Reticent Gove refuses to be a poster boy for xenophobia

Michael Gove has noticed a worrying trend. Political opportunists, he believes, are cynically playing on voters’ fear of outsiders.

He outlined his concerns yesterday at a conference in London.

“There is an increasing tendency for people to look at political questions through a prism of identity,” lamented the Environment Secretary. “They embrace a politics which divides society into contending groups, and demands that people define themselves by their group membership… You hear it when some politicians suggest our borders should be closed to people because of their faith or origin…”

His audience appeared to find these remarks most interesting. Keith Raffan – a former Conservative MP, and a Remainer – raised his hand. During the spring of 2016, he recalled, a certain political campaign group had launched a controversial poster. The poster warned the public that, if they didn’t vote to leave the EU, the country could be engulfed by “76million” immigrants from Turkey. Was this, wondered Mr Raffan, an example of cynical opportunists “playing with identity politics”?

Mr Gove presumably remembered the poster. After all, the campaign group that created it was Vote Leave – led by one M Gove.

Yet for some reason he seemed reluctant to discuss it. He ignored the subject of the poster altogether, and instead spent quite some time telling the audience that he and Mr Raffan had attended the same school.

Eventually the MC cut short these happy reminiscences, and told him to answer the question. Mr Gove launched into an impassioned lecture about the shamelessness of the SNP.

The lecture was well into its second minute when Mr Raffan interrupted.

“My question was not about the SNP!” he barked. “It was about your stance on people from Turkey coming to the UK!”

“So you’re saying Michael’s campaign was xenophobic?” asked the chair. “Yes!” snapped Mr Raffan.

The room waited. No doubt Mr Gove would be keen to explain why Mr Raffan was wrong.

“I will have to respectfully disagree,” said Mr Gove. And left it at that.

Normally Mr Gove is such a talkative man, yet on the subject of Vote Leave’s Turkey poster he seemed unusually reticent. A journalist tried to coax him from his shell with a similar line of questioning.

Once again, however, Mr Gove did not comment on the poster. Instead, he insisted that his campaign had fundamentally been about “restoring faith in our democratic institutions”. And in any case, he added, Britain was becoming “more welcoming towards immigration, and more open to new people arriving here”.

I wonder why he didn’t want to talk about that poster. After all, it made quite a splash at the time. Perhaps he was just being modest.