Michael gove

When Michael Gove addressed Tory MPs on Wednesday evening at a meeting of the 1922 committee, he began with a tribute to Boris Johnson. After a rocky few days for the Prime Minister in which he has apologised to the House for attending a drinks party in the Downing Street garden during lockdown and faced calls from his own side to resign, Gove took the opportunity to remind MPs of Johnson’s selling points. The levelling up secretary told MPs that their leader ‘gets the big calls right’ citing Brexit, vaccines and Johnson’s recent decision not to bring in extra Covid restrictions over Christmas. Given that Gove was one of the ministers calling for

It seems the government reset isn’t going exactly to plan. Michael Gove, Boris Johnson’s trouble-shooter, was due to appear on Radio 4’s Today programme in the coveted 8:10 a.m slot this morning to explain how he has finally solved the long-running cladding crisis as part of his housing brief.  But what should have been a moment of triumph turned into an episode of farce. For, in scenes straight out of W1A, the Minister for Levelling Up appears to be unable to, er, go up a level, as he spent more than half an hour trapped in one of the Corporation’s lifts. An embarrassed BBC presenter Nick Robinson was forced to explain the unfolding drama live on

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

‘This government ends if the red wall reverts back to type and we lose 45 seats then end up in hung parliament territory,’ warns one secretary of state. This comment is a reminder of how vital it is for Boris that levelling up is seen to be a success. The rewards of getting it right are considerable. The Tories’ reward for that would probably be another decade in power: one cabinet loyalist says, ‘The boss wants to see a world where Labour are shut out. We consolidate the red wall.’  Michael Gove and Andy Haldane have found inspiration in 15th-century Florence But fixing regional disparities isn’t easy: it is hard to find

So that’s it. The end. Tory conference wraps up today with Boris Johnson delivering a policy-light leader’s speech to close the four day Conservative jamboree in Manchester. Surrounded by campaign placards like a traditional electoral rally, Johnson made an hour long speech peppered with talk of ‘building back better.’ And in traditional Boris style, there were, of course, jokes – ones which fortunately landed better than some of the more laboured ones he’s been making at evening receptions. Below are five of the PM’s best moments from his address to the Tory faithful.

Have the Conservatives lost their nerve on planning reform? Not quite, but a couple of small interventions at the Conservative party conference in Manchester point in a new direction. If anything, they suggest more ambition, not less, on the part of the ministerial team involved – though less opportunity for a falling out with southern voters. The first, by Michael Gove, was yesterday in a Policy Exchange fringe event with Sebastian Payne on the latter’s new book, Broken Heartlands. The new Levelling Up Secretary told his interviewer that the gap between paying monthly rent and paying monthly mortgage instalments – which are lower than rents for first-time buyers lucky enough

What is levelling up? One of the problems with this nebulous term is that anyone in government who has understood what it means has decided to keep this a glorious secret, rather than sharing it with others. Now that there is an entire department for Levelling Up, it’s a bit harder to take this approach. Michael Gove is the new Secretary of State for the policy and spoke last night at a ConservativeHome fringe event at the Conservative party conference. He was keen not just to offer a picture of what levelling up will look like, but also to respond to critics within his own party who think this is

New York may have the Met Gala but London has Parlioke. As global fashionistas last night crammed into their garish garbs, here in Westminster our political masters were having an evening soirée of their own.  Steerpike’s man with a microphone reports that MPs were invited to a select singing bash. Ahead of her speech today at Policy Exchange, international trade secretary Liz Truss warmed up her vocal cords with a touch of karaoke. The equalities minister hosted MPs in Parliament alongside fellow Cabinet attendee Therese Coffey, fresh off a morning media round on Universal Credit cuts.  Coffey and others let their hair down with a range of vintage songs including

Conservative politicians appear willing to revolt on every issue: tax rises, China, lockdowns. But on the accumulation of power by their party they remain silent. The system is being rigged to their advantage, and on that shady objective they are happy to give the Johnson administration a free pass. Imagine a football club giving itself the right to decide when the referee can grant a penalty – or a gang of potential criminals having a veto over police investigations – and you will understand the impact of the government’s latest proposals perfectly. Its Elections Bill places the referee under the control of the ruling party and the cops in the

Downing Street’s Union Unit has tried many ideas to keep Scotland in the UK – but even they can’t have thought of this. Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove was spotted in the early hours of the morning dancing in a popular nightclub in Aberdeen, the city of his birth. Gove, a veteran of the Whitehall jungle, turned up shortly after 1 a.m. at O’Neills pub – a place ‘where you can enjoy the craic’ in its own words – before heading on upstairs to nightclub Bohemia. One gob-smacked punter was quoted in the Daily Record as saying:  ‘Michael Gove walked into O’Neills at around 1.15am, the pub was just about closing. I’m

Cabinet office minister Michael Gove has put his £2.25 million west London home on the market. The house, which has a black painted door just like the real No. 10 in Downing Street, is described by estate agents as a ‘big boned period house’ that ‘oozes style’. While Gove may not longer be part of the Notting Hill set, he’s certainly selling at Notting Hill type prices. According to the estate agents, the property is: ‘A wonderful Victorian terraced house with two floors of excellent living/entertaining space and a walled garden.’ The house sale comes just over a month after Michael and his partner Sarah Vine announced they were separating. They have

The acting one sees upon the stage doesn’t show how human beings actually comport themselves in crises, but simply how actors think they ought to. It is the same with politicians, but they are not actors, only a sort of reductio ad absurdum of a thespian. Their profession bears the same relation to proper acting (so-called) as that of a card sharp or a divorce lawyer bears to poetry. Take Michael Gove, whom I have known since I was 21, and Matt Hancock, whom (I thank God fasting) I don’t know at all. Were this a play, Hancock would not have left his wife and three children for a well-known

No doubt Michael Gove is satisfied with how his latest comments on Scottish independence have gone down. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, de facto minister for the Union (even though that’s meant to be someone else’s job), told the Telegraph he couldn’t see any circumstances under which the PM would allow Nicola Sturgeon a second referendum on breaking up Britain. This is exactly what Scotland’s embattled unionists want to hear and seem not to tire of hearing, even though they hear it a lot. Sturgeon has obliged by accusing Gove of ‘sneering, arrogant condescension’, ‘completely refusing to accept Scottish democracy’ and helping ‘build support for independence’. And so

It has been almost 45 years since Tam Dalyell first asked the West Lothian Question. It is a damning indictment of devolutionary unionists that they are still flailing for an answer. Dalyell, a Scottish Labour MP with the uncommon foresight and courage to oppose his party’s embrace of devolution, first posed it during the parliamentary debates that teed up the first referendums in 1979: ‘For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate … at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on English politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland,

This week, the government yet again threw the country’s holiday plans into chaos, after it announced that Portugal would be moved to the ‘amber list’ on Tuesday, meaning those returning from the country will have to quarantine at home for ten days. Little did the government know though that the Portuguese travel chaos would affect its own inner workings. The Daily Mail reports today that Michael Gove had to leave a meeting with Boris Johnson and devolved leaders after being pinged by the NHS app. It is thought that he came into contact with a Covid sufferer after traveling to the Champions League final in Porto last week with his

Michael Gove was deployed to the Commons on Monday afternoon to answers questions on the ministerial code, an hour-long appearance in which he was (inevitably) asked about that day’s Daily Mail splash: ‘Boris: Let the bodies pile high in their thousands’. An awkward question for any minister to handle, you might think, but the oleaginous Gove just about got away with it. Asked directly about the reports, the Cabinet Office minister gave a lengthy reply which contained this key passage to wriggle out of trouble again: Tens of thousands of people were dying. The Prime Minister made a decision in that meeting to trigger a second lockdown. He made a