Boris johnson

As a radical paper, The Spectator has always been an admirer of Michael Gove, particularly his education reforms. He was, perhaps, a little too radical when abandoning Boris Johnson at the eleventh hour last week – but let it not be said that he lacks the steel needed to become Prime Minister. Andrea Leadsom was impressive during the referendum campaign and might be a triumph as Prime Minister. But there is only one battle-tested Brexiteer in this contest – and he is Michael Gove. Tory MPs will today choose which two candidates they will ask the membership to choose between. The glitch in the voting system means they get to choose

On the way to interview Michael Gove, we meet a government minister, an Old Etonian, who suggests we ask him, ‘How can anyone trust you ever again?’ Just a fortnight ago, proposing such a question would have been unthinkable: the Justice Secretary had a reputation for being one of the most consistent, decent and honourable men in the cabinet. When Gove agreed to back Boris Johnson’s leadership bid, the pair seemed a dream team. But on the morning of their campaign launch, Gove announced that Johnson was unfit for the job, so he’d stand himself instead. Then, he was knocked out by Conservative MPs who were still recovering from the drama.

As Boris Johnson will know from his love of Greek tragedy, hubris leads to nemesis. And it is Boris’s own hubris — in playing cricket with Lord Spencer the weekend after Brexit, and not finishing his leadership speech on time — that supposedly led to his downfall. I well know from working with Boris at the Telegraph that prompt timekeeping is not his forte. For five years, my Wednesday nights were destroyed as Boris regularly missed the 7 p.m. deadline for delivering his column. ‘It hasn’t arrived,’ I’d say to him over the phone at 7.01 p.m. ‘Ah, Christ, sorry,’ said Boris, ‘Bloody internet! It must be pinging its way down those

At times this week it has seemed as though Sarah Vine will soon be running the country — that is, if she isn’t secretly already. As well as informing readers, through her Daily Mail column, that she — along with her husband Michael Gove — has been ‘charged with implementing the instructions of 17 million people’ following the Leave vote, Vine is reported to have played a pivotal role in the Justice Secretary’s decision to turn his back on Boris Johnson and run for leader. In fact, the first sign that all was not well between the Johnson and Gove camps came when Vine seemingly accidentally sent an email on the topic

The Tory party is waking up this morning reeling from one of its most dramatic days since, well, last week, when the Prime Minister announced he was resigning. MPs from across the party are amazed at what they largely see as not just an act of treachery from Michael Gove but also a breach of how politicians generally behave towards their friends and their party, which is generally with loyalty. Many of them wonder how on earth the Justice Secretary can really reunite the Conservative party at the end of a bitter referendum battle when he has just injected a great deal of bitterness into the leadership contest. Meanwhile, those

This is not something that we are keen to discuss, for we are pretty sure that we have become far less puritanical, and that this is a good thing. But try this experiment. Imagine a slightly different version of Boris: funny, human, brilliant, a bit chaotic-seeming, and so on – but without any hint of sexual scandal. There would still have been question marks over such a Boris becoming PM – especially after his opportunistic Brexit decision. But they would have faded as the prospect of a charismatic, nation-enthusing leader emerged. Some would have called this Boris fundamentally untrustworthy, citing episodes of bullying and aggressive ambition, but such qualms would have

This piece first appeared in The Spectator on 15 March 2014.  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

So, what happened? As late as yesterday afternoon, Michael Gove was trying to persuade fellow Cabinet Ministers to back Boris Johnson. This morning, he announced that not only that he was running but that ‘Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead’. Hours later, Boris – reeling from this blow – announced that he would not be running. Well, one aspect of all this appears to be Gove’s frustration with the way Boris operated. The referendum campaign had led Gove to revise his opinion of Boris, to see him as someone who could be a good Prime Minister. But Gove backers say that, when removed

Are we learning, rather painfully, what happens when you let journalists take over? Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are political hacks, by instinct and experience, so perhaps it is not surprising that Brexit is starting to look and feel like a post-modern sequel to the novel Scoop.  Deadlines, panic, laziness, brilliance, incompetence, disaster, highs, lows, sheer bloody madness — this is the new politics. Triumph snatched from the jaws of disaster, and then days later the reverse. It makes for great copy, and is (go on, you can admit it) very funny. But is it any way to run a country? What sort of professional other than a journalist would pull off a great political coup, put himself on the