No worries if you haven’t felt quite up to it: thanks to BBC Sounds, its recent Michael Gove festival, Surviving Politics, should be available for a year, to prove that no political life, however deeply disenchanting it might look, need now end in failure. Not while the BBC, with its extensive experience in rehabilitating widely detested politicians, is still there to pick up the pieces.
Just a short time after he decided not to stand for re-election (so avoiding displacement by a Lib Dem), this heavily promoted series reinvents Gove as a twinkling fount of political wisdom, a presenter who should now, if you set aside the countless reasons for his unpopularity, be as acceptable to its audience as any other. Be kind: doesn’t the officially “toxic” Gove, the Brexit hysteric, Cummings-patron, proroguing apologist, blob-detectorist, Blackadder botherer, Murdoch protege, elephant-lamp fancier, expert-denigrator and once-prized contact of Michelle Mone – “Judas” to his friends – deserve another chance? This is evidently the opinion of Paul Marshall, the billionaire buyer of the Spectator. In September, he appointed Gove its editor. The current issue features a piece by Nigel Farage. “Donald Trump,” he tells Spectator readers, “is just the most tremendous fun.”
