As I predicted yesterday, Michael Gove’s speech to the Bow Group this morning was a belter: as trenchant and subtle an analysis of Gordon Brown’s politics as any Tory politician has yet made. The Gover launched his attack more in sorrow than in anger – and it was all the deadlier for that. Look at his choice of historical precedents for the Prime Minister:
David Lloyd George – one of our most historically significant Chancellors whose peacetime premiership descended into an exercise in idealism-free positioning, truckling to establishment media figures and ideological drift.
Lyndon B Johnson – a man whose early career was marked by a genuine desire to tackle poverty and deprivation but whose idealism was thwarted first by the success of the more dazzlingly charismatic younger man to whom he played number two and whose eventual occupancy of the highest office was shaped by a cynical surfing of events not a principled programme of change.
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