Could Michael Gove support Labour?

Now that Sir Keir Starmer has reaffirmed he is a socialist, interviewers are asking other leading Labour figures if they are too. The shadow business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, explains he is a Christian socialist, which makes me want to go back to Sir Keir, an unbeliever, and ask him how he thinks his atheist socialism differs from Marxism. Socialism is in essence an economic doctrine about the common ownership of (to use the famous Clause 4 wording) ‘the means of production, distribution and exchange’. How does Sir Keir believe that common ownership should be achieved? He may not want to say. It would be equally reasonable – and equally awkward politically – to ask Rishi Sunak whether he is a capitalist. I should like to know, because their answers might clarify the current confusion in which Tories hint at approval of socialist principles and Labour of capitalist ones, without quite saying what they mean.

I join the tributes to Michael Gove as he leaves parliament.