,
18 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
This is a very interesting interview with @michaelgove, to which I may be able to add some personal observations. Nothing startling but perhaps informative.
I knew Gove pretty well at Oxford in the mid 80s: we had a mutual close friend (an old friend of mine who was at school with him): and our teams were joint winners of the Oxford Union freshers debating competition in our 1st term.
He was a friend. Not a close friend, but certainly a friend. We drifted apart after university, as many university friendships do: but with no ill will. We just headed in very different directions.
His politics weren’t - and aren’t - mine.
That’s by way of background. And what I go on to say needs to be read with the usual cautions that attach to 30 year old memories.
1. His dislike of the EU (EEC then) is genuine. We argued about it at the time. I don’t remember picking up the family issue: but I was very aware that it was something he felt strongly about.
And it was not a typical Tory view in the 80s - anti-EEC feeling was far more common on the left.
2. He was and is a brilliant debater. Also good company, and very funny in private as well as public. The courtesy is genuine.
3. His politics then were much as they are now. He was socially liberal then, on issues like 🏳️🌈 rights (again, not in the 80s by any means a routine Tory view, even among Oxford students).
He was not, I think, a free-market ideologue (as many Tories were). I suspect that that went along with a general lack of interest in/sympathy with economics - remember that, unlike most other politicians who emerged from Oxford in the 80s, he didn’t study PPE, but English.
This tweet by @MrRBourne rang a bell (though NB that Ryan’s views of “worse” in the area of economics aren’t the same as mine).
His Toryism is more romantic, I think: much more Burke than Ayn Rand, and based on a sense of national history and culture as a good story that needs further chapters.
(I suspect Gaitskell’s famous line about U.K. membership of the EEC being the end of 1,000 years of our island’s history resonates more with him than it does with Gaitskell’s political heirs.)
4. He was also intellectually curious: he was perfectly capable of listening to and accepting an argument because he thought it was right, wherever it came from.
It doesn’t surprise me that he has fully accepted the scientific case on global heating, and my hunch would be that he is genuine in accepting the consequences of that for policy.
Remember that his notorious line about experts was about economic forecasting (see above).
Conclusion: would I vote for him as PM? Well, no. I am not a Tory, and deeply disagree, as I always have done, with his views on the EU. I am also wary of his views on foreign policy (which I don’t really remember - anyway the 80s were another era - but as developed later).
But intellectual openness and curiosity are important virtues for a leader - and would be a very welcome change from his predecessor.
