Forget Nigel Farage, and his Arron Bankski bankroller. The real bad boys of Brexit were Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.
They knew it, too. Remember that slapped fish look on their faces the day after the referendum? Heads bowed, a rare, shared moment of shame and self-awareness, as it dawned on them that their jolly jape had gone a bit far.
They got over it of course, bad boydom being part of who they are and what they do. Johnson’s bad boydom was so blatant and multifaceted that eventually, far too late, it led to his defenestration.
Gove’s was more subtle, his survival instincts more refined, which is why he was at the top table for almost all of the 14-year Tory government shitshow. There’s a Dr Gove and Mr Hyde quality about him. Johnson, by contrast, is Mr Hyde and Mr Hyde.
Gove’s energy, and the political skills needed to get things done, cannot be denied. Nor, however, can the negative effects of what he did.
He was the bad boy of education, scrapping the school building programme and bringing in reforms aimed at recreating his own education for a younger generation, whose teachers are near-universal in saying the Govian era took us backwards.
There were moments I sensed he might be a good boy at Justice, where he tried to focus on sentencing reform and rehabilitation, but didn’t stick around long enough to get them done because he was more interested in Brexit. A justice system on the verge of collapse as the Tories left office was not his fault alone, nor his sole legacy, but it is a big part of it.
He did some decent things at Defra, and often said the right things as secretary of state for Levelling Up. But it was a department in search of a strategy to match a Johnson slogan. It never came, so levelling up never happened.
As the right wing media continue to try to create false equivalence between blatant Tory corruption involving multimillion-pound contracts for friends and donors, and a few Labour tickets to football matches and concerts, Gove is a bad boy on that front, too. Yes, freebie football tickets, undeclared.
But, more seriously, he was responsible for coordinating the government response to Covid, with its vaunted “VIP lane”, and how very cosy that the chair of finance of Gove’s leadership bid won £164m in five Covid PPE contracts.
That is of course chicken feed to “Baroness” Michelle Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, but as we wait for Labour’s new Covid corruption commissioner to feel their collars, let’s hope we learn why Mone was able to claim to another Cabinet Office minister that Gove had asked her “urgently” to contact them. Can you even begin to imagine the frenzy if this were a Labour minister?
On similar territory, I have yet to see a proper explanation for Gove living for three years at our expense in a £25m government-owned grace and favour residence in Carlton Terrace, London. At the start, there was a security element to it, but three years? Again, imagine if this were a Labour minister how big a scandal the Tory press would judge it to be.
This underlines Gove’s real talent – and luck – as a politician. He and Johnson are journalists at heart and for years have got away with far more from their own kind as a consequence.
So now they have come full circle, back where they belong… hacks in the right wing media ecosystem that bred them and fed them. Two political journalists who became journalist politicians, whose storytelling did huge harm to the country.
Johnson has a book out, serialised – where else? – in the Mail, the first taste a story about – what else? – Prince Harry.
Johnson may have been prime minister of a permanent member of the United Nations security council, and responsible for one of the most consequential policy changes in our history, Brexit. But after a lifetime churning out stories, the veracity of which was neither here nor there, effect and impact all that mattered, he knows what tickles the private parts of the right-wing ragosphere, and the royals are top of the list.
Then a clearly fictitious nonsense about a so-called plan to invade The Netherlands to seize European Union-owned vaccines. Were it true, we would have known about it at the time. It is all of a piece with his made-up stories about banned crisp flavours when Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, or Gove’s warnings that millions of Turks were heading our way unless we left the EU.
Gove is now following Johnson to the editor’s chair of the Spectator, recently purchased via the deep pockets of GB News funder Paul Marshall, a former Lib Dem turned rightwards to Brexit… by the man he has just made editor. So stand by for more climate change scepticism, Brexit damage denialism, culture wars, Islamophobia dressed up as “legitimate concerns about immigration”.
More putting media interest before national interest, party before country. More storytelling, more Tory Party game-playing, more Olympian sitting in judgement of all they survey, all that is wrong in the world, with no sense or acknowledgment of their enormous contribution to that.
Talking to a police officer, after a long shift, I learned that every single call-out she had done that day had been to deal with a mental health crisis, and that if they called for an ambulance, it would be “tomorrow” before it came. “However bad you think it is out there,” she said, “it’s actually worse.” Labour really have inherited a Britain broken by the Tories.
I only met Maggie Smith a couple of times, but I felt I knew her well, as one of our closest friends, Christopher Downes, the partner of former GLC chairman Illtyd Harrington, was her secretary, and entertained us endlessly with stories of her wit, her spikiness, her talent, her eccentricities.
Chris would have been heartbroken, had he still been alive, as her death was announced on Friday. My partner Fiona spoke at his funeral, memorable to many for the fact that Maggie arrived, fashionably late, the noise of the church door opening as she did so, ensuring all eyes turned to her. Chris would have loved the fact that, even at his funeral, Maggie Smith was suddenly the centre of attention.
Standing on platform 3 at Warrington Bank Quay station, I listened as the announcer warned that the incoming Glasgow-Euston train was “very, very busy,” and that it might be an idea to wait for the next one.
Needless to say, we all piled on to try our luck, and so I found myself sharing floor space between carriages with three others, two of whom had been there since Glasgow. Our shared annoyance led to a very interesting and enjoyable conversation. All things being equal, I would have preferred a seat. But the journey sped by.
So many thanks to Glaswegian Martin Doherty, who manages the BP Andrew oil rig in the North Sea; Brighton-born Glasgow primary school teacher Charlotte Reeves (the kids’ book is in the post, Charlotte), and the young American who was on his way to the British Library to do some research work, and who shared my dread of Donald Trump returning to power.
Trains dreadful, people good. British transport 2024.
