Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Gove, Javid and the uses of backstory

Michael Gove’s launch was, easily, the strongest of any candidate yesterday and he deserves the plaudits he’s getting now. Even if you dislike him, his speech is worth listening to (it’s here) and it was made without notes.

I’ve heard him talk before about the school in Liverpool he mentioned where only one pupil got decent grades. In his original telling, his point was that the distance between Liverpool and Edinburgh (where his birth mother is from) was about the same as the distance between Aberdeen and Edinburgh – so he could have ended up in either city.

But alongside the cocaine use, another disclosure in Owen Bennett’s new book is that Gove was actually born in Aberdeen. So he modified his speech, dropping out the distance point, but the principle holds good. Small accidents, sliding doors, meant he ended up in the Oxford Union and was granted all the opportunities that sprang from that – rather than dropping out of a Liverpool school.

Sajid Javid has a similar thesis – of how his background explains his politics – and he has tried to tell it for the first time today with a video. It shows his wife and family, his brother and his mum, who welcomes him at her door in the dress of her native Pakistan and cooks for him.

There are some unintentionally comic scenes (when I grow up, I’d love for my family to wave me out of the door on my way to work) but overall it gives a sense of the person.

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