Agony of seeing Michael choose between his beliefs and his friend the PM
Our columnist’s intensely personal account of a momentous decision ...
For months, I had known the storm was coming. I first raised the subject with my husband Michael Gove last summer, not long after he’d been made Lord Chancellor by the Prime Minister. We were enjoying the wilds of north Norfolk for a few days with the children — our first real chance to get away after the frenzy of the General Election. You’d have thought that politics would have been the last thing on either of our minds.
But I knew this issue of the EU referendum was going to be a biggie. Bigger perhaps than anything else we’d experienced so far. My husband has many odd and occasionally irritating obsessions: obscure American presidents; Wagner; secondhand bookshops. He also has an irrational aversion to houseplants and quiche.
But few passions trump his dislike of the EU. The profligacy, the back- scratching, the deceit, the endless bureaucracy, the unstoppable march of European federalism — and, above all else, the erosion of British sovereignty.
It’s been an obsession ever since I’ve known him. old school friends tell me it goes further back still; to when he was a boy growing up in Aberdeen, nagging his parents for a subscription to The Spectator magazine at an age when most kids would have been reading the Beano.
When he and I got engaged, I recall one friend expressing surprise that Gove, archEurosceptic that he was, should have fallen for a girl like me, who grew up in Italy.
But Michael’s anything but a Little Englander: he loves Europe (the vineyards of Bordeaux especially). He just doesn’t want Britain to be run by it.
So as soon as David Cameron announced this referendum, I knew there was going to be trouble. But on that holiday, Michael really didn’t want to talk about it.
Like most husbands, he’ll do almost anything to avoid having an awkward discussion. Mr Cameron is not only his boss, he’s also an old friend. It doesn’t get more awkward than that.
So I let it go. After all, we were meant to be relaxing. And besides, he had more pressing matters on his mind.
It was early days at the Ministry of Justice but already I could tell by the sheer amount of literature Michael was wading through that he had big plans.
In particular, he seemed to have developed, very quickly, a passion for prison reform. Soon after getting the job, he embarked on a series of prison visits.
I have rarely seen him so affected by anything: he was shaken to his core by some of the things he saw.
It quickly became clear that he saw reforming Britain’s penal system as a kind of extension of his true passion, education.
MANY of these young men in places such as Brixton or Wandsworth were extreme examples of what happens when schools fail young people, especially those from deprived backgrounds. I could see the fire that had been extinguished when he left the Department of Education re-kindled in his belly. He had his political mojo back, and he was happy for the first time in ages.
But with every week that passed, the spectre of the EU referendum loomed ever larger. Working on his red boxes at home at night, he would occasionally express frustration as yet another pointless EU directive crossed his desk.
The extent to which the tentacles of Brussels had a stranglehold on British government — something he had also experienced at Education — was impossible to ignore.
I could see him making the transformation from Eurosceptic to someone who, if given the option, would actually want to leave the EU. obscure books such as a scholarly analysis of the 1975 referendum (by David Butler and Uwe Kitzinger if you’re interested) started turning up on his bedside table.
I caught him reading roger Bootle’s The Trouble With Europe. By the time he settled into War And Peace, I knew we were in for a rough ride. Then, on his first day back at work after the Christmas holidays, the Prime Minister announced he would allow Cabinet ministers a free vote on the EU referendum.
Everything I’d feared was beginning to unfold.
Since then, if I’m honest, it’s all been a bit of a nightmare. Michael has been like a cat on a hot tin roof, locked in an internal struggle of agonising proportions.
He has sought counsel from friends, colleagues, relatives. But at the end of the day, only he could make the final decision: to make the choice between loyalty to his old friend, the Prime Minister, and his own heartfelt beliefs.
It was never going to be easy. But neither of us had any idea it would be such torture either. Mr Cameron was expecting opposition from all sorts of people, but not from Michael.
When he eventually told David the truth about his feelings on the re-negotiations — that he was not inclined to support the deal in its current form — the PM was genuinely, and quite naturally, shocked and hurt.
I blame myself in part for any misunderstanding. In earlier, albeit informal, conversations in which Mr Cameron had asked me about Michael’s intentions, I had not been entirely transparent — mostly because I genuinely wasn’t sure which way Michael was going to go, but also because, being frightfully middle-class about it all, I didn’t want to start a row.
Now it was all coming to a head and, to cap it all, it was half-term. There’s nothing like trying to wrestle with potentially careerbreaking decisions of vital national importance when you’ve got an 11year-old and a 12-year-old at home waiting to be entertained.
Thus conversations with senior Tory colleagues were punctuated by games of Monopoly and trips to various overcrowded and overpriced outdoor activity centres.
My daughter Beatrice had a friend to stay, and they got terribly over- excited when a news
crew turned up on our doorstep. ‘ OMg, Mummy, where’s my hairbrush?’ she squealed, and the two girls spent the next hour trying on outfits before making their grand exit to the corner shop.
My son, meanwhile, was more engaged in the political debate. he’s on the PM’s side: as a Chelsea fan, he thinks a Brexit would be a disaster because it might limit the pool of foreign players available to his club.
Meanwhile, I decided to do what any sensible wife would do — spring- clean the house. I don’t know why, but when the going gets tough, I invariably succumb to an irresistible desire to tidy. I guess I just feel that even as the sky is falling, the fact that I have a wellordered cutlery drawer will somehow save me from the worst.
And so, having re- organised the kitchen cupboards, I left Michael in his favourite armchair, drafting his Brexit statement while consuming oceans of strong tea and occasionally emitting loud sighs, and retreated to my ‘lady shed’ in the back garden.
It’s a shambolic structure that doubles as a writing shack and general depository for all the things we have no space for in the house — but when things start to get a little intense, there’s no place like it. It’s like the junk-shop of our marriage, full of forgotten treasures.
Opening up a box, I came across a stack of photographs from our wedding, back in 2001.
Sixty or so of our good friends gamely schlepped to the South of France for a knees-up. There was george Osborne chatting to, of all people, feminist author Caitlin Moran, and ed Vaizey, now the longest-serving-ever culture minister, delivering his brilliant best man speech.
And Samantha Cameron, radiant and pregnant with her first child; she and David laughing on the coach back from the church.
Not the Chancellor or the famous writer or the Prime Minister. Just a group of people from all walks in life who had in common one thing: us.
It was as though fate had intervened to remind us what we were risking.
The Camerons are some of our dearest friends. We had been through so much together, both personal and political. I am godmother to Florence, their youngest. Now David would inevitably feel let down. Michael was between a rock and a hard place. Be true to himself and disappoint his friend; support the Prime Minister and betray his principles.
Thank goodness, then, for a bit of light relief in the shape of Boris Johnson, who a few weeks earlier had invited us to supper at his house in Islington. And so, last Tuesday, we had drinks in Boris and his wife Marina’s stylishly dishevelled drawing room.
Marina and I were broadly in agreement: whatever was most likely to keep the boys happy. Also there was the Russian media mogul evgeny Lebedev, impeccably groomed and suited, a stark contrast to the two baggysuited politicians sitting next to each other on the sofa.
Boris, meanwhile, was Boris: very agitated, genuinely tortured as to which way to go, although not for quite the same reasons as Michael.
It was already all a bit surreal. Then, just as dinner was being served, it got even more bizarre. A senior Cabinet minister, accompanied by a lawyer, came on speakerphone to discuss the complexities of law in relation to sovereignty. Michael and Boris leaned into the iPhone, Boris firing questions at it, Michael making listening noises.
I, too, listened dutifully for a few minutes, but it really was a very lawyerly conversation, and the aroma rising from the slow-roasted shoulder of lamb was getting to me. I tucked in.
Marina and evgeny followed suit, and we spent the next 20 minutes attempting to make polite conversation in stage whispers, Boris shushing us every time we got too loud.
After that, Wednesday and Thursday passed in a flurry of phone calls and meetings. There was a good deal more sighing. As the hours wore on and the various participants in this bizarre saga got increasingly tired and tetchy, the pressure grew.
There were some mightily tricky exchanges. It was clear that No 10 were very keen indeed to swing Michael’s vote in their favour. But it was not to be.
This wretched referendum is still a while off, so I don’t for a moment expect the next months will be easy. But then politics never is. And it’s precisely because of this that I am glad my husband made the choice he made.
Not just because a true friendship can survive any test. But also because, purely from the point of view of a wife and mother, there aren’t a great deal of upsides to having a husband in politics.
If, at the end of the day, he can’t stand up for what he believes in, then what’s the point?
That is why I don’t think there was ever any real question in Michael’s mind that he was going to vote Out. In all the years we’ve been together, I’ve never really known him change his mind about the fundamentals in life.
He MIghT bend a little, out of politeness or expediency; but ultimately he knows his mind —and once he’s made it up, he’s almost impossible to shift. The other problem is that, as some teachers reading this might know, he’s not very good at sitting on the fence. Or keeping his mouth shut. And not everything he says always keeps the people he cares about happy.
For example, a lot of the stuff he’s been doing on prisons has, I know, not pleased many traditional Conservatives. But he didn’t go into politics to be a people pleaser. he went in to get things right.
And the simple fact is that, in his head, the intellectual arguments for remaining in europe simply don’t stack up. It would be wrong for him to do anything else. he’s got to see it through.
Baroness Thatcher herself could rise from her grave to tell him to get back in his box, and still he wouldn’t. It’s just in the nature of the beast that he makes his judgments based on what he thinks — and not on what others want him to think.
Ultimately, his view is that true friends can have differences of opinion without letting it affect their relationships. I hope and pray that will turn out to be true.