Michael gove

This morning’s Guardian scoop about Michael Gove’s suggestion that the nation should present the Queen with a new Royal yacht for the Jubilee is the talk of Westminster. But the full correspondence indicates that Gove was not proposing any taxpayer funding for a new Britannia.   Gove refers to ‘David Willetts’s excellent suggestion for a Royal Yacht’. This proposal was made in a letter from Willetts to the Prime Minister on the 5th September, which was copied to various colleagues. Willetts writes that Rear Admiral Bawtree sees The Future Ship Project for the 21st Century ‘as a potential replacement for the Royal Yacht Britannia’.   Willetts says that ‘The proposed

Downhills Primary School in Haringey is fast becoming a political battleground. Before Christmas, David Lammy, the local MP, a bunch of union leaders, left-wing opponents of education reform and Labour councilors wrote to The Guardian complaining about Michael Gove’s plans to convert primary school with poor academic records into academies. In the New Year, Michael Gove responded with a speech in which he attacked those opposing to dealing with these sub-standards schools. He accused them of being subscribers to the “bigoted backward bankrupt ideology of a left wing establishment that perpetuates division and denies opportunity.” (Pete blogged about the significance of the speech at the time.) The power of Gove’s

Michael Gove has never been timid in confronting the education bureaucracy, but his attack on them today is particularly — and noteworthily — unforgiving. Referring to those truculent local authorities that are blocking his schools reforms, he will say in a speech that starts in about ten minutes: ‘The same ideologues who are happy with failure — the enemies of promise — also say you can’t get the same results in the inner cities as the leafy suburbs, so it’s wrong to stigmatise these schools. Let’s be clear what these people mean. Let’s hold their prejudices up to the light. What are they saying? “If you’re poor, if you’re Turkish,

A change of pace, that’s what David Cameron offers in an article on schools reform for the Daily Telegraph this morning. A change of pace not just from the furious momentum of the eurozone crisis, but also in his government’s education policy. From now on, he suggests, reform will go quicker and further. Instead of just focussing on those schools that are failing outright, the coalition will extend its ire to those schools that ‘drift along tolerating second best’. Rather than just singling out inner city schools, Cameron will also cast his disapproval at ‘teachers in shire counties… satisfied with half of children getting five good GCSEs’. And rightly so,

Word reaches me of a vigorous exchange of views in Cabinet this week between Chris Huhne and Michael Gove over the European question. Huhne, who has form when it comes to Cabinet scraps, launched into a polemic against Tory Eurosceptics and insisted that the coalition not be “wagged by the Eurospecptic tail”. It has, obviously, escaped Huhne’s notice that there are more Tory Euro-rebels than there are Lib Dem MPs. There then followed an even more incredible moment where Huhne implied that if he had been in power, the single currency would have worked and so it was unfair to suggest that he had been proved wrong. This was all

Here’s an irony: last night’s EU fandango was the fifth largest vote in favour of the government this year. And yet there is little about the situation that is favourable to the government this morning, as the story moves on from Tory splits to coalition ones.  It started with Michael Gove’s appearance on the Today Programme earlier. The Secretary of State for Education put in a much more conciliatory performance than William Hague managed yesterday; praising the “cordiality” of the Tory rebels, and reassuring them that the Tory leadership would like to see specific powers returned from Europe “in this Parliament”. As he put it: “We need to win more

Liam Fox demonstrated today why he’ll be staying in Cabinet. He’s a tough, eloquent and effective Commons performer who does not fall to pieces when the going gets tough. George Osborne and Michael Gove were both on the front bench with him. One MP told me he saw Eric Pickles in the corridors, giving Fox a hug that almost killed him. All this reflects well on them: in politics, it’s always worth noting who stands by colleagues, and who scarpers, when it hits the fan. Fox has, finally, made the two steps required to get on top of this scandal: an apology, and full disclosure to stop the drip, drip

The row about which email account special advisers use for which emails is, I suspect, of very little interest to anyone outside SW1. But today’s FT story certainly has set the cat amongst the Whitehall pigeons. At the risk of trying the patience of everyone who doesn’t work within a mile of the Palace of Westminster, I think there is something here worth noting about our political culture. Christopher Cook’s story in the FT this morning is about an email that Dominic Cummings, one of Michael Gove’s special advisers, sent urging various political people not to use his Department of Education email. In this case, the email was perfectly proper. Ministers

A new rule seems to have been adopted at Lib Dem conference: don’t mention Academies. The coalition’s greatest single success story – something David Laws and Michael Gove agreed on before the election – is being airbrushed out. A favourable reference to Academies taking on kids from deprived backgrounds was proposed for a conference motion, but has been excised by the delegates. Lib Dem activists are heavily drawn from the ranks of local authority councilors, many of whom hate the way that schools have been given the power to break free from council control. Confronting them was a key part of Nick Clegg’s modernization programme. It seems that this has

David Cameron and IDS have been promoting the Work Programme this afternoon and they reiterated that jobseekers must learn English to claim benefits if their language difficulties are hampering their job applications. It’s another indication of the government’s radical approach to welfare reform. Aside from that, the main event in Westminster today was Ed Miliband’s speech to the TUC. Miliband was widely heckled by the Brothers, especially when he told them: “Let me just tell you about my experience of academies as I’ve got two academies in my own constituency. They have made a big difference to educational standards in my constituency and that is my local experience of that.” The Tories