Michael
Gove, the brains behind Brexit
The
justice secretary’s transformation from toxic to totem.
By TOM MCTAGUE and
ALEX SPENCE 6/15/16, 5:30 AM CET
Michael Gove —
"the Brexit guy"
LONDON — The
prospect of Brexit is doing strange things to Britain.
Michael Gove, the
U.K.’s formidable but abrasive justice secretary, is not known as a
politician with the common touch. On a recent trip to watch
Manchester United with his young son, not long after declaring that
he would campaign against the government for Britain to leave the EU,
he was expecting to receive abuse from football fans.
Instead, he told
friends, Mancunians in the ground recognized him as “the Brexit
guy” and began cheering.
Gove, the brains
behind Britain’s Brexit surge, has become the unlikely star of the
campaign — eclipsing Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.
If Britain votes Out
on June 23, David Cameron will have reason to blame Gove more than
anyone else.
In a special BBC
debate on Wednesday it is Gove, not Johnson, who will take to the
stage for the Leave campaign. Cameron will respond for Remain in a
similar BBC program four days later.
The broadcast on
Britain’s most-watched TV channel will be the biggest platform the
Leave camp has had so far to make its pitch for Britain to leave the
EU. Gove held his own in a town hall on Sky News earlier in the
month, sidestepping tough questions about the economy and allegations
that he was an “Oxbridge Trump.” Gove attracted 45 percent more
viewers than the prime minister had the previous night.
His grilling in
front of a studio audience on BBC One on Wednesday night will reach
several times the number of viewers of the Sky program.
That Gove is leading
the insurgent Leave campaign, which may be only days away from
pulling off one of the most astonishing political victories in
British history, is remarkable for a politician who just two years
ago was considered so unappealing to voters he was demoted on the
advice of Downing Street campaign guru Lynton Crosby.
Like so much in
British politics, the Brexit campaign has turned Gove’s career on
its head.
With friends like
these…
They may be on
opposite sides of a fractious political campaign, but Gove wouldn’t
be in this position without the prime minister.
It was over lunch
with Cameron, then a young MP, that Gove’s final decision to
abandon Fleet Street for politics was taken, according to a biography
of Cameron by Francis Elliott and James Hanning. Cameron had for
several years been trying to persuade his friend to join parliament.
“He’s
conservative because he thinks it is the way to change things for the
better” — Rosemary Righter
Cameron had even
pleaded publicly for Gove to stand as an MP in an article in the
Guardian after being infuriated by a piece his friend had written for
the Spectator magazine.
As a modernizing
Tory columnist, Gove had attacked the 2001 intake of Conservative MPs
— which included Cameron — as “complacent,” “in retreat
from the modern world,” and deluded by “the easy charm of home
counties cocktail parties.”
Gove wanted the
Tories to stop obsessing about “hunting, Gibraltar and spin” and
start talking about the issues voters really cared about. In that,
Cameron saw an ally.
Fourteen years
later, their friendship has been cast aside and Gove is leading the
rebellious wing of the party that threatens to end Cameron’s career
as prime minister.
Cameron should have
seen it coming. According to the memoirs of the former Liberal
Democrat minister David Laws, Cameron described Gove during the
previous coalition government as “basically a bit of a Maoist —
he believes that the world makes progress through a process of
creative destruction.”
Rosemary Righter,
chief leader writer at the Times when Gove was hired in 1996, said
her former colleague has always been Euroskeptic.
More of a
19th-century liberal radical than a classic Tory, Gove “is not a
small-c conservative who wants things to stay as they are. He’s
conservative because he thinks it is the way to change things for the
better. That makes him very socially liberal.”
On Europe, he has
never wavered, she said.
While Boris
Johnson’s Euroskepticism waxed and waned and Cameron’s all but
melted away, Gove remained determinedly anti-Brussels.
It’s a deeply-held
conviction that goes back to the collapse of his father’s fishing
business in the 1970s, which the family blamed directly on the EU.
“I saw the pride
my father and grandfather had in their business and obviously it was
very difficult to cope with seeing everything they had built
disappear,” he told the BBC this weekend. “I was just a schoolboy
at the time, I didn’t know what I was going to be doing in the
future, but it stayed with me.”
In the Sky News
appearance, Gove condemned the EU as a “job-destroying machine”
run by “sneering elites.”
Beliefs beats
loyalty
The ferocity of
Gove’s campaigning has shocked many in Downing Street who believed
he would set aside his feelings about Europe and show more loyalty to
his old friend. Accusing the prime minister and Chancellor George
Osborne — his two closest friends in politics — as untrustworthy
sparked particular anger in Number 10.
Gove’s connection
to Cameron is not only political. Gove was godfather to Cameron’s
late son Ivan; their wives are close friends and their children play
together.
Cameron claimed in
public that he was “disappointed but not surprised” by the
decision. But those close to the prime minister say he was badly
hurt.
“He always
expected Boris to do whatever would get the most attention,” one
former Downing Street aide said. “But he had been led to believe
Michael would not campaign for Out. I don’t know if he ever said it
directly or if it was wishful thinking on Cameron’s part, but
Michael certainly did not disabuse him of the notion. It came as a
surprise.”
Gove himself has
admitted agonizing over the decision because of his loyalty to
Cameron.
In February, when
Gove announced his decision, Rupert Murdoch tweeted that “friends
always knew his principles would overcome his personal friendships.”
It is more likely
his loyalty to his father trumped his loyalty to the prime minister,
although even his friends say he is “ferociously ideological.”
Born to a single
student mother in Edinburgh in 1967, Gove was adopted when he was
four months old and raised in Aberdeen. He has never tried to find
his birth mother because of his devotion to his adoptive parents. “I
am more than just grateful” to them, he told the New Statesman in
2010. “My parents were wonderful and I know, in the way that you
can’t always put into words, that to seek to find out who my birth
mother is would upset my parents.”
After a scholarship
at a private school and Oxford University, Gove was turned down by
the Conservative research department, which said he was neither
political nor Conservative enough to work there. Instead, he pursued
a career in journalism, starting at the local newspaper, the Press
and Journal, in Aberdeen.
Other jobs followed
at Scottish Television and the BBC. As a producer on the influential
Today program on BBC Radio 4, Gove earned a reputation as
“practically the brightest person they’d ever had,” Righter
said. He joined the Times in 1996, where he spent nearly a decade on
staff, as leader writer, comment editor and news editor.
Gove was well-liked,
according to several former colleagues. “He was so reasonable, so
exceedingly courteous,” Righter said. “You never had any sense
that there was any sort of double-dealing, intellectual or otherwise.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a straighter, more decent person in
journalism.”
Philip Webster, the
former political editor of the Times who worked with Gove when he was
news editor, said he was “clearly going to go higher” after the
referendum and was “on the way up come what may.”
Like Johnson, Gove
has retained strong ties in the conservative media which have
bolstered his political rise.
“I’d
be surprised if Gove ever saw himself as a future prime minister” —
Philip Webster
He kept a column in
the Times for several years after entering the Commons — the
newspaper paid him £60,000 a year — and remained close to several
of his former bosses, including Murdoch. In the six years since the
Tories returned to government, elevating Gove to the cabinet, Gove
has dined with Murdoch at least ten times, according to the meeting
disclosures that all ministers are required to file periodically.
Gove and his wife were among the guests at the media mogul’s
wedding to Jerry Hall in London this year.
In recent years,
Gove has also become close to another powerful newspaper empire —
that of Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail. In the space of
several months in 2014, the Goves stayed with Rothermere and his
family at least three times, according to Gove’s public
disclosures. That included a weekend at Rothermere’s home in
France, at a value of £2,134.
Gove has the backing
of another important constituency: Conservative MPs. According to the
website Conservative Home, 30 percent of Tories in parliament want
the justice secretary to be the next party leader, ahead of Johnson
on 22 percent and home secretary Theresa May on 16 percent.
Gove insists he’s
not interested in taking over from Cameron, telling Sky News this
month to “count me out” of any leadership contest. Webster, his
former colleague at the Times, said: “I’d be surprised if Gove
ever saw himself as a future prime minister, but he’s one of those
classics who sees himself as the maker of a prime minister.”
In the event of a
vote to leave, some believe Gove would serve as a powerful deputy to
a prime minister Johnson, perhaps leading a renegotiation of
Britain’s relationship with Europe.
Others have
speculated that Gove could become deputy prime minister even if
Britain votes to remain, as Cameron tries to bring the feuding party
factions back together. Or Gove could lose his position in cabinet if
Cameron decides to clear out the Brexit rebels.
Gove insists it
would be worth it. “I don’t mind if my cabinet career is over,”
he told BBC Radio Scotland this week. “I think the most important
thing is to make a principled case for Britain leaving the EU.”
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