The BBC have given Michael Gove a podcast. Why?

He then stabbed his co-leader in the back, went back to work for him even when he knew he would be a disaster, then stabbed him in the front. He has been described as shifty, unprincipled, untrustworthy and a Machiavellian psychopath – not by Labour, but by Conservatives who have worked with him. 

Not even the Tory Party were daft enough to give Gove one of the great offices of state but apparently this is the kind of CV that gets you a job editing the Spectator and another hosting a BBC podcast.

Gove has developed a habit of apologising for some of the carnage he has inflicted – cancelling Labour’s school building project, lying about Turkey’s EU ascension, being part of governments that failed the victims of Covid and Grenfell; small stuff like that. So I listened to a recent episode of Surviving Politics that featured Arlene Foster with more eagerness than you might expect. In the presence of the hapless former DUP leader, would he finally apologise for the big one – Brexit itself?

Well, of course not. Gove did own up to another mistake, but that was only to humour Theresa May when she tried to fashion something workable out of the mess he and Boris Johnson had landed Britain in. His error, said Gove, was not to press harder for the mess we have now.

Foster – does she really count as a survivor, by the way, having been kicked out as leader by a party she helped to destroy? – was equally delusional. She and Gove agreed that May should never have said there would be no border in Ireland.

Foster said instead that there could have been an invisible border. “It’s almost as if there aren’t any borders anywhere else in the EU, but of course we know there are. And of course, there are solutions, but those solutions weren’t taken up,” she said. 

How these borders work and most importantly if any of them are like the one between Ireland and Northern Ireland was not discussed. Whether they are governed by anything like the Good Friday Agreement and were designed after decades of relentless terrorism to end a murderous conflict was not mentioned. 

Foster described her greatest success as the billions demanded by the DUP when she was leader, in order to keep May in No. 10. She and Gove laughed cheerfully at the idea that it was a shameless bung, and said the money has been used to help Northern Ireland to have almost “the best broadband in Europe”. It’s a proud boast, but you suspect that the 56% who voted Remain in NI might have preferred slightly slower download speeds if that meant remaining in the EU.

They talked about Boris Johnson, who insisted he wouldn’t lie to Arlene and then – guess what?! – lied to Arlene. “He let us down badly and he knows that,” she said. 

The truth is that Arlene Foster and Michael Gove also let the people of Northern Ireland down, badly, and they know it. Foster pursued Brexit with rank cynicism, and it is hard to believe her party did not do so in order to scupper the Good Friday Agreement. 

As to the real problems that Brexit has caused in Ireland on both sides of the border, there was not a word. The interview felt like nothing more than watching two unrepentant, recidivist arsonists blaming the Fire Service of Northern Ireland for failing to save the buildings they themselves had set on fire. Still, at least they survived.

Or one of them did. The one true moment of value in this podcast was when Foster described how dreadful it felt to be stabbed in the back by your colleagues and Gove groaned and tut-tutted. We can be sure that if he ever encountered – say, by looking in the mirror – someone who’d done something like that, Michael Gove would give himself a piece of his own mind!

I’m not sure I can survive another episode of Surviving Politics. Although I suppose we should all deserve some credit for surviving Michael Gove.