Michael Gove for leader? There have been several suggestions to this effect recently
— not least from Toby Young in his debut column for the Sun on Sunday. But Tim Montgomerie today
quotes one of Gove’s advisors on ConservativeHome, saying
that the education secretary has ruled himself out on the grounds that he doesn’t have the character for the job. This certainly squares with what Gove told me in September 2008. The
interview was published here, but I’ve looked up my notes and can reprint
his answer in a little more detail.
I put to him a Westminster rumour that he promised Sarah Vine, his wife, that he’d never run for leader. He threw his head back and laughed loudly. This is what he said:
If people don’t see their family, he said, then sooner or later there will be a crash, a burnout and a heavy price to pay:‘“It’s not as if she wrung the concession out of me at knifepoint,” he says. “Look, I’d never run for leader because I know what the job entails. I know it would place an impossible burden on me and my family. And I told Sarah that if it ever becomes the case that the burden upon us is just intolerable, then I will have to take evasive action. I’d have to say ‘I’m sorry, I can’t carry on doing this,’ and already I feel it, already I’ve got to say that things I should be doing, speeches, sometimes I say ‘no, I’ve got to preserve some time for my family.’ So as for getting in to a job like that, then no.”’
I asked if he meant this in terms of media presentation:‘And irrespective of everything else, I know what leaders have, I know what it takes to be in that job and I just know anyway that I don’t have it. There are several people, I won’t name them all, in the shadow cabinet, who could be Prime Minister. Fortunately the person who is best equipped happens to be our leader at the moment and of all the people in the shadow cabinet who could be Prime Minister, I know that I’m not one of them. Absolutely.’
‘There is just an extra dimension. In the same way as, if you are a journalist, there is a limit to the number of jobs that you know you are able to do. And some of us know that we could never have been editor. That doesn’t mean to say necessarily that we are tortured by self doubt.’
Comments