Proud men like Gove’s father and my dad never seek a sliver of pity

Can it ever be right to drag the ageing parents of politicians into important national debates? Yes, it is justified, particularly if their ambitious children are making public claims about them and their shared history.

however, there are limits. and there are rules. The Left were utterly outraged when this paper suggested that Ralph Miliband’s Marxist sympathies had a corrosive effect on son ed’s political philosophy.

Yet they think it is absolutely fine for The Guardian to ring up Michael Gove’s 79-year-old father out of the blue, an elderly gentleman who is hard of hearing and suffers from late-onset diabetes.

This was in response to the Leave campaigner’s claim that Gove Sr’s aberdeenbased fishing business had gone to the wall in the eighties as a direct result of the eU’s Common Fisheries Policy — and that hardships had resulted.

In answer to questions, ernest Gove is reported to have said: ‘It wasn’t any hardship or things like that . . . I couldn’t see any future in it, so I wasn’t going to go into all the trouble of having hardship.

‘I just decided to sell up and get a job with someone else, that was all.’

Cheap political points are being made, with Michael Gove being called ‘fishy’ and worse. But father did not deny what son said, he merely played it down. and I completely understand that.

For my father, like Michael Gove’s, is a son of the north-east of Scotland. as a race, they are proud but taciturn men, not much given to expressing emotion or articulating their innermost feelings.

They would rather spend a calendar month gutting haddock with their bare hands than appear to seek a sliver of pity from a stranger.

To be tight-lipped and sometimes rather dour would be their default response to any inquiry, hostile or otherwise. They are the kind of men who would come back from a war with a missing limb and say: ‘Just a scratch, darling.’ The kind of men who would never expect sympathy for past privations because their entire way of life in that hard scrabble world was to buckle down, hope for the best and keep right on to the end of the road.

Gove’s adoptive father worked in the thankless fishing industry; my father worked backbreaking shifts on farms and in forests before joining the police force. and like many from that generation of hardy Scots, they are men defined by understatement and modesty.

TheY would never suggest that their experiences had somehow been tougher than yours — even though they most certainly were — because in that wind-blasted corner of north- east Scotland there was always, always someone who was worse off.

Why would ernest Gove close a previously successful fish processing factory unless he absolutely had to?

Only those who are painfully unfamiliar with the business world — like the vast majority of Labour MPs and everyone at The Guardian — could think for a moment that shutting down a family business and putting two dozen people out of work could cause anything but hardships all round.

all you have to do is look at the evidence. It is no secret that the fishing communities around aberdeen and elsewhere in the UK were absolutely devastated by the eU Common Fisheries Policy.

From the very beginning, it was skewed to favour the then existing members of the european economic Community to the disadvantage of the British fishing fleet.

It was designed to give the French, the Dutch and others increased access to fish-rich waters — particularly those around the UK, norway, Ireland and Denmark. From that moment on, it is no exaggeration to say the entire UK-based fishing industry plunged into a decline from which it has never recovered.

To this day, our fishing ports are a sorry shadow of the bustling places of commerce and success they once were.

There are few boats, perhaps a desultory market paying desultory prices for the catch, a dwindling band of men eking out a living against european odds that are unfairly stacked against them.

Last year, I was in Skagen, the lovely town at the tip of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. Geographically speaking, it is exactly opposite aberdeen across the north Sea — but there the similarity ends.

The first time I walked into the town’s fishing harbour — the largest in Denmark — I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was crammed with hundreds of gleaming trawlers, a huge fleet of expensive boats that put to sea and came back laden every day.

On the wharves were the country’s main herring processing facility and the world’s largest fish oil factory.

apparently unhindered by legislation that has crippled the UK fishermen, here was a booming fish town of a type now extinct at home, where patched up old tubs manned by long-suffering fishermen set sail on the Sea of Callous Indifference every day.

In aberdeen and newlyn, in Brixham and Whitby, generations of fisher folk have known nothing but hardship for four decades. never mind the price of fish. There is a much bigger point to be made, rather than who did and did not suffer what back then.

Poor ernest Gove, a good man weaponised against his son for the crime of being polite but unforthcoming with a nosy stranger.

after all, it is so much more fun to harpoon the minnows instead of going after the great big whale of an issue that the British fishing industry has become. What has being in europe ever done for our fishermen? absolutely nothing.