With her poison pen, Gove’s wife directs the Tory game of thrones
Sarah Vine’s email to her husband Michael Gove proves that her words can be mightier than the sword
THEY were just two letters in a page full of words, but they were by far the most revealing. In talking about who bore the responsibility for implementing the will of 17 million Leave voters in her newspaper column yesterday, Michael Gove’s wife Sarah Vine chose the word “we”.
Not “we” as in the Leave campaign, but “we” as in “Michael and I”.
A slip of the pen? Not a bit of it. On Tuesday morning in an email to Mr Gove and his staff, Ms Vine spoke of how important it was that “we focus on the individual obstacles”.
In full Lady Macbeth flow, she went on to issue strict instructions to the Justice Secretary: “You MUST have SPECIFIC assurances from Boris OTHERWISE you cannot guarantee your support… do not concede any ground.”
She also used the email – mistakenly sent to a member of the public, who passed it on to Sky News – to instruct Mr Gove’s staff in who should be by his side for the day’s “crucial meetings” as Boris Johnson, Theresa May and others jockeyed for position in the Tory leadership contest.
It was a rare and extraordinary glimpse of what is happening off-stage as the Conservatives decide who is going to be our next Prime Minister. Some might even say startling.
The level of influence Ms Vine has – or thinks she has – over the workings of the Cabinet has never been stated so explicitly. The signs, though, have long been there for anyone paying close attention to her public pronouncements. For David Cameron and his allies, it will come as no surprise at all.
Ms Vine, 49, met Michael Gove when they were both working as journalists at The Times. Mr Gove was already close to David Cameron and his coterie, and when they married in the South of France in 2001 their wedding guests included the Camerons, George Osborne and Boris Johnson. Ed Vaizey, now the Culture Secretary, was best man. The Goves were so close to the Camerons that Ms Vine is godmother to their youngest daughter, Florence. They went on holiday together and sent their children to the same schools.
But politics can get in the way of friendships. In July 2014, with a general election less than a year away, Mr Cameron ruthlessly decided to demote his old friend Mr Gove from Education Secretary to Chief Whip after opinion polls showed he had become deeply unpopular with the public. Ms Vine, whose household income was cut by £36,000 at a stroke, was furious.
On Twitter she shared an article headlined: “A shabby day’s work which Cameron will live to regret.” It was a chilling warning, and one that history may judge to have been correct.
Two years later, as her husband agonised over whether to stay loyal to his old friend Mr Cameron in the EU referendum or join the Leave campaign, Ms Vine was not inclined to shepherd him towards Remain.
When David Cameron asked her which way 48-year-old Mr Gove was likely to go, she was, by her own admission, “not entirely transparent”, claiming she “didn’t want to start a row”. As a result the Prime Minister was “genuinely, and quite naturally, shocked and hurt” when Mr Gove turned against him. Mr Cameron, of course, had to carry on working with his by-now Justice Secretary, but not so their wives. At a birthday party for the Tory party chairman Lord Feldman in late February, days after Mr Gove had come out in favour of Brexit, Ms Vine was confronted by Samantha Cameron.
The usually inscrutable Mrs Cameron reportedly accused her friend of “betrayal” and was furious about an article she had written in which she disclosed private conversations between their husbands.
There was, of course, no going back for Mr Gove or his ambitious wife, who is nicknamed Sarah Vain by the satirical magazine Private Eye.
As the Leave campaign gathered pace, Ms Vine was by her husband’s side for drinks parties at Boris Johnson’s house, where they would discuss the pros and cons of Brexit.
Referring to the Remain campaign in her Daily Mail column, she wrote: “Not since there was a Borgia Pope at the Vatican have so many thumbs been so comprehensively screwed.”
Then, on referendum night, she played hostess as “a mixture of Remainers and Leavers” sat down for dinner at the Gove household in Ladbroke Grove, west London. While her husband went to bed at 10.30, “worn out by the campaign”, she stayed up with her guests until midnight to see the first results come in. Shortly before 5am, her husband’s mobile phone rang. “Michael, guess what, we’ve won!” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “Gosh,” he said. “I suppose I had better get up.”
Ms Vine joked to him: “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.”
She described the result as “terrifying”, not because of the implications for Britain, but because of what it meant for Mr and Mrs Gove.
“Given Michael’s high-profile role in the Leave campaign,” she wrote in her newspaper column, “that means he – we – are now charged with implementing the instructions of 17 million people. And that is an awesome responsibility.”
She went on: “I felt as though I had fallen through a rabbit hole — lost in a strange land where nothing made sense any more. This was absolutely, categorically not meant to happen. David Cameron was not supposed to go. This was not what this referendum was about; that was not why Michael backed Leave. Helping my husband make the right decisions in such a short space of time, on very little sleep and under such stressful conditions has been hard.”
Helping her husband make the right decisions, or instructing him?
As Mr Gove sought to leverage his position as the Leave campaign’s second-biggest beast, Ms Vine was emailing him and his staff as if it was she who was in control.
“Very important that we focus on the individual obstacles and thoroughly overcome them before moving to the next,” she wrote. “I really think Michael needs to have a Henry [Cook, Mr Gove’s special adviser] or a Beth [Armstrong, also a special adviser] with him for this morning’s crucial meetings. One sim-
‘You must have SPECIFIC assurances from Boris. Do not concede any ground. Be your stubborn best. GOOD LUCK’
ple message: You MUST have SPECIFIC assurances from Boris OTHERWISE you cannot guarantee your support. The details can be worked out later on, but without that you have no leverage.
“Crucially, the membership will not have the necessary reassurance to back Boris, neither will [Daily Mail editor Paul] Dacre/[Rupert] Murdoch, who instinctively dislike Boris but trust your ability enough to support a Boris Gove ticket. Do not concede any ground. Be your stubborn best. “GOOD LUCK.” A spokesman for Mr Gove could only say: “We don’t comment on private email exchanges or conversations. Obviously Boris and Michael have had many discussions about how the campaign will proceed.”
As have Michael and Sarah, it would seem.