To the Covid Inquiry, the longest-running farce outside of the West End. With costs for the great gravy train now expected to top £200 million, Fleet Street hacks are certainly getting their money’s worth. There was the mammoth grilling of a brooding Boris Johnson in December 2023. The ritual humiliation of ‘simple’ Simon Case back in May. And the spectacular sniping of Matt Hancock too at which the former Health Secretary concluded almost everyone was to blame except, er, himself!
So who would be the latest ex-politician to enter into the crosshairs of Baroness Hallett today? Step forward Michael Gove, up before the inquiry to face questions about his role in Covid contracts. The charge put to the onetime Cabinet Office minister was that he had told officials to ‘circumvent’ regulators to help entrepreneur James Dyson. A minute was submitted from 25 March 2020, suggesting that Gove wanted Dyson’s ventilators approved by the MHRA within 48 hours.
Nonsense, declared Gove, such a suggestion was ‘absurd’. He insisted that the minute was phrased in ‘shorthand’ and that what it was meant to say was that he wanted to see the Dyson ventilator approved – provided it passed the tests. ‘If I had told the MHRA to approve a product, they would have told me where to get off’, he added.
But the best moment of the tête-à-tête came when attention turned towards the Good Law Project, Jolyon Maugham’s preferred vehicle for relevance in public life. Asked about its work on exposing procurement contracts, Gove delivered an assault as brutal as Maugham’s Boxing Day slaughter:
I have a very low opinion of the Good Law Project. I believe that its title is an almost perfect oxymoron. The man who runs it is a politically-motivated grifter.
Ouch. Lucky for us, Gove wasn’t wearing a kimono when he said it…
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