Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Michael Gove’s campaigning masterclass

In the past few weeks, the Tories have been so busy fighting each other that they appear to have forgotten about the Opposition party. But now, while things are quieter in the parliamentary recess, senior figures are starting to take the fight back to Labour. Michael Gove has written a barnstormer of an Op-Ed in today’s Telegraph which marks the start of this onslaught with quite some gusto.

He describes Ed Miliband as ‘as clearly defined as a blancmange in a hurricane’ and pokes fun at his recent Google Big Tent speech about Willy Wonka and Mr Burns. ‘With less than two years before the general election, the Opposition has so little of weight to say that it makes a hole in the air seem substantial,’ he writes. It must be a welcome break from his pantomime battle with the teaching unions, but the same love of a fight is very clear in this piece.

But Gove, clearly offering a masterclass in campaigning to the rest of his party when they stop tearing chunks off one another, also manages to pop a neat little party political broadcast into his piece, pointing out all the government’s achievements on cutting the deficit, education, tax and welfare reform, immigration, crime, the NHS and the EU.

The party machine is trying as best it can to turn away from the infighting of the past few weeks so it can get its own achievements across and put the spotlight on Labour. Expect to see many more pieces that follow this Gove masterclass in attacking the opposition.

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