Michael gove

Boris Johnson is about to go ahead with his leadership campaign launch without the man who has pulled so much of it together. MPs entering the event are baffled by this morning’s shock announcement by Michael Gove that he will run for leader himself: he was the man who invited them. Others, such as Dominic Raab, have already announced they have switched to the Gove campaign. Funnily enough, behind the scenes there is utter fury in the Boris camp. One prominent supporter points out that the Justice Secretary repeatedly insisted that he didn’t want the top job. ‘How can anyone believe a word Gove says on anything ever again?’ they

Oh dear. This morning Sarah Vine surprised Daily Mail readers after she declared in her column that both she and her husband Michael Gove had been ‘charged with implementing the instructions of 17 million people’ following the Leave vote. While Vine’s central role in the Brexit negotiations prompted laughter in some quarters, it now transpires that she has been taking on a very hands-on role indeed. Sky News have been passed an email from Vine setting out the Justice Secretary’s leadership plotting after she accidentally cc’ed in a member of public. The email — sent yesterday — raises some awkward questions for the pair. While a Gove/Boris joint ticket is on the cards,

The Tory leaders of Vote Leave, those supposedly civilised and intelligent men, are creating the conditions for a mass far-right movement in England. They have lined up the ingredients like a poisoner mixing a potion, and I can almost feel the convulsion that will follow. They have treated the electorate like children. They pretended that they could cut or even stop immigration from the EU and have a growing economy too. No hard choices, they said. No costs or trade-offs. Now the Tory wing of the Brexit campaign, the friends of the City and big business, insists that we should remain part of the single market. So should you, if

Westminster is still digesting what happened on Thursday night. But before Britain can turn itself to the big question of how to leave the EU, a new Prime Minister has to be chosen by the Tory party. Nearly every Tory MP I’ve spoken to since Friday morning is of the view that the new PM will have to be an Outer. They argue that the public would find it find odd to vote for Britain to leave, and then have a new PM chosen who was on the losing side in the referendum. There are, as I report in The Sun this morning, Cabinet Ministers who want Michael Gove to

It was a nice touch that MPs sat in each other’s seats in the Commons during the tributes to Jo Cox on Monday. I hope it helped remind Tories where they’ll be sitting permanently after 2020 if they don’t bind the party’s wounds on Friday. If Remain wins, then everyone must coalesce around David Cameron; if it’s Leave then Michael Gove. These things were managed much better before 1965 when the Queen decided on Tory leaders. For all his reservations about the premiership, Gove wouldn’t refuse Her Majesty’s request to form a government, not in the year of her 90th birthday. How do you think Jeremy Corbyn voted in the

One consequence of David Cameron’s refusal to take part in any ‘Blue on Blue’ debates is that he and Michael Gove are appearing several days apart on BBC Question Time. Tonight, it was Gove’s turn to face the studio audience. In reply to the first question, Gove made clear that—in the event of Britain voting to leave—he wouldn’t support the so-called ‘punishment Budget’ that George Osborne set out today. Gove said that the Remain campaign were ‘turning it up to 11’ on the scare stories as polling day approached. Though, interestingly, he studiously avoided any personal criticism of Osborne. With the polls tightening the Remainers are getting more passionate, and

The only arguments that matter in politics today are the arguments on the right. The only futures that are possible to imagine are those offered by the different strands of right-wing thought. The right’s arguments are not good to my mind. Nor are the futures it offers desirable. It is just that the right’s opponents are all but absent from the debate. The future of the country is up for grabs, but only the right hand of England is reaching up to seize it. The journalist in me almost hopes that the ‘leave’ campaign wins. The lies it has told will then be clear, and the liberal press will have

This week the Prime Minister devoted a speech to what he regarded as six lies being told by his opponents in the EU referendum campaign. He later confessed that the idea for the speech had come to him while watching the news at 9 p.m. the previous evening. It would have been better if he had contented himself with shouting at the television, rather than adding yet more rancour to what has become a slanging match. Most voters tune into an election campaign only in its final few weeks; those who do so now will find nothing but hysteria, hyperventilation and obloquy. Where, it is often asked, are the facts?

Momentum in the ‘Leave’ campaign seems to be growing after Brexit took the lead in two polls out today. There are, however, still several weeks until the actual day of the EU referendum and the gap between the two sides remains marginal (four per cent). But ‘Remain’ still seem shaken by these polls. Here’s how they spent the day fighting back: David Cameron said Brexit would put a bomb under Britain’s economy, going on to say that ‘the worst thing is, we would have lit the fuse ourselves’: The PM was backed up Lib Dem leader Tim Farron. In a joint event, Farron said the argument for ‘Leave’ was built

The Leave campaign have had their best week of the campaign this week. After months of being battered by the Whitehall machine, they’ve taken advantage of purdah silencing government departments to get themselves onto the front foot. As I write in The Sun this morning, even IN supporting Cabinet Ministers admit that Leave have had a good week. But they argue that they won’t be able to ride the immigration issue to victory on June 23rd. One argues that you can’t focus on immigration week after week, or ‘By week four, you end up sounding like Nigel Farage’. But Vote Leave think their trump card is the link between immigration and people’s

Westminster has a tendency to get ahead of itself. MPs want to discuss the aftermath of an event long before it has happened. They play never-ending games of ‘What if?’ At the moment, the political class cannot stop discussing, in great detail, what the post-EU referendum political landscape will look like. The speculation is, in and of itself, part of the political process. Much of the talk of the post-vote challenges facing David Cameron is intended to persuade him to pull his punches in the final weeks of the campaign. What no one disputes is that the Prime Minister will find governing even harder after 23 June. His majority is