Philip Collins
(Picture: Daniel Hambury)Inside 10 Downing Street nothing is stirring. Boris Johnson has, in effect, checked out and the staff in the building are waiting for the next incumbent. We are in the midst of a leadership contest which, thought it has hardly seemed to start, appears destined never to end. Eventually, on September 5, it will but neither Liz Truss nor Rishi Sunak communicate much of a sense of purpose. Meanwhile, the only minister who ever really does anything has just announced that he has had enough.
Michael Gove announced over the weekend that he is going to leave politics. Mr Gove has encountered a few battles down the years, and he hardly endeared himself to bien-pensant Britain with his advocacy of Brexit, something he had thought consistently for 30 years. But it should be noted that Mr Gove’s departure is a blow. It is a blow for a government which has had, since Brexit, almost no purpose and it is a blow for the idea of levelling up, talked about incessantly by Mr Johnson, but only latterly given any form at all by Mr Gove’s White Paper.
Everywhere Mr Gove has gone as a minister something, for good or ill, has at least happened. How many other ministers over the last decade have left any kind of policy legacy? In his first post, at Education, Mr Gove accelerated the expansion of the school academy programme that he inherited from Labour. He stands at the end of a line of reforming ministers that starts with Kenneth Baker and goes through successive Labour education secretaries before coming to a full stop after Mr Gove was removed from that post.
It is worth remembering why he was shifted from Education. It was because he had inflamed the teaching profession so much that Lynton Crosby, the Prime Minister’s electoral guru at the time, thought he was costing the party popularity. Getting along with the sector that has to implement your reforms is a crucial skill and Mr Gove was poor at it. The error he made was to allow Dominic Cummings free rein to complain about “the Blob”, the conspiracy of Left-wing teachers whom he thought controlled education and made progress impossible.
Interestingly, Mr Gove learnt and got better. In all his subsequent policy jobs in Cabinet, he made a point of winning the support of the sector he was working with. At Justice, Mr Gove inherited a system that is badly in need of reform and he won the consent of the profession to think boldly. With Martin Narey, the former head of Barnado’s, he drafted an excellent plan that still awaits implementation.
At Defra, Mr Gove made the single use of plastic a big national question and won the support of an initially hostile environmental lobby. His commitment to the countryside, his willingness to listen and determination to be the first minister actually to get something done all melted that early suspicion. The same was true at local government level, where Mr Gove did more on housing in a short stay than anyone else. In the fullness of time, the impressive work that he did on Grenfell will become more widely known and will change his reputation.
Is any other minister so keen to act? Mr Gove appears to have no heir, nobody committed to change. When he left the Justice post, his successor squashed all the excellent thinking done in his name. Nothing much happened, in the event. The name of Mr Gove’s successor was Liz Truss. This weekend he denounced Ms Truss’s plans as “a holiday from reality”, as indeed they are.
Mr Gove himself is now set to take a holiday from politics and it is a mark of how dreadful the rest of his party is that I am now inclined to think this something of a shame.
