With Michael Gove it’s all about the drugs. Always has been. How to find exactly the right dosage to keep himself more or less stable. And in the past year that has sometimes become a near on impossible task. Mikey has all but given up the day job as secretary of state for levelling up. His department has even been forced to hand back money that had been earmarked for key projects as he hadn’t got round to spending it.
Truth is that the Govester has been spending more and more time in the crack den he has had built on his department’s roof. Most days he just stares into the abyss that is the chaos that he and the Conservative government have caused over the last 14 years. There will be a reckoning and Mikey can scarcely bear to pay the price.
Occasionally, though, he can be tempted out of his stupor to engage with the real world. Always a nervy time for his minders as they are never quite sure which Govester they are going to get. The sweaty, wild-eyed, manic version or the near comatose, morose, self-pitying man.
The early signs were not good. Mikey had been due to give a keynote speech about antisemitism at a Jewish community centre in north London at 10am. Journalists and delegates had been told to arrive between 9 and 9.30. But by 10.20 there was still no sign of the Govester. Just intermittent bursts of chillout music played through the hall’s loudspeakers.
Backstage, the minders were working overtime. Whatever they are getting paid, it’s not enough. Miraculously, the minister eventually appeared. A triumph in itself. The organisers let out a large sigh of relief. The first hurdle had been successfully negotiated.
And the second. Because when Mikey started speaking he initially sounded totally plausible. A bit detached, in a slightly too pleased with himself undergraduate at the Oxford Union kind of way, but that’s always been his style. Less a speech and more a punchy history lecture. Preaching to the converted.
For the first 25 minutes there was little for anyone to argue with as he went through the formation of the state of Israel, the Jews’ search for a home, and antisemitism past and present. If you had to make a criticism, it was that the Govester had forgotten he was meant to be a politician. Rather, he seemed bemused that no one was actually doing anything about the racist abuse. Still, the drugs were just about working.
Until they weren’t. Maybe it was just a nasty comedown but then Mikey went rogue. Allowed himself to show his real self. His nasty self. Is there any other? He may fancy himself as a libertarian but he doesn’t have a liberal bone in his body. The Govester would fit in quite nicely in the modern Chinese Communist party.
The only good protester was a dead protester. Bring on the tanks. Tell the police to stop being so goddamned nice. Crack some skulls. Inside every protesting university student lurked a secret lefty antisemite. Mikey did name a few rightwing antisemites in the interests of balance but his contempt was all reserved for those on the left. The bien pensants who cloak their antisemitism in rubbish about wanting a peaceful resolution to the war in Gaza.
Next the Govester singled out Kemi Badenoch for special praise. She was right to hate the young, the poor, the disabled, pretty much everyone. Almost certainly the kiss of death for Kemi’s leadership ambitions. Mikey has never knowingly backed a winner.
He ended in full-on rant. He refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the international criminal court. How dare it cite Benjamin Netanyahu. It was only meant to go for terrorists and rogue states. Not for democracies that might have broken the rules. That was much too close to home. If they could go for Bibi they could go for anyone. Maybe even us. His minders hastily bundled him into the car before he could do any more damage.
Still, the Govester wasn’t the only minister out and about pursuing his own eclectic agenda. The work and pensions secretary, Mel Stride, was at a jobcentre in south London on a one-man mission to get the unemployed back to work. He didn’t seem to realise that it had been 14 years of Tory government that had led to this. Still, best not to tell him now. It might blow his mind.
“British jobs for British workers,” he declared. Or more accurately, “British jobs for British shirkers”. For Stride was most keen for all those lazy bastards who have been claiming benefits for imaginary ailments to fill the shit jobs that we used to get foreigners to do. Given that Caring Mel is himself likely to be unemployed after the next election, maybe he could try his hand at looking after dementia patients. Except, these jobs were never intended for people like him.
Nor was Stride in any mood to back down on bankrupting people whose earnings had inadvertently exceeded the carer’s allowance limit. “I care as much as any other person would,” he said. Though not enough to do anything about it. If you snooze, you lose. People should learn to keep better track of their own finances. You got the feeling Stride couldn’t wait for the Tories to lose the next election. Let someone else deal with the workshy riff-raff.
Meanwhile in the Commons, the Treasury minister John Glen was outlining the details of the government’s proposed compensation scheme for those affected by the contaminated blood scandal. On Monday, the prime minister had said how sorry he was for the failures of successive governments. It wasn’t clear if he included his own in that. By Tuesday the scale of that apology was apparent on the Tory benches. The government benches were barely a quarter full.
Glen did his best to make it sound as if he was sincere in his belief that this should never happen again. He probably even meant it. MPs have very short-term selective memories when it suits them. Believe they are of a higher moral order than their predecessors as they wash away the sins of the past. Only, we all know we will back here saying the same things all over again within a matter of years. If not months.
Where is the grand, futile gesture? The one that might signify real change. A minister resigning on behalf of all those ministers who got away with it. That would take courage. Integrity. Pigs might fly.