Michael Gove
Based on Wikipedia: Michael Gove
In the summer of 2016, Boris Johnson stood poised to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The Brexit referendum had just succeeded, Johnson was the favorite to lead the Conservative Party, and his campaign manager Michael Gove was helping coordinate the final push. Then, on the morning Johnson was set to formally declare his candidacy, Gove withdrew his support and announced he would run for the leadership himself. The betrayal became legendary in British political circles—a masterclass in political knife-work that torpedoed both men's ambitions and handed the premiership to Theresa May.
This was not an aberration. It was Michael Gove in his element.
From Aberdeen Fish Markets to Oxford Debates
Gove's origins could hardly be more different from the Eton-and-Oxbridge pipeline that produces so many British Conservative politicians. Born Graeme Andrew Logan in August 1967, he was placed in care soon after birth. His biological mother, long believed to have been an unmarried Edinburgh student, was actually a twenty-three-year-old cookery demonstrator in Aberdeen—a detail that wouldn't emerge publicly until a biography appeared in 2019.
At four months old, he was adopted by Ernest and Christine Gove. Ernest ran a fish processing business at Aberdeen Harbour, in the gritty industrial district of Torry. Christine worked as a lab assistant at the University of Aberdeen. They raised Michael and his adoptive sister Angela in a small house in Kittybrewster, a working-class neighborhood far removed from the corridors of Westminster.
The young Gove attended state primary schools before a teacher recognized something unusual. On her recommendation, he sat the entrance exam for Robert Gordon's College, an independent school with fees his family could barely afford. He passed.
At Robert Gordon's, Gove revealed himself immediately. Classmates and teachers remember a boy who raised his hand at the start of every lesson, who wore suits, rode an old-fashioned bicycle, recited poetry, and threw himself into debates. Sports held little appeal. He later described himself as a "swot"—British slang for an overly studious pupil—who felt intellectually out of place at home.
Here's a curious detail: in 1983, sixteen-year-old Michael Gove joined the Labour Party and campaigned for them in the general election. This was the election that gave Margaret Thatcher her landslide second victory. Gove would soon change course dramatically.
When his father's fish business collapsed during Gove's final years of school, the family could no longer afford tuition. He won a scholarship to continue.
Oxford and the Making of a Conservative
In 1985, Gove arrived at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to read English. He also switched political allegiances, joining the Conservative Party. This conversion would prove permanent.
Oxford introduced Gove to a figure who would shape his entire career: Boris Johnson. During his first year, Gove became an enthusiastic supporter of Johnson's campaign for President of the Oxford Union—a debating society that has served as a training ground for British politicians since the nineteenth century. Gove would later describe Johnson as "quite the most brilliant extempore speaker of his generation."
Gove himself won the presidency of the Oxford Union in early 1987. But his time at Oxford also produced speeches that would later prove embarrassing. In one debate on the British Empire, he used the term "fuzzy-wuzzies"—a colonial-era slur for African peoples—and made dismissive comments about gay relationships. He described Thatcher's economic policies as a "new empire" where "the happy South stamps over the cruel, dirty, toothless face of the Northerner." These remarks would resurface decades later during his political career.
He graduated with an upper second-class degree—respectable but not outstanding, the same classification as Theresa May, David Cameron, and most British prime ministers who attended Oxford.
The Journalist Years
When Gove applied to work at the Conservative Research Department after university, he received a memorable rejection: he was "insufficiently political" and "insufficiently Conservative." So he turned to journalism instead.
His early career stumbled. After a brief stint on The Daily Telegraph's gossip column, his editor reportedly told him his talent lay "in libel"—not a compliment. Unable to make a living in London, he returned to Aberdeen and worked as a trainee reporter at The Press and Journal, the local newspaper. He spent several months on strike during a bitter 1989-1990 dispute over union recognition.
Television came next. He worked for Scottish Television and briefly for Grampian Television in Aberdeen before moving to national broadcasting. At the BBC, he worked on On the Record and the Today programme—flagship political journalism positions. At Channel 4, he appeared on A Stab in the Dark, a current affairs show, alongside David Baddiel, who would later become famous as a comedian.
By 1995, The Guardian had identified Gove as part of "The Group"—a circle of young Conservatives who were skeptical of Prime Minister John Major's leadership and critical of the welfare state and European integration. This Euroscepticism would define Gove's later career.
In January 1996, he joined The Times as a leader writer. Over the following years, he accumulated titles: comment editor, home affairs editor, assistant editor, Saturday editor. He wrote a weekly column on politics and contributed to other publications including The Spectator, the magazine he would eventually edit.
Gove cultivated a relationship with Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The Times. In testimony before the Leveson Inquiry—a judicial investigation into press ethics following the phone-hacking scandal—Gove described Murdoch as "one of the most impressive and significant figures of the last 50 years."
During this period, Gove wrote two books. One was a sympathetic biography of Michael Portillo, a Conservative politician. The other, The Price of Peace, attacked the Northern Ireland peace process and compared the Good Friday Agreement to the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The comparison was inflammatory. The Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, ended decades of sectarian violence that had killed over 3,500 people. Gove's comparison to Munich—where Britain and France allowed Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia in a failed attempt to prevent war—suggested he viewed the peace deal as a surrender to terrorism.
The Notting Hill Set
In 2002, Gove co-founded Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank that remains influential today. This placed him at the center of what journalists dubbed the "Notting Hill set"—a group of modernizing Conservatives that included David Cameron, George Osborne, Ed Vaizey, Nick Boles, and Rachel Whetstone. The name came from the affluent West London neighborhood where several of them lived.
These modernizers wanted to detoxify the Conservative Party brand, which had become associated with social conservatism and hostility to public services during the Thatcher and Major years. They combined socially liberal positions—supporting gay rights and environmentalism—with traditional Conservative economics.
When Gove was passed over for the editorship of The Times, he began focusing on politics. David Cameron, not yet party leader but already influential, publicly urged him to make the switch. In a piece for The Guardian, Cameron wrote: "Give up the journalist's expense account and cast aside ambitions of editing the Thunderer"—The Times' nickname—"Gird up your loins and prepare for late nights sitting on uncomfortable green benches... In short, Michael, become a Tory MP."
In July 2004, Gove won the Conservative candidacy for Surrey Heath, a safe Conservative seat in the wealthy commuter belt southwest of London. The previous MP had been deselected by local party members over personal conduct disputes. Gove maintained his Times column on contract but prepared for a new career.
Education Secretary: The Reformer
Gove entered Parliament in 2005 and rose quickly. After the 2010 election produced a hung parliament—no party won an outright majority—the Conservatives formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Gove became Secretary of State for Education.
What followed was one of the most aggressive education reform programs in modern British history.
Gove immediately cancelled Building Schools for the Future, a Labour programme that had planned to rebuild or refurbish every secondary school in England. The cancellation was chaotic—he released lists of affected schools that proved inaccurate, requiring multiple corrections and a public apology.
But cancellation was only the beginning. Gove championed two Swedish-inspired innovations: academies and free schools.
Academies are state-funded schools that operate independently of local government control. Labour had introduced them in limited numbers; Gove dramatically expanded the program, allowing any school rated "Outstanding" by inspectors to become an academy. Free schools went further—they allowed parents, teachers, charities, or other groups to establish entirely new state-funded schools outside local authority control.
The theory behind both reforms borrowed from market economics. Parents choosing between competing schools would drive improvement, the argument went, just as consumers choosing between products drive quality in commercial markets. Critics countered that education isn't a market—schools can't easily expand or contract like businesses, parents don't have perfect information, and the stakes of a bad choice fall on children who had no say in the decision.
Gove also reformed examinations. He changed GCSE qualifications—exams taken by sixteen-year-olds—and A-Levels—exams taken at eighteen—to emphasize final examinations over coursework. He introduced a new grading system for GCSEs, replacing letters (A* through G) with numbers (9 through 1). He made exams harder and more traditional, with more emphasis on memorization and essay-writing.
The teaching profession revolted. At their 2013 conferences, four separate teachers' unions passed motions of no confidence in Gove's policies. This was extraordinary. Teaching unions frequently criticize government policy, but formal no-confidence votes are rare.
Gove responded combatively. He dismissed critics as "the blob"—a term borrowed from a 1958 science fiction film about an alien creature that absorbs everything in its path. In Gove's telling, educational progressives, teaching unions, and university education departments had formed a self-interested mass that resisted reform.
The Trojan Horse Affair
In 2014, a scandal erupted in Birmingham. An anonymous letter, apparently leaked from Muslim conservatives, described "Operation Trojan Horse"—an alleged plot to take over state schools and run them according to strict Islamic principles. The letter described a five-step process: identify target schools, install sympathetic governors, remove unsympathetic headteachers, and transform the curriculum.
Investigations followed. School inspectors found evidence of religious conservatism in some Birmingham schools—separate seating for boys and girls, limited sex education, narrow curriculum choices. But they found no coordinated conspiracy, and the original letter was widely suspected to be a forgery, possibly written to stir up controversy.
Gove's response became controversial for different reasons. He publicly clashed with Theresa May, then Home Secretary, over who bore responsibility for the failures. Leaked letters between their departments appeared in the press. Gove's allies accused May's department of failing to address extremism; May's allies accused Gove of losing control of schools in his own department.
The dispute foreshadowed later conflicts. May and Gove would find themselves competing for power repeatedly over the following decade.
Brexit: The Great Betrayal
In the 2014 cabinet reshuffle, Gove was moved from Education to Government Chief Whip—a role that involves managing parliamentary discipline rather than running a department. This was widely seen as a demotion, a cooling-off period after the education wars.
But after the Conservatives won an outright majority in 2015, Gove received a significant promotion: Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor. The Lord Chancellor is one of the oldest offices in English government, dating to the Anglo-Saxon period. The holder traditionally serves as keeper of the Great Seal, advisor on constitutional matters, and head of the judiciary—though the judicial role has been separated in recent decades.
Then came Brexit.
When David Cameron announced a referendum on European Union membership, Gove faced a choice. Cameron wanted to remain in the EU. Gove, despite his friendship with Cameron, chose to campaign for Leave.
He became co-convenor of Vote Leave alongside Boris Johnson. The two Oxford contemporaries—the supporter and the supported from those Union debates three decades earlier—now stood as the public faces of Brexit. Their campaign emphasized sovereignty ("take back control") and immigration (the notorious poster showing queues of refugees with the slogan "Breaking Point").
Leave won, 52% to 48%. Cameron resigned. The Conservative Party needed a new leader.
Boris Johnson was the obvious candidate. As the most prominent Leave campaigner with the highest public profile, he started as favorite. Gove served as his campaign manager, seemingly positioning himself as kingmaker rather than king.
Then came the betrayal.
On the morning of June 30, 2016, just hours before Johnson was scheduled to formally declare his candidacy, Gove released a statement withdrawing his support. He said he had reluctantly concluded that Johnson "cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead." He announced his own candidacy instead.
Johnson, blindsided, withdrew from the race entirely. His campaign launch speech, scheduled for that morning, never happened.
The political world was stunned. Gove's move was called treacherous, ruthless, calculated, Shakespearean. It backfired spectacularly. Conservative MPs, spooked by his apparent disloyalty, declined to support him. In the leadership election, Gove finished third behind Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom. When Leadsom withdrew, May became Prime Minister.
She did not forget what Gove had done. He was dismissed from the Cabinet entirely.
Redemption and Return
Gove spent a year on the backbenches—parliamentary slang for MPs who hold no ministerial office. Then the 2017 election changed everything.
May called a snap election expecting to increase her majority. Instead, she lost it. The Conservatives remained the largest party but needed support from Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party to govern. May, weakened, needed to rebuild her Cabinet with experienced hands.
She brought Gove back as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It was a remarkable rehabilitation. The man she had exiled for political betrayal now sat at her cabinet table, responsible for farming policy, fisheries, and—crucially for Brexit—negotiating the UK's departure from the EU's Common Agricultural Policy.
Gove surprised many observers by taking the environment portfolio seriously. He talked about plastic pollution, announced plans to ban plastic straws, and gave speeches about biodiversity loss. Environmentalists remained skeptical but acknowledged he was more engaged than typical Conservative ministers.
When May's Brexit deal collapsed and she announced her resignation in 2019, Gove ran for the leadership again. This time he finished third behind Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt. Johnson won and, in a remarkable turn, appointed Gove to his cabinet.
The Pandemic and After
Under Johnson, Gove became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster—an ancient title now used for a minister without a specific department, handling cross-government coordination. His primary responsibility was preparing for a no-deal Brexit, the possibility that the UK would leave the EU without any trade agreement.
Then came COVID-19.
In early 2020, Gove took on responsibility for coordinating the government's pandemic response. He appeared regularly at press conferences, defending policies on lockdowns, testing, and vaccinations. The government's handling of the pandemic became intensely controversial—the UK suffered one of the highest death rates in Europe during the first wave—but Gove emerged less damaged than many colleagues.
After the pandemic's acute phase passed, Gove moved to a new role: Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. "Levelling up" was Boris Johnson's signature domestic policy, a vague promise to reduce economic disparities between London and the rest of England. The phrase generated endless mockery—what exactly did it mean?—but represented a genuine political challenge. Many traditional Labour voters in northern England had switched to Conservative in 2019, attracted by Brexit and Johnson's persona. Keeping them required delivering economic improvement.
Gove also became Minister for Intergovernmental Relations, responsible for managing relationships between the UK government and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. This became increasingly fraught as the Scottish National Party pushed for a second independence referendum and post-Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland created ongoing tensions.
The Final Act
In July 2022, Boris Johnson's government collapsed. A series of scandals—parties held in Downing Street during lockdown, the handling of sexual misconduct allegations against a senior MP—finally exhausted Conservative patience. Cabinet ministers resigned en masse.
Gove was among those who told Johnson to go. Johnson, characteristically, didn't go quietly. He fired Gove before announcing his own resignation—one last act of vengeance, perhaps remembering 2016.
When Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister after the brief, chaotic Liz Truss interlude, he brought Gove back yet again. Gove returned to Levelling Up and Intergovernmental Relations, continuing policies he had begun under Johnson.
But the end was near. In 2024, facing likely Conservative defeat in the upcoming general election, Gove announced he would not seek re-election. After nineteen years as Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath, he stepped down.
The afterlife proved comfortable. In 2025, he was created Baron Gove, entering the House of Lords as a life peer. And he finally achieved something that had eluded him decades earlier: he became editor of The Spectator, the conservative magazine where he had contributed throughout his career. The journalist who had been told his talent lay "in libel" now ran one of Britain's most influential political publications.
The Question of Gove
What should we make of Michael Gove?
To his admirers, he represents intellectual seriousness in a political culture that often rewards superficiality. His education reforms, whatever their flaws, attempted to address real problems in English schools. His willingness to challenge vested interests—the "blob"—showed courage. His rehabilitation after 2016 demonstrated resilience and political skill.
To his critics, he represents something darker. The 2016 betrayal of Johnson—itself following years of apparent friendship and alliance—suggested a man for whom loyalty was purely transactional. His combative approach to education alienated the very professionals needed to implement reform. His Brexit campaigning contributed to one of the most divisive episodes in modern British history.
Perhaps most interesting is the trajectory. A child born to an unmarried mother in Aberdeen, placed in care, adopted by a family of modest means, educated through scholarship and determination—this is not the typical Conservative cabinet minister's biography. Gove represents a certain kind of meritocratic ideal, the grammar school boy made good.
Yet his politics often seemed designed to pull up the ladder behind him. His education reforms emphasized traditional academic achievement and competitive examination—the system that had identified and elevated him—while critics argued they disadvantaged children from backgrounds like his own who might need different kinds of support.
The connection to the Substack article "Could It Happen Here?" is worth noting. Gove spent his career navigating questions of national identity, sovereignty, and the relationship between Britain and Europe. His journey from Labour-supporting teenager to Brexit campaigner mirrors a broader shift in British politics—the collapse of old certainties, the rise of populist nationalism, the question of whether liberal democracy itself might be vulnerable to forces that seemed unthinkable a generation ago.
Could it happen here? Gove spent four decades in British public life. What "it" is—reform, betrayal, transformation, decline—depends on who you ask. But few figures better embody the convulsions of early twenty-first century British politics than the adopted son of an Aberdeen fish merchant who rose to reshape British education, helped fracture Britain's relationship with Europe, and ended up in ermine robes in the House of Lords, editing a magazine and looking back on a career of remarkable contradictions.