Michael Gove was the most consequential minister of the 14 years of Conservative government. It could be argued that, without him, Britain would have stayed in the European Union: he paved the way for Boris Johnson to lead the Leave campaign in the referendum. And, despite having twice stood unsuccessfully for the party leadership, he also had a substantial record as a reforming minister at education, justice and levelling-up.
As the editor of The Spectator, he will continue to be influential in Tory politics, so it was worth hearing what he had to say on Thursday, to the students that I teach at King’s College London, when he gave this term’s final class in the “Conservative Years” module taught by Dr Jack Brown.
He offered a brief survey of the period of Tory turmoil, ending with an honest assessment of the way it ended, with Liz Truss’s mini-Budget in 2022 being the point of no return. “I think this was, even more than Partygate, the single greatest blot on the Conservative record,” he said.
“The fact that people in real time saw the costs of their mortgages rise, and saw the country enter a period of economic instability, wrecked the Conservatives’ reputation, such as it was, for economic management.
“But more than that, the fact that it was we, the Conservatives – our members and our MPs – who said, ‘This person is ready to be prime minister’, and the fact that just after 40 days people thought, ‘What were you smoking?’”
That meant that whoever took over, and even though it was Rishi Sunak, “who had predicted that this would end in tears”, they would be “on a losing wicket”.
As Gove stood down from parliament, the Conservative Party suffered the worst defeat in its history.
“We are now with Keir Starmer, having promised change,” said Gove. “As a result of change, what we have now is a government that is committed to austerity, staying close to a Republican president, increasing defence spending and seeing more children going into poverty. So, as you can see, a radical shift from the preceding 14 years.”
One of the students asked what Gove thought the party should do now. He admitted that it would be “very, very difficult” for the Conservatives to recover. The last time they were in opposition, “it took the Conservatives three elections before they found the leader and the platform that actually got them to government”.
In 2010, he said, “the requirements for the Conservatives to get into government were: one, Tony Blair to be replaced; two, policies on the economy and the public sector that did not look as though they exclusively favoured the wealthier. And three, ownership of policies that were about or signified altruism – so David Cameron’s embrace of green policies was both important in itself, this issue is rising up the salience in people’s minds, but also, this is a policy about our children.”
Now, he said, “the difficulties the Conservative Party have are linked to perceptions of incompetence – but how can you prove you’re competent unless and until you’re back in office?”
He said that Kemi Badenoch, his protégé as Tory leader, needs to take drastic action to try to change perceptions of the party – although he phrased it as something that “Conservative leaders”, plural, should do, implying that there may be more than one before the Tories win again. He also thought that they would not take his advice.
“What I think Conservative leaders should do, but what I think will not happen, is that they should say: ‘I am so sorry about the Liz Truss mini-Budget. And do you know why we got it wrong? We got it wrong because we preferred ideology and self-regard to reality and thinking about the whole country. That will never happen again, and I’m going to change the way in which leaders are elected in order to ensure that it doesn’t.’”
In other words, he would take the right to choose the party leader away from the members and restore it to MPs alone, as was the norm before William Hague widened the franchise in 1998 to defend himself against a challenge from Michael Portillo – of whom, incidentally, Gove wrote an admiring biography.
As for his own leadership ambitions, Gove was asked why he withdrew his support for Johnson after the referendum. “I convinced myself towards the end of the referendum campaign that Boris had moved from being Prince Hal to Henry V; he had moved from being the jester to the heir presumptive, the potential monarch,” Gove said.
“But without wanting to go into too much detail, in the days that followed, Boris reverted back to the more chaotic figure that I had hoped that he had managed to transcend, and there were a variety of things that I would have anticipated that someone would have done if they were on the brink of becoming prime minister, if that prize was there, that he didn’t do and seemed disinclined to do.
“So I thought, I can’t say at this stage to the country, ‘This man is ready to be prime minister.’ Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I should probably have said that and then just retreated and withdrew, rather than putting myself forward. But at the time, it struck me that you can’t just say, ‘Oh, well, he’s not suitable,’ and then not provide an answer.
“All I would say is that sometimes politicians, like everyone, can indulge in wishful thinking, and sometimes politicians, like everyone, can find that, after a period of exhaustion and adrenaline, their judgement is impaired.”
Gove turned against Johnson a second time after Johnson had been prime minister for three years, but he offered a “plea in mitigation” on Johnson’s behalf over Partygate: “Boris is not someone who is naturally gregarious. Boris is not someone who thought, ‘Brilliant; nobody knows what goes on behind the black door: party, party, party!’”
Gove said: “Boris genuinely believed that what he was doing was legit, ‘strictly necessary for work purposes’. What he didn’t do was take the trouble to say, ‘Look, these rules that I’ve just told everyone about – it would appear that we’re not really … hold on a moment.’”
Johnson’s mistake, Gove thought, was to continue to insist that the rules had been followed. “Boris’s governing style was that of someone who was a gambler – prime ministers often are – and his gambles a lot of the time came off, and then eventually, one gamble too many led to his fall.”
Gove was asked which of the five prime ministers of the period was best at managing the civil service, and which of them would have been best at handling the coronavirus pandemic. In both cases, his answer was “David Cameron”, but he also said that Tony Blair had been influential during the pandemic. The Labour former prime minister pressed for a policy of “first doses first” for the vaccines, widening the gap between the two doses, thus maximising the numbers receiving the greater protection of the first dose.
“As a result of both being influential and pressing for some of the things for which he argued, he helped the overdue revival in his political reputation,” Gove said, adding: “In my lifetime, the single most impressive politician in the English-speaking world has been Tony Blair.”
As I have always said, Michael Gove was the real Tory heir to Blair, and should have been prime minister instead of Boris Johnson.
