The betrayal that turned British politics on its head
The morning after the shocking Brexit vote, David Cameron announced he was stepping down as British prime minister and Tory leader. In the leadership race that quickly followed, his two most influential Brexit-supporting MPs formed a team. Former London mayor Boris Johnson and influential minister Michael Gove were friends from Oxford, and they worked together during the campaign to leave the EU. They and their advisers agreed a Johnson run would have a good chance of beating rival Theresa May.
They were about to formally launch Johnson’s bid. But the last few days had seen some disagreements, misunderstandings, missed text messages — and led to what author Tim Shipman calls possibly “the most dramatic day in British political history” since 1940.
When (Tory cabinet minister Nick) Boles arrived at Ladbroke Grove he found Gove deep in conversation with Henry Cook, Henry Newman and Beth Armstrong, with Sarah Vine and Simone Finn chipping in from the sidelines. Gove explained his “governing view” of the past week: “Boris has had a week to prove he can be prime minister — not that I was setting out to test him — and in the last 24 hours he’s had the opportunity to do two things which were relatively trivial to nail it down. He couldn’t even do those. I don’t have the luxury of time. Tomorrow, I have to say to my colleagues and the country, ‘I think this man is ready to be prime minister,’ and be held to account forever for having made that claim — or not.”
He then drew parallels with the Labour Party leadership handover in 2007, when Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair uncontested: “There were people in the Labour Party who knew that Gordon Brown could not be prime minister. And they kept quiet, and that is understandably held against them. I can’t say I think Boris can be prime minister. That’s not to say he couldn’t be at some point in the future, but it’s just that in the course of what I’ve seen in the last week and day, it’s too big a risk for the country.”
Having decided that he no longer believed in Johnson’s candidacy, Gove was clear that he would have to publicly withdraw support. There was never a question of fighting on in the hope of winning. “I can’t do that,” he said. A source familiar with Gove’s thinking says, “Arguably the prudent thing to do would have been to have knuckled under and assume it would crumble, or if Boris wins, great! But that’s not Michael.” Gove believed it would have been odder still to just withdraw his support and then remain silent. “Once we realized we couldn’t support Boris, then running myself seemed to be the sensible thing, or the logical thing, to do,” he explained.
He went back over the previous week. “I expended whatever credibility and energy I had trying to get people to support Boris. But I realized it was not going to work. It was the inability to focus on the task at hand — either Boris writing his article on time or people understanding what was needed in a leadership race, and I was determined to put a brave and constructive face on it.”
From there it was only a short step to concluding that he should run himself. One source who was there said, “We just went through it all. And within about an hour Michael and Nick realized that they would not vote for Boris Johnson in the first round because they didn’t want him to be prime minister. And when that realization came, the whole deck of cards started to fall. How can they in good conscience persuade other people to vote for Boris? How can they run his campaign?” One of those present explained Gove’s reasoning: “It was, ‘Boris can’t be prime minister. Who else is there? It can’t be Theresa (May). Therefore it has to be me.’ I think it was as simple as that.”
Gove’s wife Sarah urged him to follow his principles, saying, “Since I have known you, you have always done what you think to be right.” It was not the clinching argument, but Gove also knew he could expect heavyweight newspaper backing. The previous day he had taken a call from an influential figure in the media who urged him to run. A source in Cameron’s team claims (Chancellor of the Exchequer) George Osborne had bumped into the media powerbroker earlier that day at a business event and suggested he make the call.
At 1:30 a.m. Gove turned in, saying he wanted to sleep on it. At that point Henry Cook called Dominic Cummings (a key aide to Gove, who later led the Vote Leave campaign) who was out of London. It was the first he knew of Gove’s decision. Boles joined the call on speakerphone, “babbling on” that “Boris was unreliable” and warning darkly, “A whole lot of things are going to come out about Boris.” Cummings claimed in retrospect that Boles gave Gove “a strongly exaggerated story” about Johnson’s shortcomings.
Then Cook rang (aide) Paul Stephenson’s mobile. Stephenson was woken by the call, but did not answer it. Cook tried a second time, and when that was also unanswered, he tried Stephenson’s landline. “What is it?” Stephenson snapped. “Michael’s decided to run.” Stephenson thought the situation was “mental,” but said, “OK, of course I’ll come and help.” Having been excluded from a leadership campaign he had wanted to be involved in, he now had a way in. He texted Cummings to gauge his opinion, and in one of the classic autocorrect mistakes of the campaign, got the reply that it was “batshot crazy.”
Gove’s team stayed up until 3 a.m and then crashed at Simone Finn’s house. They would reconvene at Gove’s home at 6:30 a.m.
Gove had been sincere in believing for years that he was not cut out for the top job. But during the campaign he had begun to realize that he could deal with the pressures of leadership better than he expected, and that he enjoyed the strategic decision-making. “During the referendum cam- paign, Michael put himself through — so did Boris, to be fair — what a party leader puts themself through in a general election campaign,” a friend said.
If his response to Queengate, when he had blurted out a semi-confessional statement of his culpability to the press waiting outside his front door, was Old Gove, the man who emerged from the debates was a different politician who had tapped wells he didn’t know he had. He had always wanted to shield his family from the scrutiny that goes with leadership. When the Guardian doorstepped his elderly father and got him to say the EU had not actually finished his fish business, when Emailgate erupted, he realized that his decision to back Brexit meant he had failed in that regard. But he dealt with the crises firmly, and the family had coped. When he came to make his decision in the small hours of that Thursday morning, he thought to himself, “I’ve endured it. They’re throwing everything at me. I’m confident in the argument I’m making and I’m soaking it up. What more can they throw at me?” He was about to find out.
The second aspect of Gove’s character that carries explanatory force was his taste for revolution. If his politics and his leadership launch speech owed much to the 19th-century radical Richard Cobden, Gove’s ministerial office was also decorated with a bust of Lenin. He, like Steve Hilton, had grown frustrated with David Cameron’s caution on public-service reform. Cameron, in turn, had been horrified by Gove’s “Maoist” taste for “creative destruction.” In abandoning Johnson and running himself, Gove was embracing this approach.
Nick Boles could not sleep. At 5:30 a.m. he texted Gove and said, “We should do this.” He jumped in a cab at 6:30 a.m. and returned to Ladbroke Grove to find Gove still asleep. When he was up they went to talk in the garden. “This is the right thing to do, isn’t it?” Boles asked. Gove replied, “Yes.” Boles looked him in the eye and asked the key question: “Are you ready?” Again, Gove said, “Yes.” The two old friends exchanged some personal words and then made an agreement. “We can do this,” said Boles. “We’re in it to win it. And we give up when we win it or we’re defeated under the rules, but not before.” They then embraced to confirm the arrangement. No matter how badly they did among MPs, if they were still in the running when it got to the final two, they would contest the election. With that decided, they went back inside and told the others who had by now assembled at the house.
At 7 a.m. Gove held a conference call to confirm his decision. The two dissenting voices were Henry de Zoete and Paul Stephenson, both of whom thought the betrayal of Boris would play badly for Gove. De Zoete said, “Theresa May will be prime minister if you do this.” Stephenson warned that abandoning Boris would be compared to another notorious act of political fratricide: “This will be (former Labour leader) Ed Miliband times one hundred.” There appears to have been little understanding of the salience of this point from most of the others, who did not think Johnson would drop out of the race, nor any comprehension that Gove would be seen to be diminished by his planned action.
Crucially, Gove had his wife’s backing. “The key thing with Sarah is: can she live with this?” a source who was present said. “She’s going to have to give up her columns, it’s going to be a huge amount of pressure and restraint, and she’s said, ‘I’m ready to do this. You know I believe in you.’ She doesn’t have innately thick skin, but I think she’s developed a thicker one. Her main role was to say, ‘It’s OK, it’s fine.’ But more than that, ‘I’m absolutely sure he’s ready for it and he can do it and he’s the best person to do it.’ So that was the permission.”
Having made the decision the team got to work, phoning around a dozen MPs like Dominic Raab and Oliver Dowden who were supporting Johnson because Gove had asked them to, and asking them to attend a meeting in Gove’s Commons office at 9 a.m. Boles felt strongly that those MPs whose primary loyalty was to Gove ought to be the first to learn from them what had happened. Between 8:30 and 9, Gove personally phoned Liz Truss, who had already declared her support for Johnson, while Boles got hold of Nicky Morgan, who was due to declare that morning, and Amber Rudd, who was due to be revealed later.
Team Boris was particularly angry later that it took Gove nearly two hours from the time of his decision to inform Johnson that he was abandoning him. They regarded an email sent by Henry Newman at 7:10 a.m., detailing which MPs were due to attend Boris’s campaign launch, as particularly misleading. Newman’s job had been to round up attendees, and he continued to text MPs until 10 o’clock the previous evening. Another adviser said the email was an attempt to play things straight: “It would have been dishonest to have done stuff that screwed over Boris’s launch, so he sent a final list of people who said they were going. That was an attempt to be as straightforward as possible in the circumstances.” One side’s attempt at morality was interpreted by the other as duplicity.
In a similar vein, Gove’s allies say Beth Armstrong handed back the entire spreadsheet of Boris supporters, and took herself off the distribution list.
At 9 a.m. Gove and Boles met their MPs: Ed Vaizey, Dominic Raab, Nick Gibb, Oliver Dowden, Rishi Sunak, Suella Fernandes, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Robert Jenrick and John Hayes. Gove explained that he was going to run. Vaizey was first out of the blocks. “OK, thank God! This is what I’ve always wanted you to do. You’ve got my 100 per cent support.” John Hayes agreed, in his trademark grandiloquent fashion. But not everyone was happy. Jacob Rees-Mogg said, “I don’t think I should commit to this. You know how much I respect you, but I need to think about this.”
Oliver Dowden’s reaction was the same: “I want to think about it.” He had only signed up to the Johnson campaign because Gove was on board, but he also remembered conversations in which Gove had confessed he would not be a good prime minister. He also knew, from having family in the public sector, what a mountain Gove would have to climb to win over some voters. When the news broke, he was immediately contacted by Gavin Williamson. Dowden slept on his decision, but told Williamson on Friday morning that he would support Theresa May.
At 9:02 a.m. Westminster journalists were gathering at the Royal United Services Institute on Whitehall, where Theresa May was due to announce her candidacy in the library upstairs, when an email popped up that would turn British politics on its head.
In a statement to the media, Michael Gove began by distancing himself from David Cameron, saying the referendum result was the chance for a “bold break from the past.” He then acknowledged, “I have repeatedly said that I do not want to be prime minister. That has always been my view. But events since last Thursday have weighed heavily with me. I respect and admire all the candidates running for the leadership. In particular, I wanted to help build a team behind Boris Johnson so that a politician who argued for leaving the European Union could lead us to a better future. But I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead. I have, therefore, decided to put my name forward for the leadership.”
Gove needed to explain why he was making one of the most extraordinary political U-turns of all time, but that had necessitated a statement so personal that it ended up wounding himself as well as Johnson.
Matt Hancock, the Cabinet Office minister, had turned his phone off between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. because he was watching his son in a school production of Romeo and Juliet – playing Paris, just one of the victims of the seemingly endless Shakespearean bloodletting. “I’d forgotten how much murder there was,” he told friends later. “And suicide. Just death. Paris is murdered right at the end. Lots of death. Then I came out and turned my phone on and read Michael’s statement. Extraordinary.”