MICHAEL GOVE is reading War and Peace. Given the state of the Conservative party after the justice secretary’s declaration that he is backing Brexit, this seems appropriate. But it is not a metaphor for Tory infighting that presents itself to Gove.
“I am irresistibly reminded of the European Union every time Napoleon appears just because he was guilty of grotesque imperial overreach in his desire to impose a single unified bureaucratic model on Europe and in the end it didn’t work out so well for him.”
Whether voting to leave works out for Gove remains to be seen. He has left his closest political friends — David Cameron and George Osborne — “disappointed” by his defection and faced anonymous briefings that he might lose his job in the next reshuffle.
“There were long hours and moments deep into the night when I thought I couldn’t take this step,” he admits. “It has been very difficult in terms of a relationship with friends and colleagues whom I deeply admire.”
But friendships seem, so far, to be intact. Gove was present at Cameron’s prime minister’s question time pre-briefing on Wednesday morning and helped to polish the jokes, including one about Jeremy Corbyn’s dalliance with the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.
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“ ‘Acropolis Now’, I can reveal, is a George Osborne joke,” he says. “I said the prime minister should tee it up by saying ‘the Greek finance minister who left his country’s economy in ruins’. George was the master craftsman. I just did a little bit of veneer work at the bottom.”
This is Gove all over: the precision with words, the impish sense of humour, the willingness to defer to the rulers of the Cameron court.
Gove, sensitive to the turbulence his decision has unleashed, offered not to attend the 50th birthday party last weekend of Andrew Feldman, the Tory chairman, but was eventually persuaded to go. “That is right, yes,” he says. But the curtain is peeled back no more than this. Of the prime minister he says only: “He has behaved with great generosity of spirit and has been a perfect gent about it.”
“Those who are arguing in favour of staying in the EU are relics of the past
Gove says he is determined to “make the argument civilised” but the difficulty is in evidence when he attacks the peddlers of Project Fear.
He says it is “depressing” that “some of the people who are arguing for ‘in’ ” imply “Britain is beaten and whacked and incapable of independent existence and that we’ve got to stay in the European Union because that’s the only thing preventing economic decline and looming disaster. I simply don’t accept that point.” These “remainians” are “bleakly pessimistic”.
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But is he accusing Cameron of talking down Britain? “I’m a huge fan of the prime minister so I won’t criticise him in any way.” Which, when you consider Gove’s punctiliousness, is not a denial.
However, Gove’s view of the EU is barely more optimistic than is his opponents’ of Brexit. He accuses the EU of “inflicting pain on Europe” and adds: “The far right is stronger across the continent than at any time since the 1930s — Golden Dawn in the Greek parliament are explictly Hitler worshippers.”
The crux of his case is a “sink hole of innovation”. He compares the EU now to Orson Welles’s monologue on Switzerland in the film The Third Man. “He talks about what it has managed to produce over hundreds of years: the cuckoo clock.
“The really exciting innovations that are changing the way in which the world lives — Amazon, Google, Uber, Netflix — none of them are coming from the European Union.”
Gove’s positive vision of Britain outside the EU would see Britain adopt “a national mission to be a world leader in innovation, science and education”.
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This emphasis on the future is interesting from a man who represents some of the most traditional virtues in Westminster: politeness, rhetoric, a love of institutions.
We meet in his Commons office, a wood-panelled affair that boasts a smorgasbord of political influences: busts of Churchill and Pope Benedict; pictures of conservatives such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Robert Peel but also the radicals Richard Cobden, Charles James Fox and John Bright — along side Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Lenin — a nod to Gove’s revolutionary instincts for reform.
Gove’s Euroscepticism is grounded in his own history. This adopted son of an Aberdeen fishmonger watched his father’s business go belly up in his teenage years. “Because of the common fisheries policy my dad’s business went to the wall. That has a profound impact, seeing something that your family have worked to create and build up suddenly taken away.”
His love of parliament and the law has sharpened his contempt for the institutions of Brussels. “The institutions we’ve got in this country have been tested and work. A respect for our historic institutions isn’t about living in the past, it’s about allowing us to face the future with confidence.”
He denies that the Brexiteers — for many of whom leaving the EU is their life’s work — are old-guard oddballs. Gove reels off the names of young, intelligent (and perhaps coincidentally non-white) Tory MPs who are backing Brexit: Rishi Sunak, Suella Fernandes, Nusrat Ghani and James Cleverly. “There’s no way you can look at that quartet and say that they are representatives of the past. Those who are arguing in favour, they are relics of the past.”
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And yet two of the most prominent advocates of “leave” are George Galloway and Nigel Farage. Will Gove be sharing a platform with them? “I don’t anticipate I will,” he says. But he adds: “They are elected politicians and they deserve respect.”
He reserves his ire for the “predatory” European Court of Justice, insisting that “our security and sovereignty stand together ... There are better opportunities to generate prosperity and keep people safe if we are outside the European Union.”
The “remainers” say that people such as Gove will not spell out precisely the relationship a Britain outside the EU would enjoy. He will not be pinned down but says: “We would create an arrangement that was bespoke for Britain. I think the problem with the different models that have been put forward is that none of them take account of Britain’s unique status.”
He says the UK “would be in a far stronger position than any other country” seeking to negotiate terms with the EU in the past. “There’s a free trade area in Europe that extends from Iceland to Turkey. There’s no way Britain would be outside that.”
Gove does not accept that Britain would be punished for leaving by the rest of the EU and launches a coded attack on François Hollande and the other foreign leaders who have issued such warnings.
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“There’s a difference between the fears that some European nations want to stoke now in order to try to get us to stay in and the reality of us being outside. It wouldn’t be in their interests to cut off their nose to spite their face.”
Nor does he have time for those who say Brexit would create “contagion” by encouraging other countries to leave. “I do think it’s striking that people use the language of contagion to describe democracy. If we leave and other countries say ‘the European Union isn’t working for us’, that is democracy.”
Gove is a passionate unionist, but rejects the claim that Brexit would also lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom by driving Scotland to independence.
“There is a direct relationship between faith in Great Britain and the United Kingdom and the decline of Scottish nationalism. If we regain national independence, the sense that Great Britain has a national mission will be a more effective way of dealing with Scottish nationalism than anything else.”
Gove was a key figure in persuading Boris Johnson to back Brexit. He defends the London mayor against the charge he was motivated by personal ambition. “Boris’s personality and political views are entirely congruent with wanting out. The point has been made by lots of people that he is great fun to be around; the point that is often underestimated is that he’s someone who is driven by passion and conviction.”
Will his new closeness to Johnson trump his long-standing allegiance to George Osborne? “I’m not going to get into that,” he swerves.
Gove and Johnson are both touted as Brexit spokesmen in the televised debates in the run-up to the referendum. The justice secretary is not comfortable with this exposure. “I absolutely do not want to be in a position where I’m criticising the prime minister. I’m not anxious to thrust myself before any cameras.”
He says it is “objective reality” that there are “more attractive and compelling voices than me”.
But his aides make clear that if Vote Leave want him he is prepared to answer the call.
All his answers are tempered by knowledge of what one wrong word could do to the tinderbox in the Conservative party. Gove is a fan of Game of Thrones, HBO’s bloody tale of political family feuding. Is this another metaphor for Tory bloodletting? He laughs — “Ha! Ha!” — like two shotgun blasts downing a slow-moving pheasant.
“I like Game of Thrones because it is escapist fantasy and utterly unlike daily political reality,” he says with a knowing grin. “There is a will to unity in the Conservative party.”
The justice secretary has no time for MPs who are already plotting Cameron’s demise. To the potential regicides he says: “Please, please, please let’s just concentrate on issues. The prime minister has said he is going to step down. The idea therefore that people should move against him is for the birds. I just think it would be self-indulgent.”
His passion for history has made him a keen wargamer, battling at weekends over Kingmaker, a re-enactment of the Wars of the Roses. “I love history but I also love any excuse to get friends round for a refreshing glass,” he says.
In Kingmaker it is perhaps not surprising that this establishment rebel has a soft spot for the Yorkist forces. Those looking for omens should know that the last time he played Kingmaker, Gove defied history and took the underdogs to victory.