RIVALS TO THE DEATH ‘Aren’t you a bit toxic with the public and seen as a speccy git?’
Two great men. Two potential Prime Ministers. Now a bombshell biography of Michael Gove reveals the bitter battles between them, why he had to wield the knife — and the dark secrets that have come back to haunt him
BORIS JOHNSON had been worried Michael Gove might have his eyes on beating him to the job of Prime Minister in the weeks leading up to the EU referendum in June 2016 — and not without reason.
‘I’m pretty certain I’m going to back you, but I just need to think about this over the next 24 hours,’ said Gove.
On Saturday, June 25, two days after the referendum, Gove told Johnson he would back him; he was definitely not standing himself. But over the course of the next few days he changed his mind.
All the qualities Johnson seemed to have adopted, or at least done a good impression of understanding the importance of, during the referendum campaign had completely disappeared. Message discipline, organisation, taking advice, working to deadlines . . .
Gove thought back to his experiences working closely with a prime minister. He remembered seeing the security services rushing in, clearing the room, and telling David Cameron he had to make an instant decision on whether to give the go-ahead to have someone killed.
Could Johnson handle that level of pressure and responsibility? Gove came to the conclusion Johnson should not be Prime Minister. He decided he would stand against him. In the run-up to the launch of his campaign, Gove was put through his paces by his team as they tried to anticipate what questions he would face from the media. During this session Gove made a startling admission.
According to someone with intimate knowledge of the event, Gove was asked if he had ever taken drugs. ‘Yes, cocaine,’ he replied.
He was firmly instructed not to give that answer in public, and told instead to fall back on the words Cameron had used when he was running for leader, namely that politicians are entitled to a private life before entering politics.
There had long been rumours in Westminster that Gove had taken the drug while working at The Times. In his book Dirty Politics, Dirty Money, Lord Ashcroft made a claim that Tom Baldwin, one of Gove’s Times colleagues, was a regular user of cocaine. Baldwin refused to respond to the claim he had taken drugs with Gove.
The fact Gove — who at the time was Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor — was seemingly prepared to go public with this information would have been the first time a candidate for the highest office in the land had admitted taking a Class A drug.
After all, Gove was a member of Cameron’s campaign team for the leadership in 2005 when the future PM was asked at a fringe meeting at the party conference, whether he had taken drugs at university.
‘I had a normal university experience,’ Cameron replied, adding: ‘There were things that I did then that I don’t think that I should talk about now I’m a politician.’
During a BBC TV Question Time show, an audience member pressed Cameron: ‘ Do you believe in today’s Britain that drug-taking at university is all part of an ordinary university experience?’ Cameron replied that politicians deserve a private life before entering politics, and won a round of applause. (Cameron went on to achieve a clear victory over David Davis.)
Hours after Gove announced he was standing in 2016, Johnson withdrew from the contest, saying Gove’s challenge made it impossible for him to win.
At the first hustings event Gove braced himself for a rough ride. Johnson supporters made no secret of their feelings about the person who had brought down the man they believed should be king.
MP Jake Berry tweeted: ‘There is a very deep pit reserved in Hell for such as he. #Gove.’
He survived the first ballot, but withdrew after being soundly beaten by Andrea Leadsom and Theresa May in the next round.
In a two-week period, Gove had helped bring about the resignation of David Cameron (by backing Leave), thwarted Johnson’s ambitions to be Prime Minister and burned the reputation he had as someone to be trusted.
Leadsom subsequently quit the race and May became PM. She summoned Gove to No 10 and told him he would not be in her Cabinet. ‘One of the things that’s very important is loyalty,’ she said, ‘and after the past few weeks I’ve been speaking to people in the party . . . I wouldn’t say that you could never come back, but you need to take a period on the backbenches in order to demonstrate loyalty.’
Gove later admitted his leadership bid was a mistake. And May had been right to fire him. ‘If I’d been in her shoes I would have sacked me, too,’ he said ruefully.
Yet earlier this year Gove, by now Environment Secretary, had decided to start testing the water to see if he should be preparing a bid to take over as leader when May finally relinquished office.
Treasury Minister Mel Stride organised dinners with MPs to find out what they would be looking for from the next party leader — in terms of style and substance.
Stride created a WhatsApp group called Deep Blue, a name chosen to reflect the moderate Right agenda. MPs were invited to dinners with Stride, including some at his townhouse in Chelsea.
As anger over May’s negotiations with Labour intensified throughout April, the dinners became a more overt forum for promoting Gove, and the man himself began attending. Stride’s wife would then serve a home- cooked meal which created a relaxed atmosphere. The conversation would eventually switch to the state of the party, before, inevitably turning to the race to succeed May.
Gove would then set out his pitch, playing up his experience running three Government departments, claiming it was evidence he could bring fresh ideas.
One MP says that at the dinner they attended — three days before May announced she was resigning — Gove put forwarded two specific ideas: extra money for primary schools, and the creation of a new branch of the police force to deal purely with cyber crime.
‘Gove said the normal police are overwhelmed by cyber crime, so he wanted to create a version of the British Transport Police but just for internet-based crime.’
Not everyone at the dinner was a Gove supporter. One asked bluntly: ‘How can we trust you after you stabbed Boris in the back?’
‘I don’t see it as stabbing people in the back, I was trying to do the public a service,’ replied Gove. Another questioner had an equally forthright question: ‘Aren’t you a bit toxic with the public? Don’t people see you as a speccy git?’ Gove laughed, and acknowledged that while he was ‘ not the most photogenic’, he had been the face of the Vote Leave campaign in the EU referendum which won 17.4 million votes. It wasn’t just dinners
where Gove would hold court. At the beginning of May 2018, Stride organised a question-andanswer session with Gove at The Surprise pub in Chelsea.
Some 46 MPs turned up. Gove talked up his years of government experience and record for competency. The contrast with Dominic Raab, who had served in the Cabinet for just four months, and Johnson, who made numerous gaffes as Foreign Secretary, was clear. stooge that there is something in it for them; that by so nakedly attaching themselves to his or her particular bandwagon the fruits of success will somehow trickle down.
Yet, as the author of the essay pointedly revealed: ‘The tragedy of the stooge is that even if he thinks this through, he wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth. The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.’
In his first year at Oxford, Gove willingly became a ‘stooge’. Indeed, to the student who wrote those very words: Boris Johnson.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was born in New York on June 19, 1964 — three years before Gove entered the world in Scotland.
By the time Gove arrived at Oxford, Johnson was one of the big figures on campus. His shock of blond hair, his larger-than-life persona, meant he was someone everybody knew.
Johnson enrolled in 1983 to read Classics at Balliol College and had his sights set on the Union presidency in much the same way as Gove would in future years. He failed in his first attempt to get elected in 1984/85, but had another crack at it a year later. This time, Johnson hatched a plan to reach out to more of the electorate than his Old
Etonian demeanour had previously won over. He decided to mask his natural leanings by adopting the Social Democratic Party, the new political movement launched in 1981.
With the Tory wolf now dressed in SDP clothing, Johnson needed a flock of stooges to spread his many messages across campus.
Gove was a willing member of the ‘Boris cult’, he later remembered, providing a vivid description of his first encounter with the man: ‘It was in the Union bar. He was a striking figure with sheepdog hair and penny loafers, standing in a distinctive pose with his hands in his trouser pockets and his head bent forward.
‘He seemed like a kindly, Oxford character, but he was really like a great basking shark waiting for freshers to swim towards him.’
Gove was happy to be in the shark’s gang, and although he was taken with Johnson’s debating skills, the canny fresher knew that helping a Balliol man secure the presidency was a useful political investment:
‘The real reason why I became a stooge in the Boris machine was that Oxford politics was essentially a matter of the college that you found yourself in. I was in Lady Margaret Hall, which was a small province of Balliol, aping the manners of our betters. Slates need balance, and an LMH debater fitted into the balance.’
Not for the last time, a Johnson-fronted campaign with Gove acting as willing stooge proved popular with the voters, and the future London Mayor was elected to serve as Union president in the final term of the 1985/86 year.
Gove’s enthusiastic support of Johnson, and his own performances in union debates, helped his notoriety grow on campus. He was anointed ‘Pushy Fresher of the Year’ by the Oxford student paper Cherwell, but it wasn’t all bad press, as the same publication also dubbed him ‘the best debater in the Union’.
His speeches at the union were full of Gove’s trademark self-deprecation and wit, and it was there that he began to develop and toy with the notion that, far from being an adopted son of an Aberdeen fisherman, he was actually part of the Scottish aristocracy.
Gove, along with his school friend Duncan Gray, would don a kilt when taking part in debates, and a regular refrain would be for Gove to apologise for his dishevelled appearance, saying that his Filipino manservant Pepe was on holiday so he had had to dress himself.
Despite the joke, fellow student Philip Hensher does not believe Gove was trying to mask his true background. ‘That was common at the time: people got rid of their accent but he never did,’ says Hensher. ‘Michael often talked about his parents.’
As we’ll see on Monday, there was much more to his parents’ story than he ever realised.
‘Boris was a basking shark — waiting to pounce on his victims’