Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The glories and blunders of Michael Gove

Credit: Getty Images

On the way to work, I pass a Lidl supermarket that has a new school built on top of it. Parents gather with children in uniforms that didn’t exist a few years ago; teachers who didn’t have jobs a few years ago come together in what’s already one of the best primary schools in the country. And if it wasn’t for Michael Gove, personally, none of this would exist. I can’t think of many more important or meaningful legacies for the political career that, we now learn, will end at the July election.

A few weeks ago, Katy and I were at an event that Gove chaired where he asked the audience: what was the most conservative reform of the last 14 years? And the most unconservative? I wondered, at the time, if he asked this because he knew that he was responsible for both. His school reforms brought a whole breed of academies and free schools, bringing choice in education to hundreds of thousands of families who could not afford it. The proudest boast of the departing Conservatives after 14 years is the raising standards of education. That’s due to a revolution in taking control of schools away from local authority bureaucrats and putting them into the hands of teachers and parents.

But the most unconservative reform? The lockdowns that he bizarrely championed. For reasons I was never able to fathom, he had gone from the most liberal member of the cabinet to cheerlead for a destructive form of illiberal conservatism, seeking to build a biosecurity state. In the various debates about whether to release lockdown, he was always the most illiberal. Under his able rule, the Cabinet Office became a lockdown enforcement unit – when it could (and should) have been conducting studies estimating the full effect of lockdowns, including how they would reverse the ten years on work that the Gove reforms had done on educational inequality.

But whether right or wrong, Gove was always effective. Part of it is his charm, his ability to attract around him hugely talented and results-orientated people in whom he inspired huge loyalty. When he worked under David Cameron it was said that he was, in effect, a Tory Trot: someone who was hugely ideological and would go all-out to pursue his goal. So much depended on him having the right goal. If his goal was school reform then: great. He’d salami-slice the unions, pass the Academies Act in 77 days, and take all the bullets he needed to in order to pass power to teachers and parents. Gove realised that school reform could not be done by anyone who hoped to retain political popularity, but took the bullets as the price of getting the results.

Gove would talk, from the offset, about the fundamental problem of school reform. The results would pay back over a generation, never a political cycle. The losers would see a hit immediately (unions losing power, bad schools losing pupils) and were well-organised. The winners were the more dispersed, less-well organised and less likely to notice. They were the families of poorer kids (state schools work find for rich kids) who may end in a place like the Michaela free school. They’d see the benefit in the form of improved life chances, but they’d thank the teachers – not the Tories. And rightly: Gove saw this as a revolution where Tories removed obstacles, got out of the way and empowered teachers. Let others work miracles.

So Tories would get the blame for the reform, but never any credit for the miracles. Gove knew all that from the offset. This project had nothing to offer him, personally, other than obloquy. And the chance to do more so other kids could get the kind of education that he, an orphan, was given by his adoptive parents who sacrificed holidays and luxuries to send this brilliant child of theirs to a private school. Like Andrew Adonis, the Blair-era reformer with a similar life story, he felt it a way of repaying the good luck he’d had in life.

Gove was moved before the 2015 election, due to the unpopularity accrued from school battles. Cameron liked him but worried that once Gove became convinced of a certain idea, he was unstoppable. That, as Matthew Parris once put it in The Spectator, when Gove ‘grows eloquent, I cannot quite banish from my nostrils the smell of burning witches’. Cameron wanted him to steer clear of foreign policy, for example, fearing Gove was a neocon who’d bomb too many countries. 

Perhaps Gove ended up with lockdown as an idée fixe, putting all his energies and ability in the service of this flawed agenda. Why did he get the wrong end of the stick? Why was this fiercely-intelligent iconoclast blinded to the problems of what he was advocating?

It makes sense that Gove would quit now

I used to work for him when he was at the Times and was (briefly) my news editor: I was a political reporter in Edinburgh and too small a fish for him to really bother with. But his flaws were spoken about then. It was said that you should not give him stories that involved numbers because his brilliant brain didn’t process them very well. That was the other theory in his (to my mind) still-mysterious embrace of lockdown theory: he didn’t see the scientific, mathematical side of this. He wasn’t interested in a notion of an all-lives, QALY study or the other the economics of public health analysis.  He – like the equally-brilliant and equally-mistaken Dominic Cummings – had come to see this as ‘let’s stop the virus, and crush those who oppose us’.

I had the dubious honour of reading all Matt Hancock’s WhatsApps and Gove comes across as someone who had gone full-tribal. Hancock once asked Gove explain the goals of a coming government meeting on the pandemic. ‘Letting people express concerns in a therapeutic environment before you and I decide the policy’, Gove replied. ‘You are glorious’, purred Hancock in reply. In another message, Gove tells Hancock: ‘U r a hero. Never forget it.’ No, Hancock replies: ‘You are the true unsung Covid hero. You were the swing vote in the big calls and chose life’. He means: Gove chose lockdown. Seeing them debate who was the greater hero offers a fascinating insight into how both had come to see this as a battle with only two sides; to choose life (and lockdowns) or the virus (and resist lockdowns).

Gove’s backing Brexit made it happen. The moment where he knived Boris made history too, by landing us with Theresa May. This also showed his ssometimes-erratic judgement: how could you agree to be the campaign manager of someone who you, a week later. decide is the biggest threat to Britain? Either he erred in agreeing to lead Team Boris or erred in knifing him, but either way: what a fateful blunder. And one which perhaps sent Brexit down the wrong track with consequences that no Tory leader has been able to recover. 

It makes sense that Gove would quit now. He stepped down from frontline politics already (this is the second political obituary I’ve written for him) only to return. He’s had a long innings, many deaths and rebirths and has achieved more than most ministers ever do. Perhaps politics cost him his family. And politics ended up not being very kind to him. He had run out of allies. He had been allowed access a £25 million grace-and-favour apartment: that was an upside. But his career was on the wane and you can see how someone with so much still to give had greater ambitions that going back to opposition.

When I worked for Gove at the Times, he was tipped as a future editor: it seemed crazy to many of us that he’d join the sinking ship of the 2001 Tory campaign. But then again, we said in the newsroom, if the Tories recovered than he’d have a real chance to shape the country rather than just write about it. He certainly did shape it, for good and for ill – and perhaps more than anyone who did not occupy a great office of state. His abilities remain such that now he’s leaving, still young at 56, he’ll doubtless be tipped to edit another newspaper or a similar big job. In his letter, announcing that he was standing down, Gove said it was time for a new generation of leaders: but he’s younger than Starmer. So what did he mean? One of his former cabinet colleagues gave me his theory: that the Tories could be heading for the kind of defeat that would take 10 to 15 years to recover from. By which time, he could be in his seventies.

A plaque on the wall next to Christopher Wren’s tomb in St Paul’s ends with what I’ve always thought is the best epitaph in London: ‘si monumentum requiris circumspice‘ – if you’re looking for his monument, look around you. Gove is one of the very few people who leaves politics being able to say the same. That school that I pass every day stands as monument to Gove’s political career, as do hundreds like it. No one will thank him for it, not will he seek to claim credit. But as legacies go, it’s not too shabby.

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