gove and Davidson launched a new Tory think tank called Onward, whose mission is to deliver to the Conservatives “a reforming, forward-looking agenda that responds to the concerns of the entire nation”.

You do not need to be a political nerd to detect the fact that the Conservatives had one of these. It was led by a man who once asked Gove to be godfather to his son. In around 2016, it was just beginning to emerge from the worst effects of a huge financial meltdown. It was just getting to the point where its attempts to rebalance the economy to the benefit of the “entire nation”, via its northern powerhouse project, were bearing fruit.

Then Gove smashed it to pieces in a carnival of tin-brained xenophobia, and now seems to think it is only he that can do what would have been done much better without him.

Don’t be under any illusion. Michael Gove has made the country poorer. He has hammered this country’s economy, and done so deliberately. People still like to criticise so-called Project Fear, and in so doing take credit for the fact that Brexit has not been as damaging as predicted because the global economy has exceeded expectations. But Britain has missed out on this surge. It has gone from the highest growth economy in the G7 to the lowest. Michael Gove has made you and I and everyone else poorer, and has done so deliberately.

Gove is obviously not without his considerable strengths. He has been a stellar, and reforming minister in many departments. Personally, I have long thought a prime minister should have the courage to set him loose on the NHS.

But if the Conservative Party really does think a stint from Gove in No 10 is the link to a brighter future, they are even more deluded than anyone dares imagine. At this time of great political nausea, it is more than the nation will be able to stomach.

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