Gove’s poisoned chalice could hold the Tories’ elixir for next election

His new job looks like a sadistic demotion, but it also gives him power to make ‘levelling up’ a reality

Anewly elected MP wrote in 2005 that “the countryside is not renewable” and that builders eyeing up greenfield sites for development had to understand the environment was “a finite resource”.

Those words are likely to be quoted back to their author, Michael Gove, on a constant loop in the months and years ahead after he was handed the poisoned chalice of planning reform by Boris Johnson this week.

Whether Mr Gove proves himself to be the “shy green” he professed to be in 2014, or the man promising “diggers in the ground and homes for all” in 2016 will help define not only his own legacy but also the Conservatives’ fortunes at the next general election.

Grassroots Tories will hope he turns out to be the former, the man who has repeatedly spoken out against new developments in his Surrey Heath constituency where they risked altering the “character” of their surroundings.

Mr Johnson, of course, will be reminding the new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government that when Mr Gove ran for party leader in 2016 (brutally ending Mr Johnson’s own leadership bid) he promised to build “hundreds of thousands of new homes a year... come what may” and would “not take no for an answer”.

The Prime Minister has given the job to Mr Gove because of his track record in forcing through reform in his previous roles, and possibly because it will force him to make unpopular decisions that will kill off any lingering hopes he might have of yet another leadership bid.

For Mr Gove’s part, he will be trying to convince himself he can thread the narrowest of needles by building the government target of 300,000 homes a year without the need to carve up chunks of the countryside.

As long ago as 2001, years before he entered Parliament, Mr Gove was supporting the idea of winning back young voters by building affordable housing for key workers. The idea was put forward in a book called A Blue Tomorrow, written by Mr Gove and other Tory rising stars.

In 2006, within a year of becoming an MP, Mr Gove was made shadow housing spokesman by David Cameron, having set out his ideas about planning in an essay for the Social Market Foundation think tank.

In it, as well as pointing out that the countryside is “not renewable”, he added: “Unless business shows that it is thinking seriously about sustainability it risks undermining the foundations of future prosperity and human flourishing.”

It was a theme he returned to in 2013, when he echoed the sentiments of the Prince of Wales by saying development must “lift up the soul” rather than be a blot on the landscape.

He said: “I believe that we cannot think of our built environment without thinking of beauty. Many of the most beautiful vistas in the United Kingdom are beautiful because of building.” Nor was this just talk. In October last year he spoke at a planning appeal hearing in his Surrey Heath constituency against a development of 44 homes (of which 40 per cent were classed as “affordable”) on a site earmarked for housing by the Tory-led council.

He argued that the scheme in Bagshot would “alter the character of the village for the worse” and even helped the local protest group with its fundraising. The previous year he said he was “deeply concerned” about plans to build a 1,500-home garden village on the site of Fairoaks Airport, and in 2017 he wrote to the Government’s Planning Inspectorate to raise objections to a plan for 95 homes in the village of Ash Green.

Among the factors he highlighted were increased “traffic dangers, vehicle noise and pollution”, which apply to almost any new development.

And therein lies the problem for Mr Gove. Residents routinely object to new developments, particularly in small towns and villages, for the very reasons cited by Mr Gove in his objections to house building in his own constituency. MPS know that they, too, must object to some developments if they are to keep voters happy, particularly in marginal seats.

The Tories’ shock defeat in the Chesham and Amersham by-election in June, in which the Lib Dems zoomed in on planning reforms concerns, showed how toxic the issue can be.

But the Government has little to no chance of hitting its target of 300,000 new homes per year unless it builds some in villages and small towns which are resistant to expansion.

Mr Johnson’s references to “newt-counting delays in our system” when he launched his overhaul of planning last year was seen by some as code for riding roughshod over protections for greenfield sites.

If the answer to nimbyism – and the housing crisis – was simply to build attractive homes on brownfield sites (as Mr Gove has advocated in the past), previous housing secretaries would have cracked the case by now.

Mr Gove will, inevitably, have to take some unpopular decisions, and that is why Tory MPS concerned about planning reform have already demanded a meeting with him.

The minister also faces questions about a potential conflict of interest after the latest Register of MPS’ Interests showed he accepted £100,000 in donations last month from Zachariasz Gertler, a property developer with a fortune estimated at £150 million in 2009.

Bob Seely, one of 100 Tory backbenchers due to meet Mr Gove, said: “More low- density, cardependent housing estates on greenfield sites in the countryside or suburbs will be lose-lose. Communities will be in revolt, MPS will be under huge pressure and we will singlehandedly hand the Lib Dems a lifeline.

“Do we really want that two years out from an election with taxes going up and inflation rearing its ugly head?”

‘More low-density, car-dependent estates on greenfield sites will be lose-lose’

He may never have held a great office of state, but Michael Gove has been one of the most influential Tory figures in recent years. His reforms transformed schools, narrowing the gap between state and private. That gap was then blown open again by the lockdowns he advocated as Cabinet Office minister – damage that’s repairable, he’d argue, in a way that Covid deaths are not. Without him, the Brexit referendum might well have gone the other way. A great many people have Gove to thank (or blame) for the political world as it looks now.

Boris Johnson’s decision to make him Housing Secretary certainly looks like a sadistic demotion. Robert Jenrick was tortured in the job, stuck between a Prime Minister who wants to build 300,000 houses a year and Tory backbenchers who are firmly opposed. The much-hyped Planning Bill has been halted and the agenda is in chaos: this is the mess which Gove now walks into. “It might be his last job in government,” says one colleague. “He’s a fixer, but this could be unfixable.”

All this is consistent with how the Prime Minister has deployed Gove: sending him into high-stakes, highdanger jobs. First, it was planning for no-deal Brexit. Then, pandemic planning. In this week’s Cabinet, Gove was told to “save Christmas” – that is to say, somehow fix the lorry driver shortage. It’s another Catch-22. Gove will be blamed for any failure, but No10 will take the credit for success.

But the other, seemingly nonsensical, part of Gove’s job has the greater potential. He has been put in charge of “levelling up”, supposedly the signature mission of the Johnson Government. The phrase has been thrown around for years now without anyone having the faintest idea what it means. Gove has the power to give it definition and political force. It gives him a roving remit, and a fair bit of power.

Gove has never quite been forgiven for his moment of madness, five years ago, when he quit as Johnson’s campaign manager and decided to run for leader himself. His rationale was simple: he had seen, first hand, what a Boris rule would look like, and wanted to save Britain from that horror. “I’ve seen what it takes to be Prime Minister,” Gove told me at the time. “You need to take decisions quickly, with clarity and a sense of purpose. You need to generate and sustain an air of command and certainty. He [Boris] didn’t do that.”

When asked about this, now, Gove simply says: “I was wrong.” But some of his original criticisms hold. It’s hard to find any command or certainty over the government agenda. The various catchphrases – “global Britain,” “build back better” and now “build back greener” – have come to define the verbal mush into which Toryism is sinking.

But which Gove will we get? Will it be the reformer, who so brilliantly allowed thousands of schools to break free from governmental control? Or the more authoritarian figure who emerged last year after finding himself drawn to tough lockdown restrictions and big-spending solutions?

The legacy of Gove’s 2010 education reforms can be seen everywhere. Four in five secondaries are now free of local-authority control and England has shot up the global education league tables over a decade when spending fell. He took on the teaching unions, and won. But the fight left him rather bloodied, and David Cameron moved him before the election, on the grounds that he was hated by too many people.

Some of Gove’s friends say he was changed, not just by the leadership drama debacle, but by Covid planning: it fell to him, for example, to work out where the dead would be buried if morgues overflowed. He advocated the “go hard, go early” lockdowns, vaccine passports and much else in between. At one point, he was saying that trains should not stop at towns that had a high Covid rate. Rather than look at the pros and cons of lockdown, his Cabinet Office often came across as unquestioning cheerleaders for the policy.

His inspiration, nowadays, is drawn from countries with strong and fast-acting governments – especially in Asia and Israel. “He admires efficient systems more than liberal ones,” says one colleague. “Except once, he’d have called them ‘authoritarian’ rather than ‘efficient’”. In the arguments about trade deals, he’s tended to side with the protectionists and oppose free traders – to the bafflement of those Tories who thought that the main point of Brexit was to take such opportunities.

To his critics (and he has quite a few) his changing political identity is part of his character. “The word ‘chameleon’ is overused, but Michael can certainly take different positions when it suits him,” says one MP. Another describes him using an 1845 ditty about Robert Peel: “How wonderful is Peel/ He changeth with the time/ Turning and twisting like an eel/ Ascending through the slime.” There is still plenty of bitterness from Tories who blame him for torpedoing the 2016 Boris campaign and clearing the path for Theresa May.

Gove has, before, answered critics with reforms and has the chance to do so again. The trick in housing is to confront the cabal of big housebuilders, who have grown suspiciously close to the Tories and tend to profit from their reforms. This is partly why the backbenchers are angry. They worry about their constituents being ushered into substandard housing which may later need upgrading at huge expense ( just look at the cladding scandal). If Gove manages to open up the market, he could find a way of building more houses with greater public consent.

At his best, Gove could define “levelling up” in a more radical way. Brexit, for example, means that VAT can be changed in any way the Government wants. Why not allow certain towns to cut VAT to attract shoppers? Or offer National Insurance holidays to firms that want to invest in a certain area? Such ideas have been floating around government for years, but never been enacted. They can be now.

It’s possible that Gove never emerges from housing, finds it unfixable and makes no more progress than Jenrick. But if he makes a success of it, and turns “levelling up” from a slogan into an agenda, he’ll have achieved something the Prime Minister has so far failed to do. It’s strange to think it, but the future of Toryism may well be in his hands.

Which Gove will we get? The reformer or the man who found himself drawn to tough lockdown restrictions?