‘Don’t ask about the love child!” jokes Michael Gove as he sweeps through Portcullis House, soft hair a-flying, slate suit a-flapping, aides eddying about him.
Well, is there one? Gove pauses, smiles, purses his pink lips. “I think that’ll have to come out later,” he says, with a titter.
This is not, after all, the time for scandal. Four days shy of party conference and the shadow secretary of state for children, schools and families must be on whip-smart form, no distractions, no love children, all in readiness for 18-hour days or at least “going to bed with Jeremy Paxman and waking up with John Humphrys”, he says. And although he insists he’s nervous — “always nervous ahead of party conference. I haven’t written the speech yet” — there is something brisk and crisp and calmly self-assured about him in his neat little tie as he swishes up to a boardroom, swigs a cup of tea and parks his slip-ons on the seat of a neighbouring chair.
At 42, Gove — who, in the flesh, is pale and whippety and curiously smooth, somewhere between Martin Clunes and Pee-wee Herman — is facing the “summit of my career”, he says. “Being secretary of state for education is what I’m aiming for, what I want to do and . . .” and, well, it will probably all be decided in 12 short minutes this week, when he outlines further details of his “schools revolution”, a much-heralded set of proposals for state education based on the Swedish voucher system.
A kind of extension of Tony Blair’s academies programme, this would consist of a nationwide constellation of not-for-profit, parent-led schools set up and managed according to certain guidelines. Each pupil would garner £5,000 in state funding, with inner-city children receiving more, although “we’re working out how much that should be and who should qualify”.
For countless parents frustrated at not being able to get their children into their local school of choice, the scheme presents an apparently golden opportunity to take matters into their own hands and slough off the restrictions of the local authorities, which “cream 15% off funding, essentially to pay bureaucrats”, he says.
Still, it’s all pretty radical, isn’t it? I could set up a school in my basement tomorrow, with Timmy and Totty from next door, hire Miss Honey from down the road and never mind if I want them to make puppets all day long or talk Welsh or worship the sun god Ra. Right?
Gove pauses. “If you put forward a business plan, we’d put you in touch with people to help you and then on the basis of who you were hiring . . .”
For middle-class yummy mummies with sharp elbows, business nous and an iPhone full of tutors, this kind of operation will come as a slice of heaven. But Gove is keen to make it work for those further down the socioeconomic scale: his policies are aimed at the Gateshead mum, he says, a no-nonsense working-class woman passionate about her kids. Passionate enough to set up a massive comprehensive with 2,500 feral children on a depressed sink estate? That’s some task, I say. But Gove is confident that they’re exactly the sort to bestir themselves to mass action. Out of desperation, if anything.
“I think what you’re likely to see is groups with a sense of mission,” he says. “I’ve talked to some groups in Birmingham who have strong representation among the Afro-Caribbean community, some of them with links to churches, who are desperate to have the sort of legislation we’ve talked about in order to set up schools.”
He pauses. “One of the humbling things has been the way in which people, who don’t have the sorts of resources that some of the glitzier organisations in education have, are absolutely passionate about trying to take advantage.”
Hmmm. Pie in the sky? Just last week the architect of the Swedish model, Anders Hultin, said this kind of system simply won’t work unless the schools are allowed to make a profit — why else set them up? — but Gove is adamant they should remain not-for-profit.
“There are over 4,500 charter schools in America of which fewer than 10% are for-profit, so it is empirically false to suggest that this idea can only work in a for-profit system. I’m meeting people every week who want to start new schools and I am not finding that profits are an issue.”
In fact, he’s so confident that it’ll all be perfectly fine that he’s instructed a team of lawyers “to help draw up legislation to identify those things that need to be changed”, so when he assumes office next May his shiny new education bill will be good to go.
Then he’s off again in that kid-glovey, mesmerising burr, explaining how the internet will help bring parents together, how a new independent body has been set up ... He really is an lissom orator. Someone told me that he’d delivered the finest, funniest best-man speech ever witnessed; certainly he’s the sort to use words such as “cadre” and “milquetoast” in the course of ordinary conversation and as for the hand gestures ... The hand gestures! Wave upon wave, they’re hypnotic and as I watch him and them I am reminded of the time he was caught unawares through a pane of glass on Newsnight rehearsing his “speech hand” at conference last year. Does he practise in the mirror at home in north Kensington wearing nothing but the Turnbull & Asser pyjamas that his wife, the journalist Sarah Vine, revealed first attracted her to him when they met years ago on a skiing trip?
Aaaaand back in the room, “... I’m going to tell you about some changes we’re going to make to Ofsted,” he is saying. Ah. Yes. Schools inspection. He wants to streamline the whole thing, trim down the number of targets and abolish the requirement to inspect already good schools, so that “we will have an even more intense process of inspecting those schools that are not doing well”. If parents raise a flicker of doubt, the inspectors will be sent back in to evaluate.
He is also very exercised on the subject of the national curriculum. Specifics are to be saved for this week, he says, but his fury at the displacement of history in favour of “citizenship” is widely documented.
“We need more history teaching,” he says, pointing out that in some secondary schools the subject is subsumed into wider topic areas from the earliest years. One such topic area he encountered was Star Wars, he splutters, “and it was being used to teach children about the English civil war, because it was about an intergalactic civil war”.
So I think we can take it that proper history with proper peasants and proper beheadings will be back, along with physics and vigorous streaming and it will be goodbye to lessons in how not to be Vicky Pollard. Well, no surprise: Gove has a whiff of the history don about him, albeit a cashmere-wearing neocon media-savvy history don.
At Oxford, which he reached via Robert Gordon’s college, Aberdeen’s most academic private day school, he read English, but his gleeful appearances on Late Review and the books he’s written — a biography of Michael Portillo, a blast against Islam, a study of the Northern Ireland peace process — hint at the range of his interests.
The adopted son of an Aberdeen fish merchant and his wife, Gove feels a “special sort of, um, gratitude to them”. His parents must have been agog at the artful, bright, scarily articulate young “cuckoo” they raised in their nest. He wears his learning lightly. Far from being the resident Tory egghead, “there are eggier heads than me in the shadow cabinet”, he insists, roaring with laughter, raising a knee and rocking backwards and forwards, slip-on waggling (see? History don): “Oliver Letwin, David Willetts, William Hague, George Osborne.”
This seems a little disingenuous from the man nicknamed “the Prof”: it is widely acknowledged that Gove’s fine grey cells are much valued by the leadership, as is his trophy status as The One That’s Never Accused of Being Etonian. Has he ever felt out of place among the crème de la crème? Well, if he did, that’s all in the past: they have an affectionate nickname for him now: Jon Bon Govey. “It was just Govey, and then it was Bon Govey, and one particular friend calls me just Bon ... David Cameron calls me a huge variety of things, most of which we’d better not go into,” he says. Do I sense a schoolboy pash? Still, arriving at Oxford was “different”, he admits. “Yeah. But I think everyone feels in their first term at university that they’re finding their feet. I made some good friends.”
Including Cameron, who persuaded him to abandon journalism in 2005 in favour of a career in politics. The two are famously close; they even share a school run. Doesn’t he get fed up with Cameron?
“I think the public can’t see enough of David Cameron,” he says, eyes dancing in amusement at his self-parodically pat politician’s answer. “Everyone knows that from time to time we share the school run” — Gove has two children, Beatrice, 8, and William, 6 — “but it doesn’t actually mean that David is in the car with me ... the whole point of the school run is that I sometimes see David’s children and he sometimes sees mine.” Nearly time for an Ofsted inspection, in fact? He laughs. “That may be a bit of a heavy hand.”
There’s something quite vulnerable about Gove: I do wonder how he will fare in power. When he was hauled over the coals in the expenses scandal earlier this year, he seemed utterly broken having to apologise for claiming for luxury furniture on expenses. “These things happen,” he says now. “One of the things about politics is that at different times you face attack, criticism from different quarters . . .” The public apology to his Surrey Heath constituents, a meeting in which his shame was palpable, must have been difficult.
“I just got on with the job,” he says. “People will have formed an opinion, made a statement, had a meeting, but I just carried on doing my job.”
One detail was particularly embarrassing, of course: his claim included £2,000 for Oka furniture. Oka is a company part-owned by Cameron’s mother-in-law, Annabel Astor. Was he aware of the connection? For the first time in the interview the garrulous Gove is tongue-tied. “Um . . .” he says. Silence. “The furniture decisions were made without reference to who owned the company. They were all made because they were ... Um ... No. I don’t tend to find out who the proprietor of the company . . .”
So, yes, last summer must have been tough. Did it shake his confidence in politics? Possibly. Certainly he doesn’t see himself as a politician for ever. “No,” he says, surprisingly. Will he go back to books, and to writing, full-time? “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know because I’m focused on the task in hand. I’m concentrating on getting that right and if I’ve got it right, whatever happens after that . . .”
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