Of today’s corpses piled up in Downing Street, none has caused more shock than that of Michael Gove. That Nicky Morgan, who signed Gove’s nomination papers to be leader, has also gone hints at some kind of personal animosity. But might the explanation be more straightforward than that – simply one of his policy and approach as justice secretary?
Gove acquired a reputation as a great reformer during his time at the Department for Education, facing down huge opposition from teachers’ unions in the process. He incurred considerable personal cost for doing this, with David Cameron shifting him to the whips office before the last election on the instructions of Sir Lynton Crosby, who feared Gove to be electorally toxic.
When Gove was handed the Department for Justice following last year’s general election, it seemed as if he might do for the legal profession what he did for teachers. Yet it didn’t turn out that way. Far from it, he quickly lost his appetite for taking on vested interests and rolled back the reforms which his predecessor, Chris Grayling, had bravely been pursuing. Cuts to the £1.6 billion legal aid budget were abandoned.
From her vantage point of the Home Office Theresa May must have been appalled. For years she had been fighting the extradition of Jordanian terror suspect Abu Qatada (later acquitted in his native country when he was finally deported). By the time he was extradited he had run up a legal aid bill of over £500,000, with a total bill for taxpayers of £1.7 million. May had seen at first hand the excesses of the legal aid system and how it could be abused.
Gove’s reason for abandoning the reform scarcely encouraged confidence. He said that he didn’t want his department having to fight 99 legal cases which the profession had filed against the reforms. It was an open invitation to any group which dislikes government policy – take the government to court and it will probably give in.
Gove’s record in government, then, has been very old Tory. He was happy to take on the teachers, traditionally regarded by many in the party as being left-wing enemies. The legal profession, seen much more as allies of the Tories, received very different treatment.
There was also Gove’s attraction to the cause of prison reform. Theresa May first clashed with the coalition’s first justice secretary, Ken Clarke, in 2010, when she retorted to his promise to end prison as a place of punishment by saying: ‘The key for members of the public is that they want criminals to be punished. They want them taken off the streets.’ Gove appeared to go native when exposed to the prison reform lobby, saying he wanted prisons to ‘become centres of purpose, redemption and hope’ and telling the Howard League for Penal Reform that he wanted the prison population to fall.
While Theresa May was one of the original Tory modernisers determined to throw off the ‘nasty party’ tag, that has never meant that she has been softer or more liberal on crime. Michael Gove’s approach was so at odds that it is not hard to see why she wanted him out of the justice department and indeed the government altogether.
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