Over Gove
The current peaens of praise for Michael Gove, obsequies to all intents and appearances, are remarkable and wonderful. At least, they make me wonder where Fraser Nelson et al have been for the past ten years.
Never has there been such a puffed-up popinjay as Michael Gove, a parliamentary peacock whose sky-high opinion of himself he has barely tried to conceal. It seems to me at least that this itinerant courtier has floated from one cabinet post to another without ever leaving a lasting legacy.
Let us consider the remarkable praise for his tenure as Education Secretary.’ Michael took on the Blob – and Won!’ the received wisdom goes except that one or two facts run counter to this legend.
- Gove sought to impose an English Baccalaureate composed of broadly academic subjects examined in traditional ways. Revolutionary? Reactionary more like. Presented with a golden opportunity to radically reshape education to provide the majority of students with fulfilling, exacting and rewarding technical, managerial, medical, or service courses leading to useful and employable young people, he fluffed it. He flew straight into the arms of academia and the mania for university started by the scoundrel Blair and directly ensured we would be in the catastrophic educational mess we have today. He even called his ‘new’ schools Academies. How posh. What a great step up from grammar schools. Except they were all still comprehensives and preserved the appalling comprehensive movement Labour via Anthony Crosland began in 1974. Well done, Mr Gove, you gave your full backing to the most disastrous experiment in social policy this country has ever known. (As is well known, Crosland and all his cabinet colleagues save Harold Wilson were all the products of private schools and Oxbridge. Another milestone for parliamentary hypocrisy.)
- The Great Betrayer: MICHAEL GOVE has finally admitted he was wrong to blow up Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign in 2016, saying he bitterly regrets it.
He claims he has told the Prime Minister he is sorry for stabbing him in the back and added: “Everybody knows I made a mistake then.”
“Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead.” Michael Gove publicly explodes Boris’s leadership campaign after Brexit success together. The most cold-blooded political betrayal in history.
In stabbing Boris in the back, front and face, Gove committed his own hara kiri and yet . . .
Such is his brazen and unscrupulous effrontery he scurried back to Boris as soon as Johnson replaced Theresa May and won the General Election in 2019.
What integrity. What character. If it looks like a rat and smells like a rat . . .
- The Level Crossing Guard
After bobbing about the Johnson cabinet doing not very much as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (or CDL, as Gove preferred to be called) BoJo jumps on ‘levelling up’ as the Big Idea and promptly makes Gove the leveller upper Minister-in-Chief.. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, the Italians say, and this was a dish straight out of the freezer. What the precise brief Boris gave Gove will never be known, because the PM had no idea and Gove was stumped. Essentially to exchange Sunderland and Surrey would have done the trick but no-one in Whitehall knew how.
So what did Gove plan to do to level the UK up?
The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced in November 2020 that he was changing the way that the benefit of investment was calculated to allow projects with big regional impacts to be prioritised. In October 2021, the government revealed the successful bids for the first round of the £4.8bn Levelling-Up Fund. A total of just under £1.7bn was shared between 105 towns, cities and areas.
In May 2022, BBC Panorama sent freedom-of-information requests to councils in the 100 most deprived areas in England.
It found that 28 councils had their bids rejected. This included 18 areas that were on the government’s top priority list, including Knowsley and Blackpool. Meanwhile, 38 councils won all, or some, of the money they requested, and 34 councils did not submit a bid in this round.
A report from the Public Accounts Committee in June 2022 criticised the process on the basis that ministers had only finalised the principles for awarding the money once they knew which bidders had been shortlisted. It expressed concern that some bidders were successful because they were too optimistic about how soon their projects could be delivered while more realistic bidders missed out.
BBC: Long-promised plans to close the gap between rich and poor parts of the country have been announced by the government.
The strategy, unveiled by Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove, will take until 2030 and aims to improve services such as education, broadband and transport. Mr Gove said it would “shift both money and power into the hands of working people”. But Labour said the plans contained no new money and little fresh thinking.
Mr Gove told the BBC the strategy was not aimed at providing new funding but ensuring it is spent effectively on local priorities.
Let’s cut to the chase: Pure Govery, a re-heated stew of abandoned ideas and blue sky thinking blown apart by every think tank and Treasury report since 1979. Pure boloney, sliced wafer thin. With Magic Mike at the helm, seismic improvements are on the horizon toschools, colleges, universities, transport, communications and broadband, freeports, incentives for entrepreneurs and start-ups, a giddy whirl of frothy fantasy with not one thin dime to pay for it all. Pure Gove, 100% Bullshit.
- The Lockdowner General
And never let it be forgotten that Gove was the leading zealot in the cabinet from the outset. From 23 March, 2020, when Boris embarked on the most catastrophic usurpation of democracy, free will and human rights to establish totalitarian control over the public inspired by the likes of career psychotics, demented professors and charlatans like Dominic Cummings, Neil Ferguson and Matt Hancock, Gove was at hand constantly to keep the PM’s wavering hand firmly on the tiller of lockdown. Every single aspect of our welfare state and society, every pillar of what passes for western civilisation was cancelled at a stroke. Gove made an unholy alliance with the ‘fucking useless’ Secretary of State for Health Matt Hancock to ensure that other views were silenced or marginalised. The cabal of Gove, Hancock and SAGE cornered Boris who, of course, capitulated at once. The bold libertarian left the building, the cowering, timorous beastie moved into Number 10. If you seek Gove’s monument, look around you.
- Economy – bankrupt
- Education – bankrupt
- Parliament – bankrupt
- Criminal Justice System – bankrupt
- NHS – bankrupt
- Police – bankrupt
- Ambulance Service – bankrupt
- Social Care – bankrupt
I could go on. Please add to this list. Let it be known that Boris et al did more to ruin this country in six months than Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich did in six years of total war.
Let this be his epitaph: All Bullshit, All Bollocks.
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