He’s up against it, but ideas fizz in Michael like liver salts in water
SEES THE COURTIER TAKE A TILT AT THE CROWN
TO the least propitious, but so far most bracing, of the Tory leadership speeches. It was held at a Westminster think-tank, Policy Exchange, in a room so sterile it could have been a police interrogation cell. Plain walls. Stark chimney piece. Hard chairs. Tell us, Michael Gove, why, in the early hours of Thursday June 30, you did murder the chances of your former friend Boris Johnson?
As it happens, Mr Gove was not there as a police suspect. He was there himself to aim for the Tory command. The eternal courtier has decided to take a tilt at the crown.
Has he any chance? Hard to see how. The Establishment is terrified of him. Bitter Europhiles such as Ken Clarke have set their faces against him. Few Boris-ites will forgive what he did to their blond Dulux dog.
But as Mr Gove himself has always argued, the low-born should aim high. We were at ‘a hinge in history’, he said with a writer’s flourish. We could either try to muddle through or we could ‘lean in, embrace the change the British people voted for’. The Brexit result demanded ‘an end to politics-as-usual’.
Politics as usual? Did he mean Theresa May? The phrase could certainly apply to the appalling greasers – the Philip Hammonds of this slippery world – who have glurped themselves on to her campaign.
Mr Gove said he had never been driven by ambition. ‘Indeed, I did almost everything NOT to be a candidate.
‘I know my limitations. Whatever charisma is, I don’t have it. Whatever glamour may be, I don’t think anyone could ever associate me with it.’ Nicely done.
He continued: ‘But at every step in my political life I’ve asked myself one question.’ Pause. A bespectacled, beaver-cheeked stare down the camera lens. ‘What is the right thing to do? What does your heart tell you?’
There were not many MPs in the room to support him. Some were allegedly in France at the Somme commemorations. Former Cabinet Office minister Lord (Fran- cis) Maude was present, as were ministers Nick Boles, Shailesh Vara, Nick Gibb and backbencher Antoinette Sandbach. Good old Sandbags. She’s about 8ft tall, shoes like baguettes, big heart.
We had to go through more personal stuff. It had been a ‘wrench’ for him to part from David Cameron over the EU; and he recalled the moment his adoptive mother told him, when he was a tiddler, ‘son, you didn’t grow under my heart, you grew in my heart’. Mr Gove went a bit round-eyed at this point. BUT this was not a soapy speech. It was gripping for its working- class Toryism and its flinty insistence that immigration drop and Brexit be delivered. He spoke of the underclass that has become ‘flotsam and jetsam in the powerful flows of global capital and free labour’.
He made a snorting attack on City middlemen and consultants and managers – the sort of people who receive ‘huge pay-offs and pen- sion contributions and then go on to lecture people on average and below-average wages about the need for greater labour flexibility’.
To hear a Tory say this was terrifically refreshing. Too many of these consultant types, said Mr Gove, ‘act as though they were Steve Jobs but in fact they’re really behaving like David Brent’.
Was this really the stuff for a Tory leadership application? Or was it more the speech of a back-room philosopher? Maybe.
But if – and it’s a big if – Mr Gove can make the play- off in this leadership election and put these arguments to the party membership, the activists might well become excited. Gove is an image-bender’s nightmare.
He also now has what strategists call ‘negatives’ on trust and calmness. But ideas fizz in him like liver salts in water.
He was a Brexiteer. He talks of change. His attacks on the undeserving rich would play well in Old Labour areas. Though he may never win, he could well force more complacent candidates to raise their game.