Martin Kettle is all worked up to learn that Michael Gove is either a cynic or an extremist, now his extremism, or cynical pose of same, affects an issue he cares about.
Where was Kettle when Gove wrote a whole book about the secret rulers of the world’s scheme to hand Europe over to the Arabs? Didn’t he read his own newspaper’s detailed coverage of Gove picking a special adviser who turned out to be a eugenicist? Or its award-winning coverage of him using his wife’s GMail account for confidential government business in order to break the Freedom of Information Act? Did he not think someone who was a News International editor in the phone-hacking, gak-ridden imperial phase might be a bit of a cynical careerist bastard? What about when he brought the eugenics guy back to help run his referendum campaign? Didn’t he notice him arguing that the country needs to be more like Albania?
None of them affected Kettle’s holidays, I guess, so there you go. Personally I said back in 2006 or thereabouts that Michael Gove would take us into the next Iraq War, and it’s telling that David Cameron kept him a long, long way from anything related to foreign policy. Now, though, he thinks he’s found a way to perpetrate a similarly atrocious policy disaster without even being in the Cabinet.
I do hope, though, that the referendum might yet give the commentariat a Gary Larson moment on Vote Leave’s whole tin-pot triumvirate of tat, Gove, IDS, and Boris Johnson.
They’re arseholes! And what have we been licking? Sadly, Larson can also offer us the likely response.
Kettle’s the guy talking here: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/3b/22/82/3b2282217e7ef0eaf8ffc17b8e0c848f.jpg
Also, there was some reporting (which I’m having a lot of trouble finding on Google) about how Gove’s role at Policy Exchange was to channel in US donor money with the aim of shifting UK politics further to the right. And dark mutterings that this was part of his “kingmaker” image.
His times column in the early 2000s was remarkably bloodthirsty. I vaguely remember a post September 11 column in which he effectively demanded the carpet bombing of Afghanistan as just one of the measures needed to deal with The Muslims
Gove is the guy who wrote that he had fallen in love with Tony Blair because of the way Blair had managed to get the UK involved in the invasion of Iraq.
That is presumably why Kettle quite liked Gove.
That is why Gove is a dangerous idiot.
Wait, what is this book of Gove’s? It sounds entertaining.
Guth: Celsius 7/7
Oh wow, according to amazon blurb he believes that the west has had a policy of appeasement towards terrorism. I would laugh, but lots of dead civilians makes that impossible.
So the question is, at what point can we put him into the ‘evil’ camp?