Imagine a gigolo who suddenly becomes a priest. He has regrets, he says, but his regrets are vague, and what has changed his mind is vaguer still.
Imagine that gigolo and you will have a sense of the strange world of Michael Gove — Conservative politician turned Spectator editor. Suddenly, now he has left Parliament, Baron Gove has realised the many senses in which he was wrong. But does this represent a genuine intellectual shift or a conversion of convenience?
I suspect that the latter is often true. For example, Gove is lamenting his “false hopes” on foreign policy. “I hoped regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq might see democracy spread across the Middle East,” says Gove, “I am a reluctant realist, a chastened idealist not so much red-pilled by MAGA as schooled by unending history.”
Well, it’s good that Gove has seen the light. But has he summed up his pro-regime change position appropriately? Gove was a passionate supporter of invading Iraq. In 2004, condemned the “tragic … anti-Americanism” of conservative opponents of the invasion, who, if listened to, would have led Britain to “disaster”. A — sadly hypothetical — rejection of Atlanticism, for Gove, would have represented a “denial to rank with Peter’s”. George W. Bush did claim that Jesus was his favourite political philosopher but even he did not position himself as his successor.
Years of bloodshed did nothing to change Gove’s mind. In 2008, he declared that the invasion of Iraq had been “a proper British foreign policy success”. What he has learned since then — at which point 176 British soldiers had died as well as tens of thousands of Iraqis — is a mystery.
Baron Gove has also seen the light on Brexit. “We defined Brexit success in a way which the people who voted for it did not recognise,” he says. For example, Britons wanted “an end to imported labour depressing wages”. The Conservative government, in Gove’s view, “moved only fitfully and marginally” when it came to addressing voters’ concerns. Actually, on migration it did the exact opposite of what Brexit voters — and a lot of other voters — wanted — and who was there celebrating Britain’s “positive, welcoming, liberal forward-looking” attitude towards non-EU migration? Why, a certain M. Gove.
Gove rails against Labour’s “tragically limited, anaemically timid, intellectually impoverished, morally pusillanimous, pre-emptively cringing”. Well, that is an impressive collection of adverbs and adjectives. But it was Gove who was telling Brexiteers “not [to] make the best the enemy of the good” when Theresa May was pushing her Brexit In Name Only deal in 2018.
While these represent attempts to acknowledge Conservative failures without acknowledging their scale, Gove will also simply ignore them. His interview with Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood covers the crisis of prison capacity without touching on the Conservative failure to address warnings that prisons would run out of space. A self-congratulatory Steerpike piece about how The Spectator is the “magazine the establishment don’t want you to read”, addressing the outrageous arrest of Julian Foulkes, whose ownership of a copy of The Spectator — among other things — was treated as suspicious by the police, does not pause to consider the implications of the fact that this took place in 2023 when the Tories were in government.
Gove deserves some credit for allowing Toby Young to write a piece with the blunt title “I was right — and Gove was wrong — on lockdown”. Still, his evasive attitude towards his own beliefs and decisions, as well as that of the Conservative government more broadly, raises serious questions about the ability of right-leaning journalism to represent a serious and coherent alternative to the Starmite political establishment and the right-on cultural class.
I have one regret that has been dogging me throughout the construction of this piece. I compared Baron Gove to a gigolo who has suddenly become a priest. This was unjust of me. Gigolos, whatever one might think of them, are fairly harmless — not like Conservative ministers.
