It must have been disheartening for the dwindling band of Brexit diehards to learn that Michael Gove has been wondering if ending the UK’s relationship with its principal trading partner made any sense. “I ask myself all the time, ‘was it the right thing to do?’” he admitted in an interview in the Financial Times. That’s up there with Karl Marx wondering if communism wasn’t a boo-boo, but Gove has never managed to either understand or sustain relationships. He befriended and betrayed both David Cameron and Boris Johnson – twice – and his marriage to Sarah Vine ended last year.
An aide to Liz Truss was quoted in the Sunday Times over the weekend as saying of Gove – after he apparently turned down an ambassadorship – that he was “deeply troubled”, with “a darkness inside him” that “corrupts his soul”.
I recall one of his longtime friends, a former journalist, telling me: “The thing about Michael is he is ultimately very lonely and Brexit gave him a chance to get out and have dinners with a lot of people and enjoy perhaps for the first time in his life a sense of comradeship. Even now if I ask him what he’s doing in the evening, it’s always Brexity people he’s off to see.”
