Michael Gove, Sally Morgan, nerds, and longer hours
The Lib Dems are making hay with the Sally Morgan/Ofsted topic for slightly synthetic reasons. They’ve been polling those voters who might plump for them. State teachers are a decent-sized cohort in that wedge. State teachers detest Michael Gove (well, quite a few of them do) and the Lib Dems decided some time ago they’d play up disagreements with Mr Gove and thereby wave at the target voters saying “We share your values.”
What’s less well known is that Tory private polling on Michael Gove shows that the moment you get away from the core Tory vote, he’s a bit of a repelling magnet amongst the voters they need to pick up as well.
There’s a bit of genuine outrage in the mix for the Lib Dems too. Michael Gove knew David Laws wanted Sally Morgan to stay in post but went ahead with the non-renewal of term/sacking anyway. He also announced that the Lib Dem Paul Marshall would chair the new appointment process without agreeing that with Paul Marshall or David Laws, so the Lib Dems say. Laws and Gove meet later, and there is some suggestion the Lib Dems won’t allow Paul Marshall’s name to go ahead for a process they think should be above suspicion (they’re pretty much ruling out the idea of persuading Sally Morgan to stay in post after the last 24 hours).
The row’s been given a bit of extra steam this morning by Sir David Bell, the permanent secretary Michael Gove decided he could get along without in an earlier Whitehall knifing. Sir David’s been a bit of a critic before – here, for example. Dan Hodges makes the point that Labour could give masterclasses in the purification of the quangos, but there’s another point here about the journey that the Tories, and Mr Gove in particular, have been on.
Rather like Tony Blair back in 1997 wanting to sweep any vaguely liberal Tory under his cloak and broaden his own political reach, the Cameroons in the early years of coalition loved nothing more than bagging an ex-Blairite to strengthen their claim to occupy the centre ground. Alan Milburn? Come on in. John Hutton? Pull up a chair.
In any ranking of self-confessed Blair-loving Tories, Michael Gove and George Osborne would fight it out for top place. There have been strong rumours that it was No.10, not Mr Gove, that wanted Sally Morgan to make way for someone with links to the Tory party as part of a government-wide effort to connect with Tories. At the end of his speech, I asked Mr Gove if the initiative for the decision to move Baroness Morgan came from No.10. He insisted it was his decision and his initiative.
Michael Gove was also part of another, smaller sub-set of Cameroons: the early Lib Dem lovers. He expressed a readiness to yield his position in cabinet to David Laws in the short few days of courtship before the coalition was formed. He professed great admiration for Nick Clegg and his Orange Bookers in the first year or two of coalition, sat enthusiastically on the joint committee to plan coalition policies for the second half of the term. I asked him why he now hates Lib Dems and he insisted a list of Lib Dem appointments showed he didn’t.
Well, now no-one’s more Lib Dem-baiting than Mr Gove. And that’s another oddity in this process – the modus operandi of Mr Gove. He is “politeness itself” personally, the Lib Dems say. And then he’s “incredibly ruthless” when you’ve left the room. Tories will rejoice at that description.
His friends would say he’s a zealot to give children the opportunities he enjoyed at school. He claimed in his speech at Newham this morning that he’d managed to “shift” the “tectonic plates” of education, which is quite a claim. In his speech he called for longer school hours in state schools to allow more extra-curricular activity just like private schools. He told me there might be more money for that initiative if it came, though he sounded like he’d be scraping money out of the existing budget too.
I asked him why teachers hated him and he didn’t appear to query the premise. He said change had been difficult and he hadn’t sought to make himself popular but to do the right thing. I suggested one of the reasons teachers hated him was because he seemed to be trying to impose an education on all that worked for him – a very specific nerdy, geeky type. He said he believed “nerds are cool” and wanted to disseminate that message. You can see the interview on Channel 4 News tonight.
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