Turning up at Silverstone earlier this month for the Conservative manifesto launch, Michael Gove was asked why he had now decided to leave frontline politics.
“In Formula One terms I am a bit of a James Hunt,” he replied, a nod to the British racing driver who in 1979 quit half-way through the season after losing enthusiasm for the sport and realising his team’s car was uncompetitive.
The Conservative election campaign has taken a few more wrong turns since. In an interview this week, Gove, who was first elected as the MP for Surrey Heath in 2005 and has since held six cabinet posts, says: “I think that most of us have a shelf life in politics. I think a useful ministerial career is a maximum of 10 to 15 years … Politics takes its own toll. Service takes its own toll.”
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The admission is perhaps an oblique reference to the breakdown of his marriage to the journalist Sarah Vine in 2021, which was in part because of Gove’s “mistress” — politics — to which he was devoted, and in part because of the animosity between the couple and their other friends after his decision to back Leave in the 2016 referendum on European Union membership.
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He famously fell out with David and Samantha Cameron after he took a prominent role in Vote Leave — a move which gave Boris Johnson the political cover to join the campaign.
Gove, 56, claims the constant invasion of privacy, the “viciousness” of the attacks on social media, and the unrealistic expectations placed on MPs are a “significant burden” and can often be a barrier to people entering politics.
“Would you want to have someone taking photos of you when you were in the queue in Tesco on a Saturday morning?” he asks.
“Do you want to face the dilemma of, do I, in order to do right by my constituents or do right by my colleagues, go on Friday night to Harrogate to speak at an event, or do I stay at home with my partner and children because they’ve already given up a lot?”
He is the most high-profile of nearly 80 Conservative MPs to have announced that they are standing down before the election. It has been described as a “ravens leaving the Tower moment”.
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The Conservatives’ campaign of gaffes and missteps has now added a betting scandal. Two candidates are already being investigated by the Gambling Commission over alleged wagers placed on the timing of the election on the eve of the announcement.
Likening the row to partygate, which saw Johnson’s No 10 investigated over gatherings during the pandemic, Gove said: “It looks like one rule for them and one rule for us … That’s the most potentially damaging thing. The perception that we operate outside the rules that we set for others. That was damaging at the time of partygate and is damaging here.”
He added: “If you’re in a privileged position [close] to the prime minister at the heart of a political operation and you use inside information to make additional money for yourself, that’s just not acceptable … You are, in effect, securing an advantage against other people who are betting entirely fairly and without that knowledge. So if these allegations are true, it’s very difficult to defend.”
The divorced father-of two claims he has only ever made one political bet when he put money on Hillary Clinton to beat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race. “That was literally a world away,” he said. “But this is, as far as I can tell, an allegation about people using privileged inside information to secure an advantage that wasn’t available to others.”
Accusing those involved of “sucking the oxygen out of the campaign”, he said that, just as with partygate, “a few individuals end up creating an incredibly damaging atmosphere for the party”.
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“The overwhelming majority of candidates and Conservative Party supporters on the ground are doing their best to focus the debate on the big arguments and this gets in the way,” he said. “So it’s both bad in itself, but also destructive to the efforts of all of those good people who are currently fighting hard for the Conservative vote.”
With some polls suggesting the Tories could be reduced to fewer than 100 seats, Gove remains characteristically optimistic that the party could yet turn things around.
“It would be a mistake to think that there is a single intervention, a wonder weapon that hasn’t yet been deployed that will transform the campaign,” he said. “I think that there are three things, however, that can influence things in the final two weeks.”
The first is tax. Gove believes the fear of tax rises is still the “biggest barrier” to people voting Labour. He has urged his party to double down on its claims that Labour will raise taxes by £2,000 per working household and compared this to the attack line successfully deployed by Vote Leave when it pledged to spend an additional £350 million a week on the NHS.
The second is the prospect of Labour being handed “untrammelled power” and the third is Starmer’s plans to develop a closer working relationship with the EU.
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Gove said: “I think one of the biggest question marks over Labour is what they would do in terms of relations with the EU because it is on the record that Starmer did everything he could to frustrate a Brexit deal and to secure a second referendum. I was in the room with him when we were trying to negotiate an agreement between Labour and the Conservatives under Theresa [May] to secure a Brexit deal.
“He deliberately sabotaged a softer deal than the one that Boris eventually secured because he wanted to play double or quits on a second referendum and keeping us in. We know where his heart lies on that. And I think that if there were a big Labour victory, then we would see a very rapid series of accommodations with the EU on the single market, on fishing, on migration, all of which would be running entirely contrary to the instincts of most Conservative, and for that matter most Reform, voters. So I think those are three areas where, if we can continue to make the argument, then I think that the election can end up being a lot closer than people think at the moment.”
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Warning that a vote for Reform would be a vote for Labour, Gove said it could also hand Starmer a “blank cheque for a closer alignment with Europe” and allow his party to do “all the things that are in their heart as well as … their manifesto”.
“The bigger Labour’s mandate is perceived to be, they [Labour] won’t just be tiptoeing towards the EU, they’ll be running with open arms towards it,” he said.
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Gove also criticised the Labour leader’s claims in Thursday night’s BBC leaders’ debate that Jeremy Corbyn would have made a better prime minister than Johnson. “It’s the most preposterous thing to say,” he said. “If we’d had Corbyn in then, we wouldn’t have supported Ukraine against Russia, we wouldn’t have been able to galvanise the NHS in the way that Boris undoubtedly did during the Covid pandemic and secure the vaccine rollout. Boris is generous-hearted and patriotic. I know that there are also criticisms, but I also saw a phenomenally hard-working person who’s dedicated to doing the right thing.”
Gove questioned Starmer’s decision to serve in his shadow cabinet. He said: “The reason he [Starmer] did so is because he put his interests in one day leading the Labour Party ahead of telling the truth about what was right for the country. There were other people in the Labour Party, like Rachel Reeves and Liz Kendall, who refused to serve under Corbyn because they thought that his leadership was a moral stain on the Labour Party — and Starmer didn’t do that.”
One area where Gove and Labour have previously been in agreement was on the imposition of VAT on private school fees. Writing in The Times in 2017, the former education secretary said: “Private school fees are VAT-exempt. That tax advantage allows the wealthiest in this country — indeed, the very wealthiest in the globe — to buy a prestige service that secures their children a permanent positional edge in society at an effective 20 per cent discount. How can this be justified?”
Asked about Labour’s flagship policy, which the party believes can raise some £1.6 billion a year as part of its plans to recruit about 6,500 specialist state school teachers in England, Gove said he was “relaxed” about private schools being exempt from VAT.
Signalling a U-turn on his previous position, Gove, who attended the private Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen, said: “I think Labour’s policy is just a blanket tax increase. What I was arguing for was pressure on independent schools to do more to help the state sector and actually that has been happening.
“I don’t have any sort of ideological opposition to a private education. What I do believe is that our independent schools are a huge asset in this country … I would always want, in government, to respect the independence of independent schools, but at the same time nudge and encourage them to recognise a wider social responsibility.”
Gove, whose education reforms signalled a return to traditional educational values, said he intends to continue to be part of the debate on education and levelling up but does not think he will end up taking a seat in the House of Lords.
He claims he is leaving the House of Commons to make way for fresh talent — but that does not include Nigel Farage, who he does not believe will ever lead the Conservative Party.
Ruling out any future deal or merger with Reform, Gove said: “He [Farage] wants to destroy the Conservative Party. That is fair enough as a political position, but that means all Conservatives should beware. He’s not our ally. He’s our competitor and our challenger.”
Instead, Gove believes the future of the party depends on a new generation of women, including Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, Claire Coutinho, the energy secretary, and Laura Trott, the chief secretary to the Treasury.
“All three come from non-conventional Conservative backgrounds,” he said. “All three are people who, through their own hard work, have overcome barriers to be professionally successful before they entered parliament.
“All three are very clear-sighted, conviction Conservatives, but without some of the baggage of being involved in the battles of the past. All three have analysis of what we’ve got right and also some of the things that we’ve got wrong in the last 14 years that I think is compelling. So I think that what they bring is a freshness, a vigour, an intellectual clarity, a personal honesty, which will be the future of party.”
