Michael Gove wants to smash and slaughter his way to a new Britain

There will always be a place for disrupters in politics, in business, and in every walk of life. But there is a difference between disrupters and wreckers

Michael Gove has announced his candidacy for the leader of the Conservative Party (Getty Images)

Brutus, even after having his life reimagined by Shakespeare himself, is a man who will be remembered not for his words but his deeds.

Michael Gove arrived with words, 5,000 of them: “A New Vision for Britain.” But they were always destined to be overshadowed by events of the preceding 24 hours.

The first 1,000 were dedicated to constructing an alibi. “I did almost everything not to be a candidate for the leadership of this party,” he said, redefining both the words almost and everything with trademark “Govian” vision, so as to stop short of including knifing the front runner at midnight and then, actually, standing for the leadership himself.

“I came to realise this week that he was not the right person for the task,” he said, of a man he has known and worked closely with for 30 years.

This act of outrageous treachery will surely be enough to mean this “new vision for Britain” will never come to pass. Jake Berry is only one of 331 Conservative MPs who will be responsible for whittling this list down to two names, but Berry’s view that “there is a very deep pit reserved in hell for those such as he” is reasonably widely shared.

It would involve a total transformation of the UK economy: a trashing of financial services as they currently stand, a reinvention of the tax system, Teach First for prisons, a massive role for government in funding start-ups and a whole range of other things. While ambitious, they may not be deliverable in the midst of a deep and lasting recession that all the major banks are about to forecast, and while the most of the nation’s energies are devoted to extricating itself from the EU.

While he spoke, incidentally, George Osborne abandoned plans for a budget surplus by 2020.

There will always be a place for disrupters in politics, and in business and in every walk of life. But there is a difference between disrupters and wreckers. The sheer scale of what will be smashed or slaughtered to make way for this man’s “new vision for Britain” is breathtaking.

Gove cited the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman: “Many people in financial services are paid vast fortunes as if they are outstandingly skilful but in many cases they are simply lucky,” he said. This is undoubtedly true. But they also contribute 18 per cent of the nation’s GDP.

They are the luckiest ones, but that half the world has its money managed in one square mile in London makes us all, however galling it might seem, the lucky ones too. In the first hours post-Brexit, quite literally, plans were afoot in Frankfurt, Dublin, Amsterdam and the rest to take advantage of Great Britain’s stunning error. Many in the City of London are being optimistic even if that optimism is misplaced. There was nothing at all to be optimistic about here.

“Too many of these people act as though they are Steve Jobs. In fact they’re behaving like David Brent,” he said.

Some act like they are Julius Caesar, but their deeds betray them.