Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Will Michael Gove dare to bring Christianity into his prison reform plans?

This April, Michael Gove wrote in The Spectator: ‘To call yourself a Christian in contemporary Britain is to invite pity, condescension or cool dismissal.’ Certainly, the titters it provoked in the more left-wing corners of Twitter rather proved his point (a white man? complaining of prejudice?). On faith, as in everything else, Britain today erodes into fragments, small landscapes inhabited by the mutually deaf.

I carry no brief for the man: my instinctive sympathy with his school reforms is matched only by my frustration with what Ian Leslie, in a profile published this week, calls the temperament by which Gove ‘is drawn irresistibly to the theatre of battle’. But even his greatest enemies don’t deny that Gove is a man of conviction. (Indeed, many use it as an insult). In an age of bureaucrats, we’re hungry for any hint of principles: hence the election of Jeremy Corbyn, with his assumption of a monopoly on morality. It’s no surprise, then, that it was pressure from both Corbyn and Gove that pincered David Cameron into a climb-down over contracts with the Saudi prison system today.

But until now, Gove has struggled to establish his own moral narrative in the broader public eye, not least for the reasons he gently suggested in that Spectator feature. Listen to any Michael Gove speech and you’ll hear his passion for meritocracy framed in terms of self-fulfilment through virtue; hear him talk on prison reform, and you’ll pick up stories of redemption and repentance; even his opposition to Saudi Wahhabism is based on a vision of Christianity’s more merciful alternative. I sense that he’d love to be allowed to base his pitch on Christian values. But here in Britain, we don’t really do God.

Nowhere was this tension more apparent than in last night’s Panorama, which looked at prison reform in Texas.

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