20 Feb 2016

Michael Gove’s journey: Will Boris follow?

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Any visitor to Michael Gove’s office on the top floor of the Ministry of Justice in the last few months will have been struck by one fat 1000 page book sitting prominently above his desk. The Business for Britain “Change, or go” document adopts the authoritative font and colourings of the Financial Times to make the case for Britain’s viability outside the EU. You couldn’t miss it. For Cabinet Ministers during the negotiation period it was the equivalent of flashing around a Lutheran text in the wrong part of sixteenth century Europe.

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One of Michael Gove’s oldest friends, a fellow MP, thought he might have made his decision to jump even earlier if the Prime Minister had required ministers to resign from the Cabinet if they wanted to campaign to Leave. “He’d have loved the Fighting Temeraire thing,” he said, “his career going down in flames for a great cause.”

Two sides to his personality have long vied in Michael Gove’s political career: the free-thinker who opined with a libertarian twist to his politics in his career as a journalist before coming into Parliament, and the ambitious ally of George Osborne and David Cameron. At the launch for Bill Cash’s biography of John Bright 4 years ago, Michael Gove gave a speech praising the author. In the same breath he referred to himself as an office-seeking “time-server” in contrast to Bill Cash’s principled life on the backbenches but also joked that he’d slipped the leash of the politically illiterate whips’ office to come to the event. A couple of years later and he would be in charge of the illiterates having swallowed his pride and accepted demotion to Chief Whip in the 2014 reshuffle.

Within the last few days there was a meeting between Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. George Osborne’s world-weary answer to the Boris Johnson question on Radio 4 this morning echoes David Cameron’s last night in Brussels. They suspect the Mayor of London has backed himself into a place he never intended to be and will back Leave, encouraged by Michael Gove’s move and sensing that his best chance of being PM is to be on the same side of this argument as the bulk of Tory members.

As a man who has never openly called for Britain to leave the EU in his entire career it would be a strange moment if he were to come to power riding on the backs of those who’ve done little else. Graham Brady, the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, told me there’s every sign that the momentum amongst MPs is moving towards Leave and no reason to think David Cameron’s successor, our next Prime Minister, won’t be someone who supported Leave.

If Boris Johnson was going to back the PM you would expect constant contact as the two confer on the shape of the National Soveriengty Act which David Cameron will promise on tv tomorrow. It has an inausipicious launch with the Justice Secretary, initially jointly charged with framing it, clearly judging that it’s not worth the vellum its written on if we stay inside the EU. With no sign of contact continuing between No. 10 and the Mayor of London , you have to assume that Boris Johnson is going to make a similar point when he breaks cover over the weekend.

This piece by former MP Paul Goodman captures how Michael Gove made this journey. He recalls how Michael Gove let slip at the start of this whole process that David Cameron needed to have a blood-curdling threat to leave ringing in EU leaders’ ears if he was to get a truly substantial deal.

The formulation stuck to about “not ruling anything out” didn’t go as far as Mr Gove and some others had advised and a bit of Michael Gove thought the whole process flawed from that moment on.

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