Gove cannot seriously think he can make May change course now
I’m constantly conflicted when it comes to Michael Gove. I admire his intellect, his capacity for reinvention, his success in inveigling his way into the heart of the Cameron project and, of course, his resilience when that claque shunned him in disgust for the apostasy of rejecting their faith in the EU, by evangelising for Leave at the 2016 referendum.
His decision to put the national interest before his friendship with David Cameron was a commendable if brutal choice, but his betrayal of Boris Johnson was by contrast politics at its most ugly. One of the testiest telephone conversations I have ever had, in the wake of his takedown of Boris, was telling Gove that I no longer trusted him and certainly wouldn’t vote to make him leader.
Now he has made another error by deciding to stay in Theresa May’s Cabinet, tying himself to a rapidly depreciating asset. If the Prime Minister’s awful Withdrawal Agreement deal is so bad that Gove felt unable to defend it as Brexit secretary, a position he was offered but turned down, how can he do so as Environment Secretary? Worse still, Gove is giving credence to the bizarre notion propagated by Brexiteer insiders that they can alter the PM’S behaviour by reasonable argument.
Really? Nothing. Has. Changed. As the saying goes. Mrs May has never won a mandate with the party membership. Or the parliamentary party. She almost gifted Downing Street to an unreconstructed Marxist. Her resilience is, in fact, stubbornness and obduracy. Her firmness of purpose, as DUP Parliamentary leader Nigel Dodds so witheringly concluded, is a failure to listen. Hence, her undermining and alienating two Brexit secretaries to the point of forcing their resignations, in only four months.
Half the Cabinet oppose her flagship policy, perhaps a third of Tory backbenchers won’t vote for it, the public know it’s a dishonest faux Brexit in name only. Even Remainers think it’s terrible. It has no chance of getting through the Commons. Mrs May’s colleagues in Parliament have actually been inordinately patient in imploring her to revert to a more authentic Brexit settlement, but she will not give ground.
More fundamentally, her deal is a complete betrayal of what every Conservative MP bar Ken Clarke stood and was elected on at the last general election. Manifestos matter. Such flagrant duplicity and breach of faith with millions of voters – especially hitherto Labour supporters who lent Tory candidates their votes to deliver Brexit – will not go unpunished. Time has run out on her and almost on the Brexit negotiations.
Brexiteers, like Gove, who imagine that they can work from the inside to convert the PM back to the path of righteousness, are deluded. Instead of this surrender, our country and the Tory party needs a Churchill figure to avoid the ignominy and humiliation of Mrs May’s deal. Let’s hope my former colleagues have the foresight and courage to find one – and soon.