David Cameron may live to regret handing Michael Gove ‘the black book’

written for The Telegraph, 16 July 2014

Apparently, radical thought is no longer a good idea in the Tory Party. Michael Gove may be loved by the grassroots, but it was the unelected Lynton Crosby, Number 10’s campaign advisor, who pressured Gove into stepping aside, persuading the inner circle that the teaching establishment’s hatred of the Education Secretary was one of Labour’s prime chances of mobilising its base in the forthcoming election. One wonders what Crosby’s political heroine, Maggie T, would have thought of such appeasement. But if anyone thinks Gove’s reach is gone from the Department of Education, they haven’t looked very closely at his personnel. In the unlikely event that she wanted to, Gove’s successor, Nicky Morgan would be able to sack his Special Advisors, but she’ll be unable to move Gove’s man in the Civil Service, Tom Shinner (hated by the left, wedded to the Free Schools Agenda as a co-founder of the Greenwich Free School, and since the end of last year, Director of Strategy at the DfE and a ministerially unsackable, “politically neutral” Civil Servant).

As it is, though she’s more than merely “competent” and has plenty of radical vision herself, Morgan needs people who knows where the bodies are buried. Especially since this year in education will be dominated by more Trojan Horse scandals, as Labour dig up every rogue free school or corrupt academy they can in advance of the election. Meanwhile, though a be-robed Jedi Knight may be the only costume the new Chief Whip hasn’t been photoshopped into somewhere on the internet, if there’s anyone who can make Gove look like Obi Wan-Kenobi, it’s Crosby’s Darth Vader. Struck down, I suspect Gove will now become more powerful than we can possibly imagine.

After all, we’ve been hearing a lot about the powers of the Chief Whip recently. The American House of Cards remake may have diluted some of original’s peculiarly British exposition of the levers at the disposal of the Chief Whip, but we’ve had an altogether grittier warning in the slowly surfacing memories of the role of the whips in covering up sexual wrongdoing in the 1980s. A recent video of Tim Fortescue has been treated as a revelation from the archives, but the existence of a “dirt book”, a file on the vulnerabilities of every MP, has been common knowledge for as long as anyone can remember: James Graham’s magisterial play about the 1970s, This House, recently made rich use of it as a plot device.

So what would Michael Gove do, armed with a modern version of the dirt book? Those who like to grouch about Osborne are presenting this as a done deal with the Chancellor: “this is a job to run the Osborne leadership campaign”, one told me. I’m less sure. Certainly, Michael Gove now has the dirt on every Tory MP (though I imagine, operator that he is, he probably always has). And certainly, he’s perfectly positioned to run a leadership campaign for someone.

The Chief Whip operates at the heart of the parliamentary party – and unlike the job of Party Chairman, long mooted as Gove’s preferred post, it doesn’t involve disciplining local associations and the risk of conflict with the powerful grassroots. Michael Gove’s a professional: he’ll get on with any job he’s given, and he’ll do it well. And he’s long made clear to allies that he sees no chance of leading the party himself – while loved in the party, he knows he’s too divisive a figure nationally, and wears the strength of the reaction as a badge of honour. But in any man as bright and driven as Michael Gove, personal ambition dies hard, and who could blame the man if his lesson from this week is that only as party leader could he truly make or break the reform agenda?

Either way, having failed to save his friend from demotion, Osborne will have to work hard to prove his worth to his most powerful lieutenant. Gove and Boris Johnson have clashed plenty in recent years, but as I’ve written before, they’re both well aware that their skills complement each other. Michael Gove has long been Osborne’s friend, and for the moment, it’s still most likely that he’ll place the Whips’ Office at the Chancellor’s disposal, if and when there’s next a vacancy at the top of the party. But given the exceptional leverage the former Education Secretary has just gained over the parliamentary party, I expect his price just went up.

As for the DfE, Gove will lose neither his passion for education, nor his influence over his old department. Even his most prominent opponents privately admit that Michael Gove will continue to care deeply about the nuances of educational debates, even and perhaps more so if ever leaves Parliament. As an adoptive child, he is more conscious than many how irreversibly a baby’s fortune may be set by chance: as he wrote for Standpoint Magazine last year, “for most of human history most individuals have had their futures determined by forces beyond their control…But education can change that. There is nothing fixed about any child’s future.” Gove’s battle has been to ensure there is no school, comprehensive, academy, free school or private, that blights a child’s life beyond repair. He engaged at every level with voices in the national debate – keeping up with expert blogs and tweeters, and inviting their authors to meet in person and discuss their concerns. Leaving will be a wrench, but it’s long been understood that Gove sees the final year of the parliament as the “implementation” phase, leaving him itchy to move onto new challenges. He coveted the role of Party Chairman, but after the success of Grant Shapps’ campaigning strategies in the Newark by-election, sacking Shapps became impossible. Without a vacancy at CCHQ, Gove renewed his passion for education. I’m sure that, even as his empire grows, he will continue to do so.