I always defended Michael Gove. Then I met him

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[/audioplayer]A few weeks ago, I was a guest at a huge tea party for children’s authors, publishers and commentators at the South Bank, but the atmosphere, over the cupcakes and finger sandwiches, was decidedly frosty. There were three keynote speakers and their speeches all targeted a man so vile and destructive that the audience visibly recoiled every time his name was mentioned. He was, of course, Michael Gove — and I wasn’t sure I should tell anyone that I had always rather admired him and, moreover, was about to interview him for this magazine. It might be better to keep quiet in much the same way that Vidkun Quisling would have been well advised not to mention his wartime visits to Berlin.

You think I’m exaggerating? One of the speakers, Patrick Ness, a brilliant, prize-winning novelist, described Gove as ‘appalling, ignorant and damaging’. He compared him to Thatcher, doing to children what she did to the miners. A well-known illustrator said to me: ‘He’s a massive, arrogant egotist who can’t see anyone else’s opinion.’ And my suggestion that Gove was a well-meaning man trying to do the best he could was met with the riposte (from a bestselling Jewish writer): ‘That was what Hitler thought when he tried to wipe us out.’ Seriously?

To his friends, he’s simply ‘Govey’. Chris Huhne once called him ‘the politest man in the House of Commons’ and it’s not as if he’s been tarred with the Bullingdon brush. Indeed, you’d have thought someone would give him credit for his humble origins, the son of a single mother adopted by an Aberdeen businessman and his wife. But no, not a bit of it. ‘He’s the original major of Hamelin,’ Ness snarled. ‘But we [children’s authors] are the pied piper.’