It’s not just Suella Braverman and Dominic Raab who have got their old jobs back. Following the Truss interregnum, normal service has been restored in Whitehall, with Michael Gove being handed another post in his fourth Conservative administration. The erudite Aberdonian has returned to the Department of Levelling Up – the ministry he left just last month – as its Secretary of State once more, beginning his speech to officials this afternoon ‘As I was saying before I was interrupted…’
Gove’s appointment has cheered many of the department’s long-suffering staff, relieved, at last, to have a minister skilled in the art of Whitehall warfare. The man himself has made clear that levelling up is a mission close to his heart, publishing a White Paper in February that drew on Renaissance Italy for inspiration. And that sense of a homecoming has only been strengthened by the return of his closest aides: Henry Newman, Josh Grimstone and Andrew Hood, all of whom join Gove as his special advisers once more.
It’s not just the officials and spads who are familiar with Gove – one of his junior ministers has a bit of a history with the nightlife-loving legislator. Back in 1993, Gove was a journalist in his mid-twenties and was invited by the then Cambridge Union President Lucy Frazer to speak at the Cambridge Union in support of the motion ‘This house prefers a woman on top.’ Gove responded by unleashing a string of lewd jokes at Frazer’s expense and suggesting that she had done ‘remarkably well’ to come from ‘the back streets of the slums of Leeds’.
Good to see the minister practicing what it preaches when it comes to levelling up…
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