The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Did Gove shake his stuff to show he has the common touch – if not the moves?
Amuch put-upon husband took his wife out for a meal in Aberdeen at the weekend. She moaned about everything. The food was awful, she hated the wine and she said her husband was boring.
To cheer her up, he suggested a dance club. “Suppose so,” she said. “Just for 10 minutes. I’m tired.”
When they got in, a guy with glasses was on the dance floor, coolly throwing shapes.
He wasn’t breakdancing or doing backflips – just waving his hands. The wife turned to the husband and said: “That’s my old friend Michael. About 30 years ago, we both worked at The Press and Journal. He got serious but I turned him down and he went off to London.”
Her husband yawned: “Really? Looks like Michael had such a lucky escape, he is still celebrating.”
Michael Gove’s dancing was memorable. We have a new border collie puppy in this house and she is a bundle of yappy, flappy non-stop energy. I swear when she is throwing a tantrum, she is not as frenetic as was the groovy former P&J newshound, who has the unfathomable job of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and is, possibly, the next prime minister.
Puppy Sleek came up from Wales last week and, although just a couple of months old, amazingly has not disgraced herself. Our carpet is dry, unlike Mr G’s clobber after 90 minutes of rapid-fire flagless semaphore.
We love politicians with the common touch. From whichever party, those politicians who don’t just kiss babies at election time but go to events where they will rub shoulders with the great unwashed go down well. In the supermarket, on the sports field, or down the rub-a-dub-dub. That is where we want them.
Scottish Greens may struggle with that. I’m not sure they are cuddly enough or can look ordinary. Their new power-sharing agreement with the SNP means we’ll see them often.
One of their public faces is Patrick Harvie, a man of fairly fixed expression now required to be ministerially excited and sell us concepts like zero-carbon buildings, active travel and tenants’ rights.
Also, the high-flying trapeze artist – yes, really – Lorna Slater, now minister for green skills, the circular economy and biodiversity. The circular economy? The FM has handed them job titles that’ll make voters cringe. Nice move, Nic.
Yet Gove never struck me as being close to the common five eight, as we plebs are often known. Up in Stornoway on a flying visit recently, no reports emerged of him popping into an island hostelry for a wee sensation or a swift half-quart. That makes his nocturnal flapping in Club Bohemia seem contrived. As much a mystery as that first episode on Sunday evening of raincoated detective Vera. In those two hours, that storyline had more twists and turns than the road to Hushinish on Harris.
On the long and winding road to Number 10, Mr G knows Boris’s likeability is plummeting. Someone may have to step up. Rishi Sunak has been favourite to be the next PM. Yet, will a posh boy like rich Rishi appeal to the great washed and combed – the Tory MPs who will ultimately decide?
What they need is someone with appeal to all, now that Dominic Raab blew it by taking his ill-considered foreign break.
Younger voters, older voters and couldn’tcare-less voters may prefer a PM comfortable on an Aberdonian dancefloor. Someone who ventures outside the Westminster bubble on occasion to shake his thang, as one commentator said. No, I don’t know what “thang” means either. When I find out, I might give it a shake, though.
So what was Michael Gove actually doing there anyway? I think he was showing Tory grandees that he can be trusted to mix with the hoi polloi without putting his foot in it. Because he put his left foot in, he put his left foot out, he put his left foot in, and he shook it all about.
What’s the most attention-grabbing way for a politician who wants to be PM to show he wants to be elected? Poll dancing?
By going clubbing, it was as if Mr Gove regressed and went to a school social. Like many a clod-hopping schoolboy, his dancing wasn’t the best, but he tried. We shouldn’t diss him.
Wait a minute, maybe that’s what he was doing. Social diss dancing.
It was as if Mr Gove regressed and went to a school social