Michael Gove

Michael Andrew Gove (; born Graeme Andrew Logan, 26 August 1967) is a British politician serving as Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations since 2021. He has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Surrey Heath since 2005. A member of the Conservative Party, he has served in various Cabinet positions under Prime Ministers David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Gove has twice run to become Leader of the Conservative Party, in 2016 and 2019, finishing in third place on both occasions.

Born in Aberdeen, Gove was in care until being adopted aged four months old, after which he was raised in the Kittybrewster area of the city. He attended the independent Robert Gordon's College and studied English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He then began a career as a journalist at ''The Press and Journal'' before having a long tenure as a leader writer at ''The Times''. Elected for Surrey Heath at the 2005 general election, he was appointed to the Shadow Cabinet by Cameron in 2007 as Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families.

Appointed Secretary of State for Education in the Cameron–Clegg coalition, Gove terminated the previous Labour government's Building Schools for the Future programme, reformed A-Level and GCSE qualifications in favour of final examinations, and responded to the Trojan Horse scandal. The National Association of Head Teachers, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, the National Union of Teachers and the NASUWT passed motions of no confidence in his policies at their conferences in 2013. In the 2014 cabinet reshuffle he was moved to the post of chief whip. Following the 2015 general election and the formation of the majority Cameron government, Gove was promoted to Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor. As the co-convenor of Vote Leave, Gove was seen, along with Johnson, a fellow Conservative MP, as one of the most prominent figures of the 2016 referendum on EU membership. He was campaign manager for Johnson in the 2016 Conservative Party leadership election but withdrew his support on the morning Johnson was due to declare and announced his own candidacy, finishing third behind May and Andrea Leadsom.

Following May's appointment as Prime Minister, Gove was dismissed from the Cabinet but was appointed to the second May government as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs following the 2017 general election. He launched a second Conservative leadership bid in 2019 although eventually came third behind Johnson and Jeremy Hunt. Upon the appointment of Johnson as Prime Minister, Gove was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with responsibilities including preparations for a no-deal Brexit. He took on the additional role of minister for the Cabinet Office in the 2020 cabinet reshuffle. After the 2021 cabinet reshuffle he served as Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations until Gove told Johnson to resign during the July 2022 Government crisis and was dismissed by Johnson. Under Prime Minister Sunak, Gove was reinstated to his previous roles of Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations.

Early life

Gove was born as Graeme Andrew Logan on 26 August 1967. His biological mother, whom he originally believed to have been an unmarried Edinburgh student, was in fact a 23-year-old cookery demonstrator. Gove regarded his birthplace as Edinburgh until it was revealed in a biography in 2019 that he was born in a maternity hospital in Fonthill Road, Aberdeen. Logan was put into care soon after he was born. At the age of four months he was adopted by a Labour-supporting couple in Aberdeen, Ernest and Christine Gove, by whom he was brought up. After he joined the Gove family, Logan's name was changed to Michael Andrew Gove. His father, Ernest, ran a fish processing business and his mother, Christine, was a lab assistant at the University of Aberdeen, before working at the Aberdeen School for the Deaf.

Gove, his parents, and his sister Angela lived in a small property in the Kittybrewster area of Aberdeen, before relocating to Rosehill Drive. He was educated at two state schools (Sunnybank Primary School and Kittybrewster Primary School), and later, on the recommendation of his primary school teacher, he sat and passed the entrance exam for the independent Robert Gordon's College. In October 2012, he wrote an apology letter to his former French teacher for misbehaving in class. Gove joined the Labour Party in 1983 and campaigned on behalf of the party for the 1983 general election. Outside of school, he spent time as a Sunday school teacher at Causewayend Church. As he entered sixth year he had to apply for a scholarship as his family fell on difficult economic circumstances. He passed the scholarship exam and served as a school prefect in his final two years.

From 1985 to 1988 he read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, during which time he joined the Conservative Party. He became a member of the Oxford University Conservative Association and was secretary of Aberdeen South Young Conservatives. He helped to write speeches for Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet ministers, including Peter Lilley and Michael Howard. During his first year, he met future Prime Minister Boris Johnson and ran his campaign to be President of the Oxford Union. In an interview with Andrew Gimson, Gove remarked that at Oxford, Johnson was "quite the most brilliant extempore speaker of his generation". Gove was elected as Oxford Union President a year after Johnson. He graduated with an upper second.

After university, when applying for a job at the Conservative Research Department, he was told he was "insufficiently political" and "insufficiently Conservative", so he turned to journalism.

Journalistic career

Gove first found employment on the Peterborough column of ''The Daily Telegraph'', after passing an interview with Max Hastings. Struggling to maintain his career in London, he moved back to Aberdeen and became a trainee reporter at ''The Press and Journal'', where he spent several months on strike in the 1989–1990 dispute over union recognition and representation. From 1990 to 1991 he worked as a reporter for Scottish Television, with a brief interlude at Grampian Television in Aberdeen.

After moving to national television in 1991, Gove worked for the BBC's '' On the Record'', and the Channel 4 current affairs programme '' A Stab in the Dark'', alongside David Baddiel and Tracey MacLeod. In 1994 he began working for the BBC's '' Today'' programme. In 1995 he was identified by ''The Guardian'' as part of a group of "a new breed of 21st-century Tories". He broke the news of the 1995 Conservative Party leadership election thanks to his connections with the upper echelons of the party.

He joined ''The Times'' in 1996 as a leader writer and assumed posts as its comment editor, news editor, Saturday editor and assistant editor. He has also written a weekly column on politics and current affairs for the newspaper and contributed to ''The Times Literary Supplement'', ''Prospect'' magazine and ''The Spectator''. He remains on good terms with Rupert Murdoch, whom Gove described in evidence before the Leveson Inquiry as "one of the most impressive and significant figures of the last 50 years". He wrote a sympathetic biography of Michael Portillo and a highly critical study of the Northern Ireland peace process (''The Price of Peace''), where he compared the Good Friday Agreement to appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s.

He was a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4's '' The Moral Maze'' and '' Newsnight Review'' on BBC Two.

Political career

Gove was the founding chairman of Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank launched in 2002. He was involved in founding the right-leaning magazine '' Standpoint'', to which he occasionally contributed.

Early parliamentary career (2005–2010)

Gove won the Conservative candidacy for Surrey Heath on 5 July 2004, after the sitting MP Nick Hawkins was deselected by the local Conservative association. He first entered the House of Commons after being elected in the 2005 general election. In 2005 he was appointed Shadow Minister for Housing and Planning. He made his maiden speech on 7 June 2005, focusing on national security. Gove was seen as part of an influential set of Conservatives referred to as the Notting Hill Set, which included Conservative leader David Cameron, future Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, Ed Vaizey, Nick Boles and Rachel Whetstone.

Over a five-month period between December 2005 and April 2006, Gove claimed more than £7,000 on a house bought with his wife Sarah Vine, in 2002. Around a third of the money was spent at OKA, an upmarket interior design company established by Viscountess Astor, Cameron's mother-in-law. Shortly afterwards he reportedly ' flipped' his designated second home, a property for which he claimed around £13,000 to cover stamp duty. Gove also claimed for a cot mattress, despite children's items being banned under updated Commons rules. Gove said he would repay the claim for the cot mattress, but maintained that his other claims were "below the acceptable threshold costs for furniture" and that moving house was necessary "to effectively discharge my parliamentary duties". While he was moving between homes, on one occasion he stayed at the Pennyhill Park Hotel and Spa in Bagshot, Surrey, following a constituency engagement, charging the taxpayer more than £500 per night's stay.

On 2 July 2007, Gove was promoted to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families (a newly created department set up by Gordon Brown), shadowing Ed Balls. In the role he advocated the introduction of a Swedish-style education voucher system, whereby parents would choose where their child would be educated, with the state paying what they would have cost in a state school. He also advocated Swedish-style free schools, to be managed by parents and funded by the state, with the possibility that such schools would be allowed to be run on a for-profit model. Prior to the 2010 general election, most of Gove's questions in Commons debates concerned children, schools and families, education, local government, Council Tax, foreign affairs and the environment.

Secretary of State for Education (2010–2014)

With the formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government following the hung parliament after the 2010 general election, Gove became Secretary of State for Education. His first moves included reorganising his department, announcing plans to allow schools rated as Outstanding by Ofsted to become academies, and cutting the previous government's school-building programme. He apologised, however, when the list of terminated school-building projects he had released was found to be inaccurate; the list was reannounced several times before it was finally accurately published.

In July 2010, Gove said that Labour had failed in their attempt to break the link between social class and school achievement despite spending billions of pounds: quoting research, he indicated that by the age of six years, children of low ability from affluent homes were still out-performing brighter children from poorer backgrounds. At a House of Commons Education Select Committee he said that this separation of achievement grew larger throughout pupils' school careers, stating, "In effect, rich thick kids do better than poor clever children when they arrive at school ndthe situation as they go through gets worse".

Gove's second home was not in his constituency, but in Elstead, in the South West Surrey constituency. Gove sold the house and began to commute to his constituency.

During the 2010 Conservative Party Conference, Gove announced that the primary and secondary-school national curricula for England would be restructured, and that study of authors such as Byron, Keats, Jane Austen, Dickens and Thomas Hardy would be reinstated in English lessons as part of a plan to improve children's grasp of English literature and language. Academies were not required to follow the national curriculum, and so weren't affected by the reforms. Children who failed to write coherently and grammatically, or who were weak in spelling, were penalised in the new examinations. Standards in mathematics and science were also strengthened.

In March 2011, Gove was criticised for not understanding the importance of school architecture and accused of having misrepresented the cost. In February 2011, he had told Parliament that one individual had made £1,000,000 in one year when the true figure was £700,000 for five advisers at different times over a four-year period.

During the Cameron–Clegg ministry, Gove was the subject of repeated criticism for alleged attempts to avoid the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. The criticism surrounded Gove's use of various private email accounts to send emails that allegedly related to his departmental responsibilities. The allegations suggested that Gove and his advisers believed they could avoid their correspondence being subject to freedom of information requests, as they believed that their private email accounts were not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. In September 2011, the ''Financial Times'' reported that Gove had used an undisclosed private email account – called "Mrs Blurt" – to discuss government business with advisers. In March 2012 the Information Commissioner ruled that because emails the ''Financial Times'' had requested contained public information they could be the subject of a freedom of information request and ordered the information requested by the paper to be disclosed. It was also alleged by the ''Financial Times'' that Gove and his advisors had destroyed email correspondence in order to avoid freedom of information requests. The allegation was denied by Gove's department, which stated that deleting email was simply part of good computer housekeeping.

In June 2012, Michael Portillo backed Gove to be a serious contender in a future race for the Conservative Party leadership, though Gove had said in an interview a few months before that "I'm constitutionally incapable of it. There's a special extra quality you need that is indefinable, and I know I don't have it. There's an equanimity, an impermeability and a courage that you need. There are some things in life you know it's better not to try."

Gove was criticised by teachers unions for his attempts to overhaul English education. At the Association of Teachers and Lecturers Annual Conference in March 2013 a motion of no-confidence in Gove was passed. The next month the National Union of Teachers passed a vote of no confidence in Gove at their annual conference and called for his resignation. The National Association of Head Teachers and NASUWT also passed motions of no confidence at their conferences that year.

Chief Whip of the House of Commons (2014–2015)

On 15 July 2014, Gove's four-year stint in charge of the Department for Education came to an end when he was dismissed as Secretary of State for Education and replaced by former Treasury Minister Nicky Morgan in a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle. Gove was moved to the post of Government chief whip, which was portrayed as a demotion by his detractors; Prime Minister Cameron denied this was the case. Gove told BBC News that he had mixed emotions about starting the new role, saying it was a privilege to become Chief Whip but that leaving the Department for Education was "a wrench".

The position came with a £30,000 pay cut, and a specific media role saw Gove on television and radio "more than a traditional Chief Whip would be". He missed his first House of Commons vote in the new role, as explained by Shadow Commons Leader Angela Eagle; "Gove not only lost his first vote but managed to get stuck in the toilet in the wrong lobby". Gove remained in the post of chief whip until May 2015, when the role was taken over by Mark Harper.

Secretary of State for Justice (2015–2016)

After the 2015 general election, Cameron promoted Gove as Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor in his newly formed cabinet. He was praised in December 2015 for scrapping the courts fee introduced by his predecessor, Chris Grayling. The fee had been heavily criticised for, among other things, causing innocent people to plead guilty out of financial concerns. Gove removed the 12-book limit on prison books introduced by Grayling, arguing that books increased literacy and numeracy, skills needed for making prisoners a "potential asset to society". The move, effective from September 2015, was welcomed by Frances Cook of the Howard League for Penal Reform. Gove was also praised for his prominent role in scrapping a British bid for a Saudi prison contract.

Within three months of his taking office, the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) voted to stop taking new work in protest at Gove's insistence that they work for lower fees. The CBA subsequently praised his "courage" in reversing the proposed cuts. On 14 July 2016 Gove was removed from the position of justice secretary by the new prime minister, Theresa May.

European Union membership referendum (2016)

Gove was a prominent figure in the campaign for Britain to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum and described his decision to take that side as "the most difficult decision of my political life". He and his family spent Christmas with the Camerons at Chequers where, according to Craig Oliver, Cameron was under the impression that Gove would support remaining in the EU. Despite this, Gove decided to support the Leave campaign. At the beginning of March 2016, he was appointed co-convenor of Vote Leave, with Labour MP Gisela Stuart, and given responsibility for chairing the campaign committee.

He argued Britain would be "freer, fairer and better off" for leaving, and that " e day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want." When in an interview it was claimed that there was no expert opinion to support this, Gove remarked that "the people of this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong." However, interviewer Faisal Islam interrupted Gove after the word "experts", causing some sources to report that he had made a general statement that "the people... have had enough of experts". In 2021, Louise Richardson, the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, said she was "embarrassed" that Gove was an alumnus, on account of these comments.

In his memoir '' For the Record'', Cameron described Gove during this period as "mendacious", adding: "One quality shone through, disloyalty. Disloyalty to me and, later, disloyalty to Boris ohnson.

Conservative Party leadership candidate (2016)

After Cameron announced his intention to resign as Prime Minister, with his successor now likely to be in office by September 2016, Gove was not a candidate, having said in the past that he had no interest in becoming Prime Minister. Instead, he was seen as a strong, highly influential supporter of Johnson for that role. In a move that surprised most political analysts, Gove withdrew his support for Johnson on 30 June 2016, hours before the deadline, without any previous notice to Johnson and announced his own candidacy in the leadership election. Subsequently, Johnson declined to run.

''The Telegraph'' opined that Gove's actions in undermining Johnson's leadership aspirations constituted "the most spectacular political assassination in a generation" while ''The Guardian'' labelled it as a "Machiavellian move".

Gove said: "I wanted to help build a team behind Boris Johnson so that a politician who argued for leaving the European Union could lead us to a better future. But I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead. I have, therefore, decided to put my name forward for the leadership. I want there to be an open and positive debate about the path the country will now take. Whatever the verdict of that debate I will respect it. In the next few days I will lay out my plan for the United Kingdom which I hope can provide unity and change."

By 5 July 2016, Gove was in third place in the leadership election, behind May and Andrea Leadsom; the latter had gained an endorsement from Johnson. Some political analysts predicted that Gove might quit the race if he was unable to beat Leadsom in the first round of voting. Later that day, it was announced that May had won the first round of voting, with support from 165 MPs, while Andrea Leadsom received 66 votes and Gove trailed with 48. Gove was eliminated in the second ballot after receiving 46 votes, compared to 199 for May and 84 for Leadsom. He subsequently told the media that he was "naturally disappointed" and described his two opponents as "formidable politicians", welcoming the fact that the next PM would be female. He also encouraged a "civilised, inclusive, positive and optimistic debate".

Backbencher (2016–2017)

On 14 July 2016 Gove was dismissed by the prime minister, Theresa May. According to Jon Craig

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