What a Vine time to ask for privacy! Gove and Vine get silence and secrecy because they’re 'made’ in the media
Notice who gets to press release their personal news and who has to see it in splashed in headline font.
Sarah Vine’s column last weekend purported to be about Matt Hancock but was so transparently a series of digs at her husband that it may as well have been a picture of Michael Gove with a cock scrawled on his forehead and a comedy moustache twirling its way across his top lip.
When the news broke yesterday — through a press release to PA — that the couple is splitting after 20 years of marriage, the reactions ranged from “well, duh” to “it really took that long?” Readers of this newsletter will have been especially unsurprised. I wrote last week…
Forget subtweets, meet the subcolumn — a piece that claims to be about one thing and designed for a newspaper’s mass audience but appears, in fact, to be about something else entirely and targeted to one person in particular.
As I wrote yesterday, tabloid stories are tactical. They appear at particular times and in particular ways to serve particular purposes. And lots of stories that are equally as explosive as Hancock’s affair remain locked in a drawer. As long as a politician serves a purpose for a newspaper proprietor, their personal failings and peccadillos can be widely known but never reported.
… and noted in an earlier newsletter:
There is at least one other cabinet minister who is alleged to have been taking the michael when it comes covid rules and rumours about whose personal life have been pinging around for some time. But that person is more useful to several newspapers so is unlikely to get the Hancock treatment just yet.
Today, The Daily Telegraph — once and future home of Boris Johnson, the man who Gove famously stabbed in the back — asks whether the Cabinet Office Minister has been breaking Covid rules, pretending to be living at home with Vine while, in fact, living elsewhere for some time.
Under the headline, Michael Gove and Sarah Vine split raises Covid distancing questions, The Telegraph’s chief reporter Robert Mendick and senior news reporter Patrick Sawer write:
Michael Gove on Friday night became the second senior Cabinet minister in a week to split with his wife as Downing Street refused to say whether any social distancing rules had been broken.
The Cabinet Office minister is one of four people who have been making unprecedented decisions about people's private lives during the pandemic, sparking questions about their own domestic arrangements.
… A Number 10 spokesman declined to comment on the break-up and refused to say whether Mr Gove had broken any social distancing rules during the disintegration of his marriage.
A source close to Mr Gove dismissed any rumours about his private life as "utter nonsense" and "made up" and insisted he was unaware that any social distancing rules had been broken. The source said Mr Gove and Ms Vine remained living at their family home.
The Number 10 spokesman and the “source close to Mr Gove” — Michael Gove in a preposterous wig — are engaged in what is known as “non-denial denial” there. There’s every chance that Gove has assiduously adhered to the rules which he has been so central in setting but he is not saying so.
Instead, we get tricksy formulations of language like “he [is] unaware that any social distancing rules [have] been broken”. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t broken any rules, just that he says he’s not aware of doing so — it’s weaponised ignorance, a dare to those asking to prove that he’s done something wrong. It may turn out to be as foolish as fondling a friend in front of a CCTV in your office.
The Daily Telegraph story is a flare, lighting up the sky to tell Gove that it has heard the same rumours about [redacted] as many others, including me, have but also hoping to encourage a similar ‘whistleblower’ to the one who did for Hancock to make themselves known. The Telegraph is the paper most committed to ‘lockdown sceptic’ lines and outright conspiracy theory, its unhinged instincts best represented by Allison Pearson’s output.
It was inevitable that the Telegraph would go in hard on Gove. It’s equally likely that his former employer News UK — he was a Times journalist before he became an MP and has contributed to the paper since, including interviewing Donald Trump with Rupert Murdoch in the room — will cut him slack.
The Times reports the story entirely straight, with not a hint of the spin and insinuation it would usually drip on this kind of news. The Daily Mail gives a kindly write up to its star, not even mentioning the current value of her marital home, and unlike other papers doesn’t even mention her Mail on Sunday column about the travails of political marriages. Curious…
The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday have invested heavily in Vine will still make sure they get their money’s worth. Her recent Sunday supplement makeover now makes a lot of sense. When Gove and Vine’s statement asks for “privacy at this time” and says they will “not be providing any further comment”, you need to slip on your They Live sunglasses to see the real message:
We’re media creatures so we deserve privacy. And we won’t be providing any further comment until Sarah’s Mail on Sunday column drops this Sunday.
Gove and Vine aren’t truly asking for privacy but for exclusivity.
Vine has mined her personal life, marriage, and the lives of her children as much as any Kardashian — a family she’s castigated often — but considers herself to be in a different class.
Vine placed herself at the heart of her husband’s career and used his proximity to power to give her columns extra spice and had a mirthless joke by naming her Twitter account Westminster Wag, while also complaining about being seen as “Michael Gove’s wife”. It’s the Daily Mail creed: We have it both ways.
Only part of Diane Abbott’s tweet posted after the Hancock revelations has come true…
… we’re still waiting on the part that’s below reproach.
Vine and Gove are making a big deal — through ‘friends’ and spokespeople — of saying “there is no one else involved” and claiming their announcement was nothing to do with a story coming imminently. The Sunday newspapers will be worth reading.
You could argue that Gove and Vine deserve privacy as much as the next person but it’s an argument that collapses upon contact with Vine’s previous columns. As well as writing extensively about not only her private life but the private lives of other politicians and their spouses, Vine has had so many opinions about the Duchess of Sussex and other celebrities over the years.
It was Vine who wrote the infamous “niggling worry” piece after Harry and Meghan’s engagement and she has continued down that line ever since.
She has written about her falling out with Samantha Cameron, her previous sleeping arrangements (and sex life), and her daughter (many times) in her column. The last example is particularly interesting to me since Vine launched what I consider to be a defamatory attack on me purely for mentioning her daughter in entirely positive terms.
That situation remains in the weeds of the British legal system that Michael Gove did so much to unbalance in the favour of the rich. I have not let it go, however.
Now, you might think I retain some level of personal animus against Ms Vine, and you’d be right. But the issue of how, why and when she and Gove announced their split is an interesting one. They met as journalists at The Times and Gove retains very friendly relations with Rupert Murdoch. Vine is one of the Mail titles’ biggest stars. In the British media mafia, they are ‘made’.
That’s why Vine was able to write a nudge nudge wink wink column that hinted about the announcement to come with only further nudge nudge wink wink references from other papers. That she and Gove have not been living together has been an open secret for some time but it has not made it to the papers because Gove is useful to Murdoch, Vine is a prize for The Mail, and more broadly journalists protect journalists.
British journalism features more circling the wagons than the entire television runs of Bonanza and The Roy Rogers Show combined.
The Daily Telegraph has opened the shooting war on Gove because it is loyal to the Prime Minister personally rather than to the government as a whole. Gove’s inept Brutus act back in 2016 — which Politico hyperbolically-called, “a very British betrayal” — has not been forgotten by Telegraph editors or the Prime Minister himself.
Gove remains useful for now but when he’s finished, Boris Johnson will take him down harder than a Japanese school child in a photo-op rugby match.
Rumours that the couple organised the kind of parties that used to have pampas grass outside in the 70s rattled around Westminster for years — sorry if you’re eating while you read this — and it’s unlikely that Gove’s many political enemies are going to give him the privacy he and Vine hypocritically demand.
Let’s… uh… swing back to Vine’s column from last weekend. She wrote:
Climbing that far up Westminster’s greasy pole changes a person. And when someone changes, they require something new from a partner.
Namely, someone who is as much a courtesan as a companion, one who understands their brilliance and, crucially, is personally invested in it…
The problem with the wife who has known you since way before you were king of the world is that she sees through your facade.
She knows your fears and your insecurities. She knows that, deep down inside, you are not the Master of the Universe you purport to be. And some people don’t like to be reminded of that. Others, like Cameron, find it grounding.
In the end, there are two types of politicians. Those who can walk away from power – and those who can’t. And who will compromise everything for the sake of it.
Does that sound like someone who feels their marriage split is amicable? And isn’t it interesting that she spends so much time in the column praising her soon-to-be ex-husband’s former friend David Cameron?
It’s quite a fiendish bit of psychological warfare — reminding Michael that he’s not half the man his ham-faced former boss is and Dave made Sam’s dream of choosing the curtains in Downing Street a reality.
I expect Vine’s next column will tell us more about what happens when marriages have trusst issues and what her friends advisor… I mean… advise her.