What happened next

Michael Gove changes tack (again)

August 2016 Aware that he is not the most popular man in the Conservative Party, Michael Gove conjures a cunning plan to win Tory approval by launching Pokémon GOve – an only slightly augmented-reality mobile game in which users are able to geolocate weak cartoon colleagues and insidiously capture them for their own ends. ‘Once you’ve lured one in,’ Gove reveals excitedly in a speech at Hamleys, ‘you can make them do all sorts, then shaft them.’ His app is an instant hit, but gets forgotten when Labour MPs start a real-life version.

July 2018 Gove continues to cause mayhem from the backbenches. Egged on by the footloose David Cameron, and by his wife, Sarah Vine, via a small earpiece, the former Lord Chancellor spends PMQs hurling scrunched-up paper at Theresa May’s back, and using every allocated question as a chance to correct the previous speaker’s grammar.

May 2019 Deselected as a Tory MP before the 2020 General Election and rejected by all other political parties, Gove resorts to appearing on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here. ‘I did not want to do this; in fact, I did everything not to be a candidate for King of the Jungle, but I had to,’ Gove tells the enraptured Pippa Middleton and Vernon Kay. The public disagree: Gove is frst to go.

‘I did not want to do this; in fact, I did everything not to be a candidate for King of the Jungle, but I had to’