THE MOTHER WHO GREW GOVE IN HER HEART ( ...but body) not in her
Revealed in the Mail series that’s convulsed Westminster: the full moving story of the struggling single mum who gave her baby up for adoption — and the fish dealer’s wife whose love transformed his fate
IT’S the book that everyone is talking about — and you can read it exclusively in the Mail. On Saturday, in our first extract from a bombshell new biography, we revealed how Michael Gove had admitted taking cocaine. Today, as the fall-out sets the race to be Tory leader ablaze, we tell a very different side to his story: the heartwarming tale of how he rose from the very humblest of origins.
LIFE for Michael Gove did not necessarily begin on the day he was born. Indeed, on the day he was born, he was not Michael Gove at all — he was Graeme Logan.
On August 26, 1967, Graeme was born to an unmarried woman from Edinburgh.
Until 2019, Gove believed his birth mother was a student who gave birth to him in Scotland’s capital city, but it can now be revealed that story is not accurate.
Baby Graeme was not born in Edinburgh, but in a maternity hospital in Fonthill Road, Aberdeen. His mother was indeed from Edinburgh (and later moved back there), but was an unmarried 23-year-old cookery demonstrator at the time of his birth, not a student.
Baby Graeme’s maternal grandfather was the son of a labourer. His maternal grandmother worked in a food factory.
Baby Graeme would never know this part of his family, as he was put into care soon after he was born.
Living 127 miles north of Edinburgh were the couple who would become Graeme’s adoptive parents: Ernest and Christine Gove. The Goves had been married since September 19, 1959, when Ernest was a 22-year-old working in the family fish business and Christine, barely out of her teenage years, was a despatch clerk.
The pair were of solid Aberdonian stock, with their families’ roots in the Granite City going back generations.
Ernest knew all about the importance of his name, as his father also shared the moniker. Ernest Snr was born on November 13, 1915 in Aberdeen. Whereas his father, Andrew, was a fish-market porter, Ernest Snr moved from worker to boss by establishing his own fish processing company. Based in Aberdeen harbour, E.E. Gove and Sons would take the fish caught in the North Sea — primarily cod and whiting — gut the catch and smoke them before selling them on.
Michael’s adoptive mother was born Christine Bruce on July 24, 1939. Christine’s paternal grandfather, Robert Bruce, was also a labourer, while her maternal grandfather, John Melvin, was a stonemason.
Both of Gove’s adoptive parents left school at 15. Fishing, labouring, masonry. It was these jobs that had nurtured the oak trunks of the Gove and Bruce family trees. With the two families now linked, it seemed that no more branches would develop, as Christine and Ernest Jr were unable to have children.
But the pair chose to adopt. And so it was that on December 22, 1967, Christine received a phone call that was to change not just the life of a little boy in care in Edinburgh but the entire direction of the Gove family tree.
The Goves travelled down to collect their new son, and the baby that had arrived into the world as Graeme Andrew Logan was now named Michael Andrew Gove.
There was a lot of him to love. Young Michael was a podgy infant. Early photos show him looking like a latter-day Les Dawson.
‘He was just so cuddly, so chubby,’ Christine remembers.
Four years later, the Gove family grew by one when the couple adopted Michael’s sister, Angela. But within weeks the Goves faced a fresh hurdle: Angela was profoundly deaf, with total hearing loss in one ear and only three per cent hearing in the other. It was a challenge that Ernest and Christine approached with ‘calmness, kindness and love’, Michael wrote later.
In preparation for his new sister’s arrival, Christine had explained to Michael the truth about his own origins. With words he would never forget, she said: ‘You’re different from other children because we chose you. You didn’t grow under my heart, you grew in it.’
Writing about that memorable conversation in 1998, Gove said: ‘ When, and how, an adoptive mother chooses to tell their child about the past is one of the most delicate tasks she faces. My mother did so in such a way as to make me feel not rejected, but exceptional. I had been specially chosen by her and my father — a genuine love child.’
He added, ‘ What son could not feel better equipped for life knowing how much he had been wanted by his parents?’
Gove has always been open about his background. He once claimed he had ‘lived a lie all my life’ by being known as Michael and not Graeme. But the underlying sentiment as Gove made the transition from journalist to politician always conveyed the sense of gratitude he feels towards his parents.
There are two questions that Gove returns to again and again: who are his birth parents and does he want to find them?
These are matters Gove has clearly grappled with. ‘I have never . . . attempted to satisfy my curiosity on the mystery at the heart of my own story,’ he wrote in 1998.
His justification was simple: ‘I have never tried for fear of
‘My mother made me feel not rejected, but exceptional’
offending the woman I have always called Mum, the woman in whose heart I grew.’
Not that his adopted mother Christine had ever asked him not to, as he explained in 2010.
‘My mother has always said if I want to [trace her] I should. She is equally clear there is no need for me to tell her if I do. I know, though, that she would take it as an indication that I did not feel my life or upbringing was fulfilled. It was. My mum and dad are fantastic.’ Gove put it even more starkly in another interview in 2010: ‘It’s almost like saying to my wife that I needed to go out to dinner from time to time with another, single woman, just to be able to talk through my problems with her.’
Even so, Gove revealed in 1998 that Christine had kept his birth mother ‘in touch with my progress through life’. So with his adoptive mother vowing that she and his father wouldn’t stop him looking for his birth mother, and his birth mother aware of how his life was progressing, perhaps there is another reason for Gove’s refusal to seek out the woman who had given him up when he was a baby.
There was no way of knowing what her reaction would be to hearing from the child she had put up for adoption. It was possible she did not want to be contacted — and could have rejected such an approach. In 1998, when adoption law reforms to enable birth mothers to trace the children they had given up were put forward, Gove wrote an article suggesting he would not wish his own birth mother to contact him.
He wrote: ‘I would not want my [adoptive] mother to feel that another woman came between us, but I would feel powerless to resist any attempt by my birth mother to establish contact. Faced with this judgment of Solomon in reverse, I would only wish I had not been
thrust into this position.’
EVEN as a child, it was obvious Michael was different. More concerned with books than boats, he showed no inclination to follow his father into the family business. Put off by the smell of fresh fish, he told his father: ‘Dad, I can’t do this.’ With their boy making it clear that he would not be able to earn a living with his hands, it was obvious to Ernest and Christine that investing in his brain was the way to go and in 1979, Gove, then 13, passed the entrance exam to attend the independent Robert Gordon’s College. Sending Michael there would not be cheap: fees were £553 a year — around £3,000 today. There were no foreign holidays for the next seven years, while the family car remained a clapped-out Datsun. The school was a perfect fit — and Michael later won a scholarship to ensure that he could stay through sixth form. Intelligent and outgoing, he seemed to arrive fully formed at a time when most boys are searching for an identity. ‘When I see Michael on Tv now, I can still see the 11-year-old boy,’ said his headmaster, George Allan, adding: ‘He didn’t change his persona throughout his school career. ‘Consistency — that’s the word, consistency. We couldn’t claim to be the authors of his remarkable civility. He created his own image.’ The head of English, Mike Duncan, remembers Michael’s precocious nature: ‘He was one of the most inquiring pupils I ever remember teaching. At the start of every lesson a hand would go up and it would be Michael.
‘The thought would go through my mind: “What is he going to ask now and will I know the answer?” ’
But one former classmate said in 2013 that Gove was unafraid to stand up for injustice where he saw it: ‘He wasn’t cool or fashionable, but he was very popular because he’d always have a funny rejoinder, and could outwit the teachers.
‘One of the things I valued him for was that he prevented me from being bullied. I had glasses and red hair, and I vividly remember being bullied in the changing room, and Michael tried to stop it.’
Some teachers were intimidated by him. He was different and they didn’t know how to handle him. One way was discovered by few teachers: a sharp smack to the hand with a leather belt called a tawse.
Gove was given this punishment twice. The reason, as he admitted in 2013, was simple: ‘For answering back. For being cheeky.’
His French teacher, Daniel Montgomery, said in 2012: ‘Even in those days, Michael stood out. One colleague said: “That boy is a future leader of the Conservative Party.” ’
In a few weeks’ time, that prediction might — just might — become reality. And the boy given up for adoption by a struggling single mother would have made it to the highest office in the land.
‘Teachers didn’t know how to handle him’