Toby Young Toby Young

My battle with Michael Gove’s Blob

The Education Secretary is right about the teaching establishment – show weakness, and they’ll destroy you

[Getty Images]

Michael Gove has been under fire this week for ‘sacking’ Sally Morgan as chair of Ofsted. You’d think he’d be within his rights not to re-appoint her, given that she’s a former aid of Tony Blair’s and her three-year term has come to an end. But no. This has become Exhibit A in the latest case for the prosecution against the Education Secretary, namely, that he’s too partisan, too ideological. He’s abandoned the ‘big tent’ approach that characterised the honeymoon period of the coalition and reverted to type. He’s a Tory Rottweiler.

All complete balls, of course. When it comes to education reform, supporters and opponents don’t divide along party lines. The reason Gove appointed Sally Morgan in the first place is because she supports academies and free schools. It’s the same reason he offered Andrew Adonis a job back in 2010 and still meets regularly with Blair himself. They’re all broadly sympathetic to the reforms he’s introduced since becoming secretary of state. The battles Gove is waging against the forces of reaction — the teaching unions, Whitehall officials, local authorities — are the same battles they waged in office.

Gove’s name for the anti-reform brigade is ‘the Blob’ and that’s often leapt upon by his opponents as yet more evidence that he’s become slightly cracked after almost four years in office. They accuse him of being paranoid, seeing enemies under every bed, like some latter-day McCarthy.

But the truth is, he’s always been wary of the Blob. He’s known from day one that the success of his reforms depends on facing down an army of ideological opponents, most of them with a vested interest in preserving the status quo. It’s precisely because he sees himself as an enemy of the educational establishment that he uses revolutionary rhetoric and has a poster of Lenin on his office wall.

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