Michael Gove to stand down at general election
Seventy-seven Tory MPs are quitting rather than
standing, beating 1997’s record number
Peter
Walker
Fri 24 May
2024 20.39 CEST
Michael
Gove has joined the now record-breaking exodus of Conservative MPs quitting the
Commons, with the levelling up secretary saying it was time for a “new
generation” to lead the party.
Gove’s
announcement in a letter tweeted on Friday evening had been anticipated by some
given the strong Liberal Democrat challenge he faces in his Surrey Heath
constituency, but adds to the sense of Tories fleeing in the face of a likely
general election loss.
It puts the
total number of sitting Tories saying they will not stand again at 77, beating
the previous record of 72 from 1997.
An MP since
2005, Gove has been central to Tory fortunes ever since. He has also served as
education secretary, justice secretary, environment secretary and chancellor of
the duchy of Lancaster.
In his
letter, Gove wrote that he knew “the toll office can take, as do those closest
to me”.
“No one in
politics is a conscript. We are volunteers who willingly choose our fate. And
the chance to serve is wonderful. But there comes a moment when you know that
it is time to leave. That a new generation should lead,” he said.
Rishi
Sunak’s sudden announcement of a 4 July election had already prompted a renewed
rush of Conservatives saying they would step down, with the total hitting 70 by
Wednesday evening.
Earlier on
Friday three more MPs said they were going, among them the former cabinet
ministers John Redwood and Greg Clark, both of whom represent home counties
seats where the Liberal Democrats could beat the Tories.
The
Conservatives also symbolically handed back the party whip to the former health
secretary Matt Hancock and Bob Stewart – both of whom had already announced
they were standing down – just before parliament was to be prorogued on Friday.
Also
departing is Craig Mackinlay, who only returned to the Commons this week after
nearly dying from sepsis and having his hands and feet amputated. The South
Thanet MP said he had hoped to phase his return and could not commit to a
campaign.
Sunak’s
efforts to breathe life into the two-day-old campaign suffered another hiccup
on Friday when a visit to Belfast’s Titanic Quarter brought comparisons with
the liner’s sinking in 1912.
“We are
just yards away from where the Titanic was built and designed,” a reporter from
Belfast Live asked Sunak in a clip widely shared on social media. “Are you
captaining a sinking ship going into this election?”
As Chris
Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary – among those not standing again
– tried to suppress a smirk, Sunak launched into a heavily rehearsed answer
about how “our plan is working”.
Adding to
the difficulties, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, was chastised by the official
statistics watchdog for claiming that taxes were falling.
Robert
Chote, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, agreed with a Liberal Democrat
argument that a cut in national insurance was more than offset by other
factors, such as the freezing of tax thresholds.
The Titanic
visit in particular is the latest in a series of unwelcome mishaps that have
plagued the Conservative campaign, starting with the election being announced
by an increasingly sodden Sunak in a rainy Downing Street with his words almost
drowned out by Labour’s 1997 anthem Things Can Only Get Better, blasted out by
a protester.
On
Thursday, his first campaign stop was at a warehouse in Derbyshire, where staff
in hi-vis jackets asked him questions. It later emerged that two of the
questioners were actually Conservative councillors.
In a
subsequent event, at a brewery in south Wales, Sunak’s attempt to make small
talk by asking people if they were looking forward to Euro 2024 fell slightly
flat after they pointed out that Wales had failed to qualify.
After the
Titanic clip emerged, Ruth Davidson, the former leader of the Scottish
Conservatives, expressed worry.
“The deluge
launch drowned out by D:Ream,” she wrote on X. “A brewery visit with a teetotal
PM, so no chance of a piss-up. Now a site visit to something famous for
sinking. Is there a double agent in CCHQ, and were they a headline writer in a
previous life? Our candidates deserve better.”
Sunak
insisted to the small number of journalists on his plane from Belfast to his
next stop in the West Midlands that he was enjoying the campaign and “up for
the fight”.
He said: “I
love doing this. I’ve been doing it since the beginning of the year, I’ve been
out and about pretty much two, three days a week since the beginning of the
year and I love it.
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