He Knew He Was Right

Owen Bennett, Michael Gove: A Man in a Hurry

Biteback Publishing, 432pp, £20.00, ISBN 9781785904400

reviewed by Lee Shining

Michael Gove was worried. It was the beginning of 2013. He had been Education Secretary for nearly three years. His friend and patron, David Cameron, had given him huge freedom to implement a radical right-wing programme to transform England’s schools. Gove had fought savage battles and made powerful enemies, but the Education Secretary felt he was making progress. The modern Conservative Party was meant to be all about his ambitious agenda of domestic reform. But now the Prime Minister was threatening to blow it all up. In January 2013, Cameron was planning a speech setting out a new position on Europe. If the Conservatives won the next election, they would hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.

Gove had long held Eurosceptic views. These were shaped from a young age, by his misguided belief that EU rules had scuppered his adoptive father’s fishing business. As a nascent Brexiteer, Gove could have seen the referendum as an opportunity. But Cameron’s plan, motivated entirely by tactical considerations around party management, struck Gove as being pointlessly risky. Shortly before Cameron made his speech, Gove emailed his old friend, urging the Prime Minister to back off. ‘You don’t need to do this’, he wrote. ‘You don’t need to offer a referendum.’ The reply was of epochal stupidity. ‘Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.’

Gove is one of the oddest front-rank politicians. He has a fishy, gangling appearance, like a young man trying to impersonate an old one, unable to so much as drink a glass of water without attracting ridicule. Other Conservative politicians, like say the now-exiled Philip Hammond, have been similarly close to the party leaderships and similarly influential during the devastating years of Conservative rule. But Gove, who has never been more than a middle-ranker in the Cabinet hierarchy, is a man with a more obvious claim to a biography. Obviously convinced of his own genius – in biographer Owen Bennett’s words, ‘a man who has always seen his life as compelling autobiography in the making’ – he nevertheless displays little of the contempt many of his contemporaries feel towards ordinary people. Indeed he is noted for his almost comical politeness, particularly renowned for holding open doors for people. He considers himself an intellectual and enjoys showing off his learning, like a boastful sixth-former. But when Gove is angered he works himself into a frenzy, spitting his words in outrage, accosting the integrity of his interviewer, unable to restrain himself. This has been a life-long trait: his English teacher at school commented that teenage Gove could often lose his cool in debates. This nerdy Gove, polite and bookish yet occasionally apoplectic, has reflected his personality in his public life: he is interested in ideas and relatively open to new ones, but as an ideologue he does not like it when those ideas are questioned.

The contrast between Gove’s thoughtfulness and the galactic arrogance of contemporaries like Cameron is a major aspect of Bennett’s intelligent biography, and can be traced to critical differences in their background. David Cameron, like Gove’s other great contemporary Boris Johnson, was a Conservative by breeding, not conviction. Both Cameron and Johnson are borderline aristocrats born into vast wealth and power; Cameron’s friends half-jokingly called him ‘Prime Minister’ when he was still a teenager. Both attended Eton, followed by Oxford University, the drilling square of the British elite. Cameron was a Downing Street advisor by 25 and party leader by 39; Johnson became editor of the Spectator and tumbled inevitably into Parliament at the same time as Cameron. They were simply born of the governing class, have always known it and, despite some early humiliating attempts by Cameron, have never convincingly bothered to pretend otherwise.

Like Cameron and Johnson, Gove was privately educated, at the prestigious Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen. Like them, he went on to Oxford, where he helped Johnson become president of the union and later bagged the job for himself. But for Gove such things were privileges, not entitlements. He had been adopted as a baby by a middle-class family in Aberdeen, where his adoptive father ran the fishing business which would later motivate Michael’s Eurosceptic philosophy. The young Michael distinguished himself with his brains and eloquence. It was these that encouraged his family to save up for private school, and which eventually granted him access to the heart of the Tory establishment.

Gove always had an interest in ideas, and despite his teenage membership of the Labour Party he moved gradually to the right. Though he was born into less privilege than his contemporaries, as a conservative he has spent his career protecting their privileges. Developing his ideological framework as a journalist, by the time he entered Parliament in 2005 Gove was a well-established Thatcherite ideologue with an exceptionally obsessive, indeed borderline Islamophobic, support for the War on Terror – opinions he has never repudiated, even as he attacks others for their racism. Gove had a strong relationship with Cameron in spite, rather than because of, these beliefs, and following Cameron’s half-victory in the 2010 election the new Prime Minister appointed Gove to what would become his most notorious job, as Secretary of State for Education.

Shadowing the job in opposition, Gove had helped develop the idea that all schools should be able to become academies: independent of local government, with far greater control of their own curricula, governance and staff. Academies have been seen, before and since, as a way of ensuring privatisation by the back door, as they allow private institutions a greater role in running children’s education, and remove important parts of democratic oversight. Academies had been rolled out by the Blair government as a way of targeting the schools most in need of improvement. A characteristically adamant Gove was convinced, against the evidence, that total academisation was the key to helping the worst-off children, and taming what he saw as an intrinsically left-wing educational establishment.

Within days of taking office, he set about battering through his agenda. The Academies Act, which was intended to let every state school become an academy, was law in just over two months after the 2010 election. Gove also promoted a more traditional education, creating a narrower curriculum and discouraging study outside the core subjects: as he described it, ‘children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England, the great works of literature, proper mental arithmetic, algebra by the age of 11, modern foreign languages’. They were to sit down, shut up, and vote Conservative. Bennett does not take enough time to analyse the effect of Gove’s actions, but the facts are clear enough: academisation has broken up the education system without making it fairer, the curriculum continues to squeeze out less conventional subjects, and the school system has been crippled by the austerity Gove initiated.

But at least at the Department for Education, facts and evidence were rarely decisive in Gove’s thinking. The walls of his office were hung with pictures of Lenin and Malcolm X. Cameron described him as ‘a bit of a Maoist’, one who ‘believes that the world makes progress through a process of creative destruction’. Gove remains exceptional for the spleen and bile which he provoked in his arch-enemies, ‘the blob’ of the educational establishment. Enraging them was a quite deliberate tactic by Gove, who was convinced –with some justification, in Bennett’s always balanced opinion – that the Department for Education was full of incompetents, and the educational establishment was determined to stop any reforms by a Tory Education Secretary. There is a dramatic contrast with Cameron, whose laid-back and ideologically flexible style helped Gove get away with methods other Prime Ministers would have squashed.

As Bennett points out, Gove’s strategy at Education – taking a strong ideological line to attack the Establishment from the right – was a premonition of what was to come in the Brexit referendum and the Boris Johnson premiership, with their conspiracy theories and attacks on expertise. In Bennett’s view how Gove would vote in the final referendum was never seriously in question: while he thought carefully about his decision and sometimes tacked Remainwards, Gove was an ideological Leaver. That conviction was founded on the obligatory ravings about sovereignty, free trade and a dictatorial Brussels, but at least Gove actually believed this stuff – unlike, say, Boris Johnson’s raffle on leave, which was a matter of careers advice. However, while Johnson’s capacity for lies and bluster are the dominant feature of his political career, Gove’s actions as a leader of the Vote Leave campaign were more surprising: it was undoubtedly the moral nadir of Gove’s life.

Gove faithfully repeated the most egregious and explicitly racist lie of the campaign, that Turkey was about to join the EU. Anxious as when Education Secretary to go at the Establishment from the right, he castigated the warnings of international organisations like the IMF and OECD, infamously claiming in one debate that the voters had ‘had enough of experts’. He may also have been responsible for leaking the false claim that the Queen supported Brexit. Gove’s actions solidified his role as a major player in the subsequent Fideszisation of the Conservatives: a party goading its electorate with right-wing nationalist conspiracy.

But Gove the swivel-eyed ideologue and Gove the thoughtful, diligent schoolboy are in perpetual conflict. When Cameron appointed him Justice Secretary after the 2015 election, Gove embarked on the sort of approach a Times columnist Gove would have ridiculed: an extended listening exercise and shifted policy notably to the left, abandoning some of the nastier policies of his despised hard-right predecessor Chris Grayling. As Environment Secretary under Theresa May, Gove similarly became known for his remarkably moderate attitudes, in an area of policy traditionally viewed with by Conservatives with, at best, benign contempt. Bennett depicts these in the same light as that other piece of Goveite moderation: the apparently principled decision to trash Boris Johnson’s leadership bid in 2016 after Gove concluded that Johnson was unfit to lead the country.

Robert Caro, the great American political biographer admired by Gove, has written that power does not so much corrupt a politician as reveal their true beliefs and motivations. For Gove’s own biographer, his time in power has revealed a man convinced of his own righteousness, often content to damage his own career if it was necessary to be true to his beliefs. As a result, many readers will find Gove emerges rather better than they might expect, as someone motivated by something resembling principle rather than a simple chancer like Cameron or charlatan like Johnson. However, while Gove’s righteousness can lead to thoughtfulness and rigour, it can also be brutally destructive. It remains an open question whether a more empowered Gove might seek a return to a less violent conservatism, or would push his party further into pyromania, extremism and lies.

Lee Shining works in education policy. Lee Shining is a pseudonym.