‘Politics exacts a very high price’: an interview with Michael Gove

What is Boris Johnson’s government for? The answer, we’re often told, is ‘levelling up’. So far this has been a slogan without much meaning. More than two years on from Johnson’s election victory, it has been left to Michael Gove, as the new Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, to define the concept. He intended to set out his plans before Christmas, but Covid stopped that. It nearly stopped this interview, too. Under the government’s rules at the time, Gove is in self-isolation because he met Barnaby Joyce, Australia’s deputy prime minister, who then tested positive for Covid, possibly the Omicron variant. It means we have to speak over a computer screen.

Most cabinet ministers are, at best, lukewarm about the case for the government’s new Covid rules. Gove has the opposite worry. He fears that more measures might be needed sooner rather than later. He is, as so often during the pandemic, on the hawkish side of the argument. Some find this persona difficult to reconcile with the old Gove, who argued for less state control and more individual responsibility during his time as a Times columnist and then education secretary. So what kind of Tory is he?

‘It is very difficult to describe exactly what one’s type of conservatism is,’ he muses. He gives it a try. ‘The first thing is that I believe in the fallen nature of man.’ He talks about the value of tradition and Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoons’, before saying: ‘I believe in the vital importance in recognising that — while the state has an absolutely critical role in the life of the nation — the most important things in all our lives are those which governments can’t or shouldn’t really seek to intrude on. The most important things in all our lives are family, relationships, faith and the personal.’