The 'Levelling Up' secretary, Michael Gove, is in the news as he unveils the long-awaited white paper for spreading wealth around the country.
However, Gove's commitment to that cause has come under fresh scrutiny after critics highlighted historical celebrations of his that northerners were "cruel, dirty, [and] toothless".
In a speech to the Cambridge Union, when Gove was in his final year at the University of Oxford and president-elect of its debating society, the now-Conservative MP said: "We are at last experiencing a new empire: an empire where the happy south stamps over the cruel, dirty, toothless face of the northerner.
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“At last Mrs Thatcher is saying, 'I don’t give a fig for what half of the population say because the richer half will keep me in power. This may be amoral, this may be immoral, but it’s politics and it’s pragmatism.'”
The speech is among three - the other two speeches coming in 1993, by which point Gove was a journalist - uncovered by the Independent in which Gove made racist, homophobic, and otherwise derogatory comments.
They included such comments as Gove saying it was a "fact" that "homosexuals thrive primarily on short-term relations". On the British Empire, he said: "Eton took the cream of the colonial system: it took fettered foreigners and it turned them into gentlemen."
His final target was Prince Charles, who he called a “dull, wet, drippy adulterer”.
When the Independent uncovered the speeches in September last year, Wendy Chamberlain, the Lib Dems' chief whip in parliament, said: "Michael Gove should be ashamed that he ever thought these things, let alone said them. These inappropriate and racist remarks are not befitting of a government minister, not befitting of a journalist, in fact not befitting of anyone.
"The prime minister should consider whether this is the type of person that deserves to be sat around the cabinet table. However, given Boris Johnson’s own history of disgraceful remarks, I expect this will be another shameful issue he lets go unchallenged."
Gove and the communities department were each contacted for comment.
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