Michael Gove once offered to sign in his own blood that he would never run. We should have taken him up on it

What Jeremy Hunt is to NHS staff, Gove is to state system educators. If the next election is to be won on the smug, arrogant, contemptuous know-nothing know-all platform, either would be a banker for the Tories

Matthew Norman
Sunday 26 May 2019 17:40 EDT
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Michael Gove confirms he will enter the race to become Conservative leader

If only someone had taken up Michael Gove on his offer, the Chamber of Horrors would possess what could soon be as priceless an artefact as the original Runnymede copy of Magna Carta.

“I don’t know what I can do,” he declared with typically sincerity when asked about his ambition in 2012, “but if anyone wants me to sign a piece of parchment in my own blood saying I don’t want to be prime minister, then I’m perfectly happy to do that”.

In fact there is something else, and bloodless, he might have done. In his defence, it does rely on hindsight. And it is fiendishly obscure. It makes the most obtuse round on Only Connect look like that old GMTV competition question about the Academy Awards (are they commonly known as a) The Olives, or b) The Oscars?) So you understand how it escaped his powerhouse intellect.

But what Gove could have done, to make himself crystal clear on the point, is not run to be prime minister. That might have worked.

Yet here he is, the official Rupert Murdoch candidate, having his second crack in less than three years. He is the latest addition to a vast field of such stellar talent (even Sir Graham Brady, until Friday chairman of the 1922 Committee, is pondering a run) that he qualifies as the closest thing to a class act.

Perhaps class is the wrong word in a classless society where the warm favourite would be only the second Old Etonian PM out of the last three. By the way, the first, a certain David Cameron, is reportedly eager to return to politics. More than ever in dark times, what we need is hope.

Gove, the Oxford-educated adopted son of an Aberdeen fish seller, whose suffering at the hands of EU fishing quotas he has sworn in the blood of a mackerel to avenge, straddles the class system himself.

He is loathed equally across all classes, but most of all by teachers.

What Jeremy Hunt is to NHS staff, Gove is to state system educators. If the next election is to be won on the smug, arrogant, contemptuous know-nothing know-all platform, either would be a banker for the Tories.

But there’s more to Gove than to Hunt. Hunt, as his amazing, amazing journey from arch Remainer to potential no dealer underscores, is a man of straw.

Gove is a man of straws. He assures us that next year’s ban on plastic straws (and ear buds; never forget the buds), his signature achievement as environment secretary, will ensure “that we leave our environment in a better state for future generations”.

Time and again, walking through the petro-stink of London, I’ve overheard a buggy-pushing mother tell her friend: “If it wasn’t for the straws at McDonald’s, she’d never have this asthma,” as she shoves the inhaler into the toddler’s mouth.

But he is abundantly the least useless of the runners.

He can speak English in full sentences, for example, though they tend to be laced with the florid self-deprecation that makes him seem out of his time.

Even his surname sounds like a medieval past tense. “Sir Knight, did I not ask you to pay the keeper of the bawdy house?” “My liege, upon mine word, I gove that good mistress a purse of monies in keeping with thy will.”

He’s a minor character in Wolf Hall, doffing his cap too flamboyantly, and bowing too deeply, to Henry VIII. Everyone at court would have hated him for a weaselly little schemer on the make. But when they brought up the bodies, his wouldn’t have been among them.

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Beneath the unctuous politesse, there may even be beliefs. In Brighton seven years ago, in a short hiatus between describing himself as lacking the courage to be PM and the blood-signing pledge, he gave a startlingly good speech about social mobility. It might have been made almost verbatim by one of the more radical members of a mid-1960s Harold Wilson cabinet.

Whether he meant a word, it would be refreshing to have a prime minister who can think, and translate the thoughts into eloquent argument – useful qualities, quite possibly, when looking for a compromise in a seemingly impossible position, and negotiating a country’s future.

If the majority of Tory MPs seriously want to avoid an apocalypse approaching deceptively fast, they’d need to go further than holding their collective nose on behalf of us all. They’d have to have it surgically removed. They would remember his analysis of Boris Johnson’s inadequacies in 2016, forget his trenchant thoughts about his own, and opt bleakly for Gove.

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