Paeans to the poisonous Pob

Columnists and lobby correspondents are gaslighting us about Gove.

Previously: The Three Stigmata of the Eldritch Minister: Why the British media pretends Michael Gove is special...

Note: There simply isn’t enough space in a single edition to include every weird story about Michael Gove.

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When Michael Gove was ‘promoted’ in the September 2021 cabinet reshuffle, I wrote:

… there are many media reports calling Gove one of “the big winners” of the reshuffle, his win is equivalent to having your raffle ticket picked, discovering you’ve won a bottle of dusty sherry and then, on closer inspection, finding that someone replaced the contents with piss at some point in the late-70s.

While Gove — and his media outriders — pretend he has been gifted a mega-ministry, what Boris Johnson has actually done is scooped up all the shit of government and dumped it on his frenemy’s doorstep, muttering, “I’m sure you can make something out of that, Michael.”

… hacks have to pretend that DfLUHC (aka The Michael Gove Centre for Towns Who Can’t Economy Good and Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too) is a golden prize for the minister and that Gove, who has been in and out of government more than he’s been in and out of [redacted] is, as one source ludicrously described him to The Times, “the Swiss Army knife of ministers”. They meant he can do anything but I can accept that analogy if we take it to mean he’s a tool who never does more than a half-arsed job, should be stuck in a drawer, and would be best put to work removing stones from horses’ hooves.

Now, having been sacked by Boris Johnson in a last-minute bit of revenge and certain that Liz Truss wouldn’t even appoint him to clean the Cabinet Office toilets, Gove used an editorial in The Times this weekend to swing behind Rishi Sunak and imply — with plenty of leeway to change his mind — that he’s finished in “frontline politics”.

It was inevitable that Gove would make his move in The Times; he was its Assistant Editor prior to his election as an MP in 2005, continued to make £60,000 a year as a columnist there until 2009, and returned to the paper for a period following the Brexit referendum, when he found himself without ministerial office, to write a column and interview Donald Trump with Rupert Murdoch just out of shot. It’s also unsurprising that The Times was first with a glowing political obit for “the Gover”, especially given his habit of helping praise on Murdoch (“one of the most impressive and significant figures of the last 50 years” or so he told the Leveson Inquiry).

The Times leader column told readers Gove’s “clarity and principles will be missed” and claimed he represented “a blend of High Tory principles and compassionate liberalism.” Perhaps these principles were demonstrated during his private lunches with Rupert Murdoch and the many dinner parties he had with senior editors and journalists while married to Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine. What’s absent from that leader column are any references to accusations by former Tory Party chair Baroness Warsi that Gove holds extreme views about Muslims or his chats with Steve Bannon.

Last year’s story about Gove making racist remarks during appearances at the Oxford Union in his twenties (once when he was 20, again when he was 26) — which included audio — came and went without making much more than a ripple.

The panegyric’s description of Gove’s time as Education Secretary…

Without his insistence on higher standards, incentives for good teachers and the setting up of academies as beacons of excellence, Britain’s education system would be struggling to remain relevant.

… also unsurprisingly skips over the Trojan Horse affair, where he responded to claims of an “Islamist plot to take over Birmingham schools” by ordering a series of inquiries, including by former Metropolitan Police counterterrorism chief Peter Clarke. There was no plot — in fact, Gove’s department had encouraged the school at the centre of the claims to take over its failing neighbours to form a multi-academy trust — the findings of Clarke’s report were discredited and the Education Select Committee found “no evidence of extremism or radicalisation”.

Another gushing piece, this time for UnHerd, headlined Farewell Michael Gove, almost a philosopher king, refers to the books which give some indication of where Gove’s attitude to Islam in government springs from:

Turned away from the Conservative Research Department after university for being “insufficiently political”, like several of his predecessors in this tradition he instead became a writer, even producing books for a purpose other than embarrassing his future self. Politics came only after the cultivation of an intellectual and personal hinterland, vital for any politician who wishes to retain their integrity and their sanity in government.

William Dalrymple’s 2006 Sunday Times review of Gove’s hard-right wet-dream, Celsius 7/7, is a revelatory read:

A prominent example of the sort of pundit who has spoon-fed neocon mythologies to the British public for the past few years is Michael Gove. Gove has never lived in the Middle East, indeed has barely set foot in a Muslim country. He has little knowledge of Islamic history, theology or culture — in Celsius 7/7, he just takes the line of Bernard Lewis on these matters; nor does he speak any Islamic language. None of this, however, has prevented his being billed, on his book’s dust-jacket, “one of Britain’s leading writers and thinkers on terrorism”.

Gove’s book is a confused epic of simplistic incomprehension, riddled with more factual errors and misconceptions than any other text I have come across in two decades of reviewing books on this subject.

… All terrorist violence is contemptible. But just because we condemn does not mean we should not strive to analyse accurately. It is exactly the sort of woolly elisions and linkages that Gove indulges in that have got us into the trouble we are now in. None of this would matter if Gove were still ring-fenced within his op-ed-page padded cell; horrifyingly, however, he now sits in the Conservative shadow cabinet and is credited with having influence on Conservative policy in the region.

Worse still, this book was named as the one most taken by British MPs on their summer holidays. Blair was bad enough, the blind leading the blind; now it seems the madmen are taking over the asylum.

It’s interesting to note that Dalrymple’s piece is presented on The Times site as a review of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower — which he praises — rather than Gove’s book which is the main focus of the review. Gove used his Times column to respond to Dalrymple with the pursed-lipped acidic politeness that is his most common weapon.

Why is Gove so indulged by The Times, beyond his status as a former (and likely future) employee? Peter Oborne summed it up in 2019:

He understands and flatters the press, and is in turn protected by it. A longstanding employee of the Times, he is the Westminster avatar of the US newspaper and media baron Rupert Murdoch.

That’s the prism through which you need to view all the breathless takes about Gove. When Clare Foges, another Times columnist no doubt acutely aware of the rumours that he may be her next boss, writes…

Some politicians treat politics as a parlour game, but [Gove] was acutely aware of the millions on the other side of policymaking: the “lost boys” in failing schools, the fatherless illiterates in prison, the tenants living in grotty rip-off flats, the homeowners stuck in cladding purgatory. For them, Gove felt the hot breath of urgency on his neck. In short, he cared.

… she’s expecting the reader to forget his response to questions about an emergency budget to help those most in need during a BBC Breakfast interview in May 2022 was to put on a series of ludicrous accents. The Number 10 spokesperson’s response to that interview was that:

Michael Gove is an effective cabinet communicator who has a variety of means of getting the message across.

Those means included screeching “calm down” in a pantomime parody of a Liverpudlian accent. When the spokesperson was asked if Gove often did that in meetings, he replied: “Not in the ones I've been in.”

Gove’s aversion to “politics as a parlour game” was also demonstrated when he attempted to storm into Channel 4’s climate debate in 2019, accompanied by a camera crew and the Prime Minister’s father Stanley Johnson. Or maybe that was an example of the “gravitas” of Gove that Matthew d’Ancona moons over in his Tortoise piece (Gove is right to stick with reality).

A former Spectator editor with a long history of treacly praise for Gove (in 2010, he told GQ: “[He is] the politest man in the western hemisphere.”), d’Ancona writes:

Gove, in contrast, is one of the last true Conservative intellectuals, applying broad erudition and critical thinking to practical matters of government. There are a handful of others who have a similar cast of mind: Sir Oliver Letwin, the former MP for West Dorset, from whom Johnson withdrew the Conservative whip in September 2019; Daniel Finkelstein, a distinguished commentator and Conservative peer; Rory Stewart, who no longer considers himself a Tory; and Jesse Norman, former Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who has just been elected to a two-year Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford.

What unifies those names is a thick layer of ‘politeness’ as cover for their dark political instincts, a taste for Islamophobia, a penchant for passive aggression, and a high likelihood that they agree with Matthew d’Ancona on most topics. Gove is an intellectual to these people because he acts as a mirror for them.

D’Ancona, in common with the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary, references the rumour that Gove may be the next editor of The Times. Given his closeness to Murdoch and willingness to parrot his worldview, it’s not an unthinkable next move for Gove. He’d earn more than he does an MP while maintaining his status, and George Osborne’s undistinguished stint as Evening Standard editor set a precedent.

Over at The Daily Telegraph, Fraser Nelson — Gove’s subordinate when he was News Editor at The Times — delivers a write-up with the pretence of balance (Michael Gove was one of the most consequential ministers of modern times, for good and ill) but ends with a conclusion that sucks up more than a Henry on full power:

A free school recently opened in my neighbourhood and when I walk past it, I think of how it’s a monument to the difference one man can make in politics. Without Gove, there would be no free schools and hardly any Academies. Without him, thousands of working-class pupils who went to university probably would never have made it. Without him, Brexit would probably not have happened. His record will be debated for years to come – but few can doubt that he leaves frontline politics as one most consequential ministers of modern times.

The Gove presented by these columnists is not the Islamophobe, the backstabber, the self-serving operator, or the oddity, but a source, a dinner party companion, a former colleague and, perhaps, a future boss. They’re dancing with him, not laughing at him.

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