The Three Stigmata of the Eldritch Minister: Why the British media pretends Michael Gove is special...
"Live from the Department of Levelling Up! It's the... shit show!"
As I write this, it is five days since audio of Michael Gove sexually harassing the then-president of the Cambridge Union — now a fellow Tory MP — as well as making a string of homophobic and racist remarks reemerged. That was two days after The House magazine published an interview with Gove in which he said he’s no longer friends with his former advisor (and Twitter troll account collaborator) Dominic Cummings and a day before he was made Secretary of State for Housing1, Communities & Local Government in the cabinet reshuffle.
Over the weekend it was revealed that Gove’s new department is getting a new name to go with its new minister: The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DfLUHC, which sounds like an insult combined with a sneeze). A government statement said:
The Secretary of State will drive cross-Whitehall efforts to deliver a programme of tangible improvements in every part of the UK as we build back better from the pandemic, and deliver on the people’s priorities.
There are few things in that gobbet of doggerel and cliché:
Firstly, while 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 sometime in the late-70s.
While Gove — and his media outriders — get to pretend he has simply 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.”
Tied with “how will that play in the Red Wall” for meaninglessness, “levelling up” is the latest Potemkin slogan of Boris Johnson’s political career. It’s everywhere, spilling from the lying mouths of mediocre ministers and compliant columnists alike but get up close to it and you realise that it’s not a monolith stretching high into the clouds, but a theatrical flat, a trompe-l'œil2 which is about as impressive as the ‘mound’ at Marble Arch.
Secondly, along with “levelling up” — now hammered into the name of an actual department that previously existed to do real things around housing but now might as well be called the Department for Levelling Up, Housing, Communities, and Counting the Moon — the statement includes the dread phrase “build back better”. Another one of the Johnsonian slogans cobbled together from string, sawdust and a surfeit of bullshit, the questions it prompts should always be: Better how? And better for whom?
Thirdly, just as The Sun insists on referring to itself as “the people’s paper”, when it is, in fact, the person’s paper and that person is Rupert Murdoch, the government is still clinging on to the Cummings-inspired, Vote Leave-style claim that it is pursuing “the people’s priorities”. That’s only accurate if you reduce the individuals covered by the word “people” down to Tory donors, pals, cronies, stooges and family members (there’s a lot of interlocking circles there).
But 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-arse job, should be stuck in a drawer, and would be best put to work removing stones from horse’s hooves.
In yesterday’s The Mail on Sunday, Dan Hodges — the most resolutely wrong man in British media, who’s saved from being Glenda Jackson’s worst production only by her turn in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers — tried to turn the saga of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson into a Shakespearian epic rather than squalid manoeuvring by two small men with big egos.
Hodges begins his column with an anecdote that so perfectly fits his argument that it almost certainly did not happen outside of the theatre of the absurd — usually occupied by a tiny fez-wearing monkey clashing cymbals — that constitutes his brain. He writes:
A few days ago the Prime Minister was approached in the House of Commons by one of his party grandees. “I wonder if you can help me with my reading of the classics,” the MP said.
“Of course,” Boris answered.
“Well,” said his colleague, “It’s about Brutus. Is it true he betrayed Caesar, was then forgiven and brought back into the fold, only to then betray him again and stab him to death?”
“Er… yes. Why do you ask?” the perplexed PM asked.
“Oh,” replied the backbencher wryly, “It’s just you might want to think about that when it comes to Michael Gove and your reshuffle.”
If he ever decides to move on from his job as a gossip columnist specialising in the most unappealing people alive while pretending to be a political analyst, Hodges should not under any circumstances go into scriptwriting.
With the total fantasy element of the piece out of the way, Hodges settles back into his familiar mix of hyperbole, fiction, tittle-tattle, and ridiculous conclusions. And we are gifted this curséd image:
… recent Chequers birthday party for No 10 adviser Henry Newman delivered the spectacle of Boris zooming around the grounds on his motorbike, as Gove clung doggedly to his waist.
Hodges clings desperately to these nuggets of gossip as if they offer great insight into the relationship between Gove and Johnson (“However much he may value his counsel, Boris has never forgotten or forgiven Gove's betrayal…”) but as is so often the case his column reads like a collection of things told to him by spads for a bet.
Having clumsily set up the Shakespearian vibe with the unbelievable anecdote at the start of the piece, Hodges returns to it in the kicker, writing:
Caesar has ignored the warnings. Brutus has been welcomed back into the fold. Boris – and Britain – had better hope that his faith is properly repaid.
The parallels only partially work: Caesar was an authoritarian populist but unlike Boris Johnson, he was actually competent and able to make his mad dreams into reality. Brutus, meanwhile, while generally seen as one of history’s biggest betrayers, jostling with Judas Iscariot for the top spot, can also be considered — as Dr Kathryn Tempest argued in her book Brutus: The Noble Conspirator (2017) — as someone who felt he had to kill Caesar to end a reign of tyranny. There will never be a book with Michael Gove’s name and the word “noble” in the title.
In The Times on Friday, James Forsyth — political editor of The Spectator, Rishi Sunak’s best friend3, and husband of hack-turned-government-spinner Allegra Stratton — wrote that Michael Gove should empower mayors to help level up. It was less of a column and more of a government press release with more line breaks and fewer jokes.
Reviewing the climbers and crasher of the cabinet reshuffle, Forsyth wrote:
The most intriguing move, though, is that of the man who forced Johnson to pull out of the 2016 leadership race, Michael Gove. Housing, communities and local government is hardly a great office of state. Most people with ten years’ cabinet service would have expected a rather more distinguished berth. But don’t be fooled by the rather mundane job title. Gove is now in charge of one of the government’s biggest short-term problems: what to do about its proposed planning reform, which is facing huge opposition from Tory backbenchers, and levelling up, the government’s long-term aim.
Is it possible that Boris Johnson, a Russian doll of a man with an empty space at the centre in which all you can hear are the echoes of a small boy stamping his foot and demanding to be “world king”, has gotten over the ‘great betrayal’ of 2016 faster than the hacks who obsess over him?
Johnson enjoys having Gove as a policy ragdoll to throw around; professional political analysts thinking that dumping all of the ill-defined “levelling up” agenda in a lap that was recently seen gyrating in an Aberdonian nightclub is “a distinguished berth” are just waiting to be sold a bridge in London, perhaps a garden one that will never be completed.
Elsewhere in this week’s Mail on Sunday, the headline Is there anything Gove can't do? Boris Johnson hands 'frenemy' minister control of 'levelling up' in revamped housing and communities department - and tells him to deal with post-Grenfell cladding crisis, elections AND Nicola Sturgeon betrayed a slightly firmer grasp on reality than Dan Hodge’s effort.
In a The Sunday Times piece — beneath an illustration showing Boris Johnson as Winnie the Pooh alongside Liz Truss and Gove as Tiggers and Dominic Raab as Eeyore, something for which the estate of A.A.Milne and the Disney Corporation should not just sue but launch a generations-long blood vendetta — Tim Shipman says the Levelling Up department is “a brutal plan to keep Gove busy” and continues:
Gove, who is generally regarded as the most effective departmental minister of the past decade, has been recruited to take charge of Johnson’s central mission of “levelling up”, rebalancing the economic opportunity to the “red wall” seats in the north of England, where the Tories made giant inroads in 2019 — and dealing with housing, planning and the Union.
… “I know delivery normally involves a superhuman effort by at least one person in the room,” Johnson said, stretching his birth metaphor. “But there are plenty of other people who are absolutely indispensable.”
One of those present remarked later:“I suppose that makes Michael the midwife.” Others think that it’s Gove who will be doing the pushing. One Tory said: “Boris has realised that if he wants to achieve anything he needs Michael to deliver it for him.”
This myth of Gove as Mr Effective4 is pervasive, in part, because he is a) a friend of Rupert (a former Times journalist who remains close to the News Corp demon) and b) more broadly because he is a former journalist like Johnson and hacks are enamoured of the idea that their jobs actually have transferrable skills, particularly as the industry continues to contract faster than gonads in freezing lake. Most tinpot opinion columnists imagine themselves as reforming ministers, taking the usually unworkable, inhumane and morally bankrupt policy positions they put forward in print and making them ‘real’.
The piece is effectively an omnibus of different Westminster camps giving their spin on the reshuffle and faithful stenographer Shipman jotting them down and adding a sprinkling of drama to the whole affair. That’s why we get this…
“It was a surgical reshuffle,” said one cabinet aide. “Raab demoted, Gove put in his box with a big in-tray to keep him out of mischief, Liz Truss likewise out of the way on endless plane rides and Rishi isolated by the evisceration of his junior ministerial team. A polished exercise in potential rival management.”
… to make the Prime Minister sound ruthless and determined rather than as stable and reliable as a bin bag full of jelly and this…
Williamson was offered a knighthood to keep him sweet and this weekend came hope of a relatively swift return. “Gavin will be back,” a senior official said. “He has great political skills but he hasn’t yet flourished in a department. [He] has more determination and energy and capacity for hard work than anyone. I’m sure there will be a third act.”
… from a man who looked and sounded like Gavin Williamson wearing an elaborate wig and moustache get up.
Over at The Sun — The Times without a Grammarly subscription — Gove gets a delightful (and incredibly shoddily written) Murdoch-sanctioned puff piece: ABOUT TIME What is the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
Quoting extensively from government press releases and calling former Bank of England Chief Economist, Andy Haldane, simply “Andy”, The Sun piece assures its readers that:
The department will deliver a raft of "improvements" in every part of the UK as it recovers from the pandemic and will be coordinating with other Whitehall departments.
Boy howdy! Sounds good, Uncle Rupert.
And if anyone can achieve all that it’s a former Times hack whose reforms in the justice system and education are the gift that keeps on giving… teachers breakdowns and both victims and perpetrators something we’re calling, for legal reasons, “justice-flavoured outcomes”.
The raving Gove of late last month, king of the (soon-to-be) divorced dads, and the rediscovered racist Gove of the late-80s and mid-90s, don’t get a mention in most of the media’s praise for this “big beast” — impossible to avoid and has a tendency to shit everywhere — because he’s a former hack, a reliable source for many political journalists, and the accepted line remains that we’re all meant to pretend “levelling up” actually means something.
Similarly, hacks cannot simply accept that Gove and Johnson are not engaged in some Godzilla vs Mothra-style epic battle or the protagonists in a story worthy of Euripedes turning his hand to it. One of the central tenets of British political journalism is that the small pond spats of mediocre men must be written about as if they’re part of a Mario Puzo novel — all knives in the back and horses’ heads in the bed — when they’re actually deeply boring and transactional.
It’s easy to make Gove seem like a utility player in a squad that includes Liz Truss, Nadine Dorries, Grant Shapps, Thérèse Coffey and Priti Patel. Almost any sentient being could be presented as an intellectual colossus in that lineup, especially when the captain is Boris Johnson.
As I noted at the beginning of this edition, it’s less than a week since those recordings of Gove’s appearances at the Cambridge Union in 1987 (when he was 20) and 1993 (when he was 26) reemerged via The Independent. In them he can be heard making crude sexual comments about his future colleague Lucy Frazer, correctly describing Prince Charles as “a dull, wet, drippy adulterer”, referring to “fuzzie wuzzies”, and rejoicing that Margaret Thatcher’s policies had produced a “new empire” in which “the happy south [stamped] over the cruel, dirty, toothless face of the northerner.”
How’s that going to play in the ‘red wall’, fuckers?
Well, the answer of course is that it won’t be presented to the red wall in endless news reports that dig further into Gove’s past comments and private behaviour. Instead, he’ll continue to be humanised by hacks because he did some dad dancing/is online dating while actual journalists curse him for his continued use of the Cabinet Office clearing office to frustrate Freedom of Information requests in his previous job and fight to get investigations into whatever dubious decisions he makes in his new department published.
In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, a Philip K. Dick novel set in the future past of 2016, where global temperatures have risen to dangerous levels and involuntary resettlement plays a central role in the plot (what imagination!), manifestations of the title character and his stigmata appear everywhere. The book’s ambiguous ending suggests that its protagonist may not actually have escaped Eldritch’s clutches but is in fact trapped in his unreality.
And that’s how I feel about Michael Gove — the big beast, Swiss Army knife minister, for whom nothing is impossible — who remains gilded by media praise even as his other manifestations — Raver Gove and Racist Joke Gove — stalk the land, unmentioned by most reports outside of jokey asides. We can see the real Gove — reflected in the prose of his Daily Mail columnist soon-to-be ex-wife and the facts of his previous ministerial adventures — but the majority of the papers give us only Swiss Army Gove, sharp and dangerous.
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He’s very interested in housing having recently received large donations from a developer.
Yes, I admit it, I learned about trompe-l'œil from the Pixies album of that name rather than art history lessons.
Literally: They went to school together — Winchester College — Sunak was the best man at Forsyth’s wedding and they are godparents to each other’s children.
A notion that was already being mocked back in 2012 by Steven Collins in his ‘David, let me do it…” cartoon, where Gove persuades Cameron to let him fly a fighter plane against an alien invasion with the words: “I used to be a journalist for The Times.”