Gove skewers Gordon

Matthew d'Ancona 11:59am

As I predicted yesterday, Michael Gove’s speech to the Bow Group this morning was a belter: as trenchant and subtle an analysis of Gordon Brown’s politics as any Tory politician has yet made. The Gover launched his attack more in sorrow than in anger – and it was all the deadlier for that. Look at his choice of historical precedents for the Prime Minister:

David Lloyd George – one of our most historically significant Chancellors whose peacetime premiership descended into an exercise in idealism-free positioning, truckling to establishment media figures and ideological drift.

Lyndon B Johnson – a man whose early career was marked by a genuine desire to tackle poverty and deprivation but whose idealism was thwarted first by the success of the more dazzlingly charismatic younger man to whom he played number two and whose eventual occupancy of the highest office was shaped by a cynical surfing of events not a principled programme of change.

And Francois Mitterrand – another politician, initially capable of being viewed as an idealist, whose early experience of having his radicalism checked by events left him deploying all his talents not to transform France but to hold on, by every manoeuvre possible, to the highest office, as if the mere occupancy of power by someone from a socialist party was itself a mark of progress.

Ouch. Gove’s portrait is of a man of passionate idealism driven to make a series of historic compromises which “in his heart” he did not believe in at all. Brown centralised power to win support for Labour’s tax and spend agenda by command and control. The result, however, was falling productivity in the NHS and education and demoralised health and education professionals, exhausted and demeaned by bureaucratic control.

Here’s Gove on what Brown’s “Big Idea” for personalised public services really means.

Like those letters from direct mail companies that begin with our Christian name but have the same centrally-generated content, or cold calls from marketing companies which affect intimacy but operate to a tightly-ordered script, the Government’s “personalised” public services offer just the level of distinctiveness the centralised bureaucracy consider necessary to make us feel looked after. But without that proper responsiveness to our needs which puts us in control. There has been no renewal, no real “change”.

All now is tactics and Tory-bashing, says Gove:

“The tragedy of Gordon Brown's premiership, however long it lasts, is that its remaining raison d'etre is its own longevity….there is no newly-refurbished politics of the Left, simply an itch to centralise and a faith in bureaucratic control which speaks of nothing so much as an attachment to power itself.”

Rarely has sympathy been so lethal. My hunch is that this speech will really annoy the PM, precisely because it surveys his intellectual evolution with such precision and faux-empathy. Expect retaliation soon.