Gove pledges to ‘get a grip’ over Brexit
Minister insists he can win an election
MICHAEL GOVE evoked the spirit of Margaret Thatcher after claiming that he is the Tory leadership contender best placed to deliver Brexit – and win the next General Election.
The Environment Secretary is a front-runner to succeed Theresa May after the Prime Minister yesterday formally tendered her resignation as party leader two weeks after confirming her intention to quit in a tearful Downing Street statement.
He also said he had “the conviction, experience and grip to deliver Brexit” after the Tories were well beaten by Labour – and Nigel Farage’s fledgling Brexit Party – in the pivotal Peterborough by-election.
The heavy defeat saw Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt – one of Mr Gove’s chief rivals – warn that the Tories will have “no future” unless Brexit is resolved.
Meanwhile, ex-Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab was strongly rebuked for suggesting that Parliament could be adjourned until October 31 – the day that Britain is now due to leave the European Union – to thwart opposition from Remain-supporting MPs.
Justine Greening, the Rotherham-born Education Secretary, warned: “When you close down a debate and Parliament, you’re closing down our democracy. The ultimate anti-democrat move.
“That’s not taking back control it’s taking away control.”
In a call for unity, Mr Gove maintained that people “aren’t interested in raking over what happened” in the 2016 race when he fell out with his Brexiteer ally Boris Johnson, who is favourite for the current contest.
Mr Gove said last night that voters “want to hear about the future – who has the right ideas, the ability and serious approach needed to deliver Brexit and bring the country back together”.
Mr Gove, who was Education Secretary from 2010-14, referenced Mrs Thatcher’s rise to power and defeat of Edward Heath in 1975.
“She went on to win in 1979, 1983 and 1987. The lesson is: do the right thing, and you’ll win,” he said.
Defending his willingness to extend the Brexit deadline beyond October 31 if a deal for the UK is within his grasp, he added: “I know that if we have an election this autumn, without having delivered Brexit, we face Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street.
“But if we do deliver a good Brexit deal then we will enjoy a boost as a party and a nation which will put us in a much stronger position for the next electoral test.
“Delivering Brexit and delivering domestic policies which restore hope to forgotten communities, liberate the potential of every individual and make free markets work for everyone will secure the future of our country, and secure electoral victory.”
IT HAD begun with a coronation but its final act was a dethronement of Shakespearean magnitude – one which echoed that of the country’s only previous female Prime Minister.
Theresa May’s tenure as Conservative leader, its fifth in two decades, had begun without even a second vote, when in July 2016 her only remaining opponent, Andrea Leadsom, dropped out of the race.
It ended yesterday in some ignominy but with little ceremony. She remains for the moment in Downing Street but the party she threw there has moved on.
The news on her last day as leader was as depressing as it had been on most others, since her disastrous decision to go to the polls in 2017: The Tories relegated to third place at a by-election in the traditionally red and blue marginal seat of Peterborough.
But she had inherited a party already fissured. David Cameron’s promise to distil the debate over Europe into an in-out referendum, and the absence of an exit strategy if one were needed, poisoned the chalice.
Mrs May’s arrival at Number 10 had been marked by a speech as impassioned as Margaret Thatcher’s invoking of St Francis of Assisi, 38 years earlier.
She would tackle the “burning injustices” which, she said, held back the poor, ethnic minorities, women and the working classes in modern British society.
Less than a year later, she had lost her mandate to address any of it. Dependent on the support of Ulster’s Democratic Unionist Party, she had to fight a day-byday battle to force through her agenda and maintain the fragile unity of her Government.
She would go on to lose more than 30 Ministers, see her keynote policy defeated by a record margin of 230 votes and suffer the indignity of having her
Government found in contempt of Parliament.
Yet her reputation among some commentators as a “new Iron Lady” was not without substance, and her ruthless streak showed itself when she sacked both Michael Gove and George Osborne, with whom she had clashed in Cabinet.
She also laid down “red lines” for withdrawal which put Britain on track for a hard Brexit. She dismissed critics who saw themselves as citizens of the world but were, she said really “citizens of nowhere”.
The decision to call an early election in the hope of securing the comfort blanket she needed to take on her party dissenters, was taken on an Easter walking holiday in Snowdonia with her husband, Philip.
But a poorly received manifesto and hastily withdrawn social care policy, coupled with a robotic campaigning style and an outbreak of support for Jeremy Corbyn which neither she nor Labour had foreseen, saw her squander a 20-point lead in the polls and lose 13 MPs.
That year’s conference in Manchester ended in further humiliation as she struggled to deliver her speech, while behind her, letters fell off her logo.
In December, she seemed to have salvaged the Brexit deal, finalising a withdrawal agreement with the EC. But it sowed the seeds of future troubles, by introducing the controversial “backstop” customs arrangements for Northern Ireland which alienated her new Ulster allies.
Her attempt to unify her Cabinet at Chequers last July saw the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Brexit Secretary David Davis walk out. Mr Davis’s successor Dominic Raab followed in November. By the winter, she was in open warfare with the DUP and many of her own backbenchers, and what seemed like an avalanche of noconfidence letters arrived on the desk of the chairman of the 1922 backbenchers’ committee, Sir Graham Brady.
With MPs from all sides rejecting her fourth attempt at reaching agreement before it even reached a vote, her compromise deal was dead in the water. The resignation as Commons leader of Mrs Leadsom, the politician who had paved Mrs May’s path to Number 10 three years earlier, brought the story arc full circle.
Her reputation among some commentators as a ‘new Iron Lady’ was not without substance.