Peter Mckay

Diary – 4 October 2018

A weekend news report says Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s childhood has been scrutinised by colleagues ‘for clues to understanding this most paradoxical of politicians — the popular, ultra-courteous free-thinker who, by knifing Boris Johnson in the 2016 Tory leadership election, became a byword for treachery’. Gove was adopted as a baby and has never sought to meet his birth parents. He speaks fondly of the Aberdeen couple who adopted him. While the article concerned was generally favourable to Gove, the line about colleagues scrutinising his childhood jarred. It seemed to suggest childhood adoption might have inclined him to later-in-life treachery, as if that was the sad result of giving a child a home. Back-stabbing is hardly unknown in frontline politics. If you want a friend, buy a dog, aspirants to No. 10 are advised. Gove is certainly ultra-courteous, almost an Aberdonian version of Jacob Rees-Mogg. His soft word often turns away wrath. But he’s as hard as nails, a true son of the Granite City.

US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh surrounded himself with women when introducing himself to the nation. He included members of the girls’ basketball teams he’d coached, saying: ‘I love helping the girls grow into confident players.’ Then a row erupted when Christine Blasey Ford, a middle-aged psychology professor from California, accused him of sexually molesting her 36 years previously in Maryland, when they were both teenagers. In a reference to his basketball supporters, Time noted: ‘The row of young girls, legs bare in their private school skirts, looked different now’, inferring that they’d changed from innocent lassies into pouting Lolitas. Who to believe in this strange story: calculating, image-conscious Kavanaugh, who denies he’s molested any woman, or Dr Ford, who can’t remember where it happened, can’t recall who paid for a lie-detector test she volunteered to take, and who can’t explain other inconsistencies in her story? It’s a mad-sounding method of choosing judges for the highest court in the land.

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