Spectator Parliamentarian Awards: Boris versus Gove, round one (with audio)

Years from now, political historians may regard 2012’s Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards as the first round of Boris Johnson versus Michael Gove in the race to be Tory leader.

Gove was the event’s compere, and he gave a masterful off-the-cuff speech, full of wit and light. He said that the Spectator, which is once again being edited by a comprehensive school graduate, is a meritocratic beacon in an otherwise privileged world. The Guardian, for instance, has never been edited by someone from a comprehensive school, and no common oik has ever been the BBC’s DG. Gove’s self-confessed ‘Marxist vision’ is of a Utopian England where the Guardian and the BBC follow the Spectator’s example. England, he said, should be made in the Spectator’s image.

To do so, of course, requires that the press remains free. Gove reprised his comments to the Leveson inquiry and repeated, with relish bordering on malice, Sir Brian Leveson’s famous protestation: ‘Mr Gove, I don’t need to be told about the importance of free speech, I really don’t.’