Alex Massie Alex Massie

Michael Gove’s Brexit regret is much too little, much too late

Not the least extraordinary thing about the campaign to leave the European Union is that it turns out no-one was in charge of it. Things just happened and decisions were just made without the oversight or knowledge of the most senior politicians whose support for the project was reckoned, with some reason, to be crucial to its essential success. 

If Boris Johnson gave the Leave campaign a popular – and populist – presence in the nation’s television studios, Michael Gove gave it a certain intellectual credibility amongst the – admittedly small – percentage of the electorate that worries about such things. And with good reason: Gove’s intelligence, if not always his judgement, has never been in doubt. He has been a reforming minister in every department in which he has served. In his current role at the department of the environment – a top ten job after Brexit, incidentally – he sometimes gives the impression of being almost the only cabinet minister with even half an idea about what to do after the great day of national liberation arrives. And certainly one of the very few who, in his department’s case correctly, views it as an opportunity. 

But, really, it is possible to think this and to have a healthy admiration for Mr Gove while also thinking it’s not good enough for Michael Gove to wash his hands of a campaign in which he played such a leading part. Perhaps you cannot win a referendum without breaking eggs but there is something galling about seeing a man who cheerfully broke so many eggs apologising for their destruction as though that meant their destruction didn’t really matter because it was just a ploy, a means of winning votes, but certainly not something that should have been taken quite so very seriously. Come on. 

Yet here is Gove telling Tom Baldwin that he wishes the Leave campaign had not talked about the prospect of nearly 80 million Turks moving to Britain with quite the relish it did.

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