No senior politician has ever possessed a talent for upsetting prime ministers to match that of Michael Gove’s.
David Cameron unfriended him after the EU referendum, having believed Gove had assured him he would campaign for Remain only to see him mastermind the triumphant Leave operation. While Boris Johnson was forgiven for his front-of-house Brexit role, Gove was forever damned.
Theresa May then left him out of her first cabinet as a calculated rebuke for his spectacular betrayal of Johnson during the 2016 leadership election by which time a ‘Game of Thrones’ mentality appeared to have completely overtaken him.
Johnson himself last month fired Gove from the cabinet before he could resign, with Downing Street sources describing him as ‘a snake’.
Now Gove has incurred the wrath of Liz Truss before she has even taken up residence in No. 10. After having in the past lined up against Truss in cabinet tussles over such matters as the impact of new trade deals on UK farming and animal welfare issues, he will have known that he was already in a tight spot with the PM-to-be.
Gove’s saving grace is that he appears to be one of few Conservative MPs with the ability to make the civil service get things done
His interview in the Times in which he lambasts her tax-cutting plans as favouring FTSE 100 executives over needy families and gives his belated backing to Rishi Sunak shows he had come to believe there was no way back for him in her eyes.
Perhaps the briefing given to The Spectator’s Katy Balls by one key Truss supporter this week that ‘Gove is done’ provoked his outburst.
He was already thought by some Truss followers to have backed Kemi Badenoch in the race not because he saw her as a possible winner, but simply as a ploy to hamper the Foreign Secretary’s campaign, with the objective of eliminating her in an early round. Some Trussites believe that had this plot come to fruition he would then have switched to openly supporting Rishi Sunak.
Now he has decided to support Sunak anyway and be rude about Truss, describing her campaign as a ‘holiday from reality’ and saying he doesn’t believe he will serve in ministerial office again, there is a strong temptation to think he really is finished.
But will it turn out like that? Will he really be consigned long-term to an under-employed future enlivened mainly by leisure pursuits such as manic dancing in Scottish nightclubs, hanging out at the Garrick Club and being spotted clapping oddly in the stands at Queen’s Park Rangers home matches?
One doubts it for several reasons. For starters, while May began her premiership by exiling Gove, it was not terribly long before she recalled him, summoning him back to the top table a year in –immediately after her disastrous 2017 general election campaign left her fighting for survival.
And Johnson, despite Gove having torpedoed his 2016 leadership tilt and having campaigned fairly viciously against him during the 2019 contest, decided to retain him in cabinet, gradually coming to rely on him more and more to inject life into a Levelling-Up agenda that had proved electorally potent but hard to promote across Whitehall.
Michael Gove’s saving grace is that he appears to be one of few Conservative MPs with the ability to make the civil service get things done. His Rolls Royce brain is not only capable of analysing problems and identifying solutions, but perhaps it is his very talent for machination that has enabled him to come up with strategies for getting around Whitehall roadblocks.
When the Home Office was struggling to put together a plan for housing Ukrainian refugees this spring, it was Gove who came up with the novel solution of paying British families to offer their spare bedrooms. For good or ill that simple idea has resulted in almost 100,000 arrivals from Ukraine being accommodated here.
Genuine top-level political talent is always in short supply in Westminster. For all the fury he has ignited in successive Tory leaders, Gove has never faced quite the level of vitriol that Peter Mandelson did from supporters of Gordon Brown within the Labour party after he promoted the rival leadership ambitions of Tony Blair.
Yet who was it that Brown, engulfed by crises in 2009, ended up begging to join his Cabinet in the all-encompassing role of ‘First Secretary of State’, but the masterful Machiavelli, Mandelson?
Anyone who believes that Liz Truss will sail serenely towards victory at the next election without being buffeted by terrible, gut-wrenching storms along the way should feel free to believe that Michael Gove could not possibly serve in her administration.
But never say never. If Truss at any stage finds herself facing more first order crises than she can possibly deal with alone and if her chosen lieutenants come up short against them, do not be surprised if the call goes out to summon Gove back to the cabinet table or if he decides that the lure of high office is once more too strong to resist.
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