Michael gove

Faintly stunned Liberal Democrats report that Michael Gove is an absentee chief whip. He is simultaneously there at the coalition whips’ meetings but not there: a ghostly presence; a bored, miserable figure who has not forgiven or forgotten David Cameron’s decision to demote him from his beloved Education Department. It’s dangerous to humiliate a man and then give him the power to humiliate you. Even in the fag end of a fixed-term parliament, which long ago ran out of useful business to conduct, a government needs a good whips office if it is to stay out of trouble. The Cameron government does not have one and is always tripping over

Tony Blair has taken some time out from posing awkwardly with his wife in order to pen a piece for the New York Times. While he tries to avoid getting drawn on talking about UK domestic politics explicitly, his feeling are poorly hidden: ‘…there have grown up powerful interest groups that can stand in the way of substantial and necessary reform. Anyone who has ever tried to reform an education system, for example, knows how tough and bitter a struggle it is. The bureaucracy fights change. The teachers’ unions fight change. The public gets whipped up to defeat change even when it is in the public’s own interest. The nearest

The government has just won the vote extending the debate on the justice and home affairs opt-outs by just nine votes – 251 ayes to 242 noes. This means that MPs have approved the motion for the debate to continue to 10pm, which rebels and Labour had turned against because the Speaker had said that this was not a vote on the European Arrest Warrant. Theresa May is insistent, though, that this is a vote on the matter. Such a narrow win is clearly a relief for ministers  – and many of them had been hauled into the Commons early by panicked whips who suddenly realised they were facing a

Alex Salmond is on his way out. The First Minister gives every impression of enjoying – or at least making the most of – his farewell tour. And why not? Far from weakening the SNP, defeat in September’s referendum has – at least for now – strengthened the party. Its supremacy is unchallenged and while recent polls putting the Nationalists on 50 percent of the vote are unlikely – surely! – to last forever this is the kind of problem worth having. Nevertheless, the First Minister’s final days in office have also reminded us that policy and, indeed, philosophy are not necessarily Salmond’s strengths. Unusually, First Minister’s Questions proved a

David Laws is an honourable, clear-thinking politician – but looming general elections (and, in the Liberal Democrats’ case, threatened extinction) can have strange effects on a man. Hence his comments about the school curriculum today. He starts off with what sounds like a liberal complaint: politicians ought not to interfere with education. The school curriculum should not be set by the “whims of here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians,” he said. “”Ministers float in and out of the department, often for quite short periods of time” which created “too much turbulence”, he said. Amen. Michael Gove’s reforms are all about setting schools free from the interference of politicians in local authorities and thanks

Privately, the Conservatives are probably not particularly surprised about the demise of Bob Neill’s EU referendum bill, this time at the hands of the Liberal Democrats. It was always a Downing Street ruse to help quell backbench rebellion and senior Tories have ever since viewed the progress both of this bill and its predecessor, led by James Wharton, as an opportunity to cheer up the backbenches with bacon butty breakfasts and so on. Of course, it had a political point, now well proven, which was that only the the Conservatives want to let Britain decide its continued membership of the EU. That both Labour and the Lib Dems have blocked

MPs have a free vote tonight on Zac Goldsmith’s amendment to the Recall Bill. But I have learned that instead of voting with their Tory colleague, the Prime Minister and chief whip are to abstain in the vote. Michael Gove and David Cameron have agreed to do so, not because they oppose Goldsmith’s proposals, which will, he claims, ensure a powerful form of recall rather than that endorsed by Nick Clegg. Instead, they will not walk through the lobbies because the Lib Dems have asked them not to. Clegg and co were apparently wary of an ambush by the Tories whereby the party would officially hold a free vote, but

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Charlotte Leslie and James Forsyth join Sebastian Payne to discuss the NHS.” startat=1410] Listen [/audioplayer] As someone who believes that a Labour government would be a calamity for Britain, I ought not to mind the recent fuss about NHS Wales. Yes, it is a disaster – as the Daily Mail has been cleverly highlighting. And it has been run by Labour for 15 years, so they’re guilty as charged. Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, makes this point powerfully today. But if the English NHS is much better by comparison to Wales, it’s not because of him, nor because of David Cameron. It’s because of Tony Blair. The NHS

Is Number 10 really preparing for a U-turn on the European Arrest Warrant? After Coffee House reported some odd manoeuvres by chief whip Michael Gove involving him suggesting to Tory MPs that it might be better for the government not to opt back into the EAW, the topic came up at this afternoon’s lobby briefing. The Number 10 spokesperson told journalists that: ‘The government has set out the areas where it is, in principle, seeking to opt back in. We want to secure European agreement on that and then we will take a final view on which ones we opt back into.’ That sounds rather like there is room for

Why is Nicky Morgan the Education Secretary? She’s long been billed as a rising star in the government and has put in some very passionate and impressive performances on the conference fringe this year. But her speech to the Conservative conference hall this afternoon didn’t really answer that question. It was workmanlike, and its main mission seemed to be to tick boxes such as ‘must be nice to teachers’, rather than give us any sense of Morgan’s personal mission. Of course there was a difficult contrast between the minister apparently given the departmental responsibility because she’s not Michael Gove and Michael Gove himself, who appeared emotional as delegates applauded him

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_25_Sept_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Freddy Gray, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth on Cameron’s radicalism” startat=70] Listen [/audioplayer]No one goes to Birmingham to revive a marriage. But that is what David Cameron and the Conservative party must do next week at conference. They must find a way to put the passion back into their relationship, to learn to trust each other again ahead of the general election. For neither can win without the other next May. That election is there to be won. The Labour gathering in Manchester this week was not one of a party convinced that it is going to surge to victory in a few months. The atmosphere was subdued,

There’s an interesting interview in The Guardian this weekend with one of the most famous teachers, or ex-teachers, in Britain, Katharine Birbalsingh. You’ll probably know her. She’s the woman with fabulous hair who got a standing ovation at the Tory Party conference for a speech about a broken education system – ‘it’s broken because it keeps poor children poor’ – which confirmed the existence of ‘a culture of excuses, of low standards”. It was more or less a vindication of Michael Gove, then Education Secretary, and all he stood for. Now she says she regrets that speech – ‘it ruined my life. I should probably have kept my head down’. She’s

Only one person sitting around the cabinet table truly understands how Islamism works – and David Cameron has silenced him. I’m referring to Michael Gove, who in addition to studying radical Islam for many years was waging war against it in British schools – often surreptitiously, in order not to alert the enemy. The defenestration of Gove was the most cowardly act of Dave’s premiership. That fact was underlined yesterday when A-level* students started trolling the former education secretary because, thanks to him, they no longer get an automatic A* just for turning over the paper at the beginning of the exam. As chief whip, and not even a full