The last time I saw Michael Gove, a couple of weeks ago, I asked him how confident he was of winning his seat, the once rock-solid blue bastion of Surrey Heath (majority: 18,349). He would still be there if the Tories held 150 seats, he explained, but a greater implosion than that would sweep him away.
Gove, 56, thought he would hold on and Tory strategists still expect Surrey Heath to remain blue, but Rishi Sunak’s rain-drenched, gaffe-prone first few days can hardly have encouraged him to stay.
Despite his warm(ish) words about the prime minister’s bravery in standing and fighting last week, my understanding is that Gove, along with pretty much all his cabinet colleagues, thinks the decision to call the election now was daft.
That he has chosen to leave at this time is a ravens from the tower moment but Gove will surface again, in papers or on the radio and, we are promised, there will be an appearance on Strictly Come Dancing.
As he departs, there is a reasonable case to make that he is the most consequential politician never to have held one of the four great offices of state.
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Since the Second World War he stands comparison with Roy Jenkins, Nigel Lawson, Michael Heseltine, Denis Healey, Ken Clarke, Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell as a figure who shaped his age without becoming prime minister. Only Harriet Harman, who passed the Equality Act, passed legislation that was more enduring than Gove’s education reforms under the coalition government.
No one, with the sole exception of Boris Johnson, has created the world in which we are living quite as much as Gove. Like his friend George Osborne, he told David Cameron not to call a referendum on membership of the EU, because he suspected Leave might win. Unlike Osborne, he wanted to avoid the moment precisely because he knew he would have to follow his lifelong eurosceptic instincts and back Brexit.
That decision gave Johnson political cover to join Vote Leave as well, though Gove himself once told me he believed Johnson would have done so anyway. Unlike some, he gave Johnson credit for a sincere wish to follow his eurosceptic instincts, as well as the bald political calculation that it would be better for his leadership prospects.
Only Gove, a shrewd judge of character, explained what I think was Johnson’s real motivation: “Churchill wanted to put himself at the centre of events. I think it’s the same with Boris.”
In Gove’s view, his most important contribution to Leave’s success was the intervention he staged in January 2016, when MPs tried to oust Dominic Cummings as director of Vote Leave by contacting the plotters and making clear he would only join the campaign if his former special adviser was there to run it.
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Without that, the Leave effort would have been run by Nigel Farage, whose purist view of sovereignty had never attracted wide public support. Instead, Gove gave a certain intellectual respectability to middle-class Leavers, while Johnson and Farage turned the heads of many in what would become known as the “red wall”, which voted to Leave in 2016 and turned blue in 2019.
In helping to sink the premiership of Cameron, his close friend, and by suggesting in the campaign that “people have had enough of experts”, he became a more divisive figure, which sharpened opposition among some public servants.
Just as important as backing Leave in 2016 was Gove’s decision to pull the plug on his support of Johnson in the subsequent leadership election and announce that he was running himself. This second act of betrayal ended both Johnson’s campaign and sunk his own before it had started.
That left Theresa May to emerge, untested, as prime minister and meant that, as a Remainer, she tacked towards the Brexiteers, putting the UK on a path towards a hard Brexit. It is possible to imagine a world in which Johnson, Gove and Cummings owned the Brexit they had brought about and would have been forced into compromise. Johnson would have been better able than May to convince Leave voters to support a softer Brexit — and he would probably have done more to try to win over the 48 per cent than May did.
Gove was seen from then on as an inveterate plotter and serially disloyal, as well as a pathological leaker, which from that point on was largely untrue. He could easily have resigned from May’s cabinet in December 2017 over the Northern Ireland backstop, in July 2018 over her Chequers plan for Brexit, or in November 2018 when May’s deal with Brussels was finalised.
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When Cummings was summoned to Gove’s house that November to bully him into quitting, Gove declared: “In 2016 I went against the whole system and against the establishment and it has cost me friends. It’s been a disaster for me. I am not doing that again.”
It cost him more than that, in the end. His marriage, to the journalist Sarah Vine, broke up in 2021, in part because of Gove’s “mistress” politics, to which he was devoted, and in part because of the social ostracisation between the Goves and their other friends after his decision to back Leave.
His friend, Ed Vaizey, declared on Saturday: “He was an idiot to support Leave.”
When he began his school reforms in 2010, including allowing all schools to convert to academy status, Gove found himself in a tussle with “the blob”, his term for the educational establishment.
He soon developed a reputation as the hammer of the teaching unions, initially deploying what one general secretary called his “icy politeness” as an offensive weapon. Mary Bousted, the boss of the National Education Union, once contacted Gove’s adviser Simone Finn, his university girlfriend and now a Tory peer, to complain: “Michael is such an idealogue and he just won’t listen.” Finn replied: “You don’t have to tell me. I went out with him for five years.”
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But there developed a degree of mutual respect between Gove and the unions — though Cameron eventually moved him, on Lynton Crosby’s advice, because he had too often antagonised voters and public sector workers.
Very few ministers had Gove’s understanding of the internal wiring of Whitehall and how you actually get things done. When he was chief whip, Gove turned up at the weekly Wednesday meeting of permanent secretaries. This gathering, supposedly a forum for cross-government working, was in fact a “bitching session” for mandarins moaning about their political masters. No politician had ever turned up before. None had ever been aware they could or thought there was any point in doing so.
Journalists liked him because he took what we do seriously and treated us with respect, appeared on occasion even to value our opinion. It is assumed that he leaked like a sieve. That was not my experience. He would make himself available when it suited him, and he was a reliable noter of what food was eaten at key Brexit meetings. But he was seldom a proactive leaker, particularly not from cabinet.
I know from reading Alan Duncan’s diaries that much of what I wrote between 2016 and 2018 was attributed to Gove. It was seldom ever anything to do with him. Not a few ministers gave me stories from meetings he attended knowing he would be blamed.
The best story I ever got from his department — Gove’s plan to scrap GCSEs and bring back O-levels — he played no role in passing to me. Cameron and Nick Clegg knew nothing about the policy and the Lib Dems succeeded in killing it off.
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Those close to the man felt others developed conspiracy theories about him because they could not place him politically or predict his behaviour. “He’s charming and funny. He’s read a forest of literature and can call up popular cultural references very fluidly,” said one aide.
Gove once ad-libbed a rap about Johnson at his future wife Carrie’s 30th birthday, to the tune of a song from the musical Hamilton.
Gove was one of the best orators of his generation and arguably the best debater. If you don’t believe me, watch his evisceration of Jeremy Corbyn in the January 2019 confidence vote in the government, which came after Theresa May’s historic defeat in the first meaningful vote on her Brexit deal.
While May sat mute beside him, he toyed humorously with Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader and marmalised Corbyn’s record on national security, lifting the previously near-suicidal Conservative benches to a cacophany of cathartic glee. He did it, with just a few notes.
Gove was also one of the few politicians whose speeches read well on paper and whose newspaper articles were not just clichés glued awkwardly together. Interviewing hundreds of Westminster folk for this paper and my books, Gove was almost alone in speaking in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs.
In the dying days of Johnson’s premiership, Gove was responsible for tackling homelessness and his plans were opposed by Johnson’s right-wing aides. One of them, Andrew Griffith, the head of policy, contacted Gove’s office and said he was about to be overruled by the prime minister: “We are going to keep the meeting small because it is going to be a showdown. We don’t want Michael to be embarrassed.” A Gove ally recalled: “Michael very nicely tore them apart and, of course, Boris ended up agreeing with Michael.”
After 2016, Johnson never fully trusted Gove again, but he knew he was the best minister at his disposal and he could see he hired good people. Many of Gove’s aides went to work in No 10. Nadine Dorries saw this as evidence of a Goveite plot. In fact, they were all friends with Carrie Johnson and she wanted able people around her husband.
He was also handed, by Johnson, the responsibility for levelling up, the one area that defeated even Gove. To be a success, the policy needed Treasury support and co-operation from multiple government departments. By then there was no money and Sunak refused to cough up the cash. Johnson did not force compliance.
There are lessons in Gove’s career for Sir Keir Starmer if he wins the election. If it wants to achieve anything on NHS reform, Labour will need to come out firing with specific legislation during its honeymoon period. Only in the past year or so have the full effects of that policy been seen, with Britain zooming up the international academic league tables.
Similarly, if Starmer is serious about his “missions” he will need a better civil service and ministerial structure to encourage cross-departmental working. If Gove failed, it is hard to see a lot of this Labour front bench succeeding unless they do things differently.
How to sum him up? When I made a few calls on Saturday, a senior aide to Sunak put it best: “Michael is one of those politicians who exists outside of themselves. The idea of Michael Gove is a very powerful one that is bigger than the man — and that is a remarkable achievement.”
He never became prime minister, foreign secretary or, the job he really wanted, home secretary. He will be remembered a lot longer than many who did. And existing outside yourself sounds like good preparation for Strictly…
