Michael Gove
Michael Andrew Gove (/ɡoʊv/; born Graeme Andrew Logan;[3] 26 August 1967) is a British Conservative politician who has been Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster since July 2019 and Minister for the Cabinet Office since February 2020. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Surrey Heath since 2005. Gove served in the Cameron governments as Secretary of State for Education from 2010 to 2014[4] and Secretary of State for Justice from 2015 to 2016, and in the second May government as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He has twice run to become Leader of the Conservative Party, in 2016 and 2019, finishing in third place on both occasions.[5]
Gove began a career as an author and journalist for The Times before entering the House of Commons.[6] He was appointed to the Shadow Cabinet by David Cameron in 2007 as Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. As Education Secretary, the National Association of Head Teachers[7] Association of Teachers and Lecturers, National Union of Teachers and NASUWT passed motions of no confidence in Gove's policies at their conferences in 2013.[8]
In a 2014 Cabinet reshuffle, Gove was moved to the post of Chief Whip.[9][10] Following the 2015 election, Gove was promoted to the office of Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor. In 2016, Gove played a major role in the UK's referendum on EU membership as the co-convenor of Vote Leave.[11] Along with fellow Conservative MP Boris Johnson, Gove was seen as one of the most prominent figures of the Vote Leave campaign.[12]
On 30 June 2016, Gove, who was campaign manager for Boris Johnson's leadership bid to become Prime Minister, withdrew his support on the morning that Johnson was due to declare, and announced his own candidacy in the leadership election. Following Theresa May’s appointment as Prime Minister he was sacked from the Cabinet; however, following the 2017 general election he was appointed Environment Secretary.[13]
Gove launched another Conservative Party 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 cabinet reshuffle post-Brexit.
Early life
Graeme Logan was born on 26 August 1967.[14] His biological mother, whom he originally believed to have been an unmarried Edinburgh student, was in fact a 23-year-old cookery demonstrator.[3] 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.[15]
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.[16] After he joined the Gove family, Logan's name was changed to Michael Andrew Gove.[3] His adoptive father, Ernest, ran a fish processing business and his adoptive mother, Christine, was a lab assistant at the University of Aberdeen, before working at the Aberdeen School for the Deaf.[17]
In Aberdeen, Gove 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. Later, as he entered the sixth form he had to apply for a scholarship as his family fell on difficult economic circumstances.[16] In October 2012, he wrote an apology letter to his former French teacher for misbehaving in class.[18] From 1985 to 1988 he read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, graduating with an upper second.[19][20]
During his first year, he met future Prime Minister Boris Johnson and helped him become elected President of the Oxford Union.[21] In an interview with Andrew Gimson, Gove remarked that at Oxford, Johnson was "quite the most brilliant extempore speaker of his generation."[22] Gove was elected President of the Oxford Union a year after Johnson.[23]
Journalism career
Gove became a trainee reporter at The Press and Journal in Aberdeen, where he spent several months on strike in the 1989–1990 dispute over union recognition and representation.[24]
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,[25][26] whom Gove described in evidence before the Leveson Inquiry as "one of the most impressive and significant figures of the last 50 years".[27] 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.[20][28][29]
He has worked for the BBC's Today programme, On The Record, Scottish Television and the Channel 4 current affairs programme A Stab in the Dark, alongside David Baddiel and Tracey MacLeod, and was a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze and Newsnight Review on BBC Two.[17][30][31]
Political career
He briefly joined the Labour Party in 1983 in Aberdeen, but has stated that by the time he left to go to Oxford University he was a Conservative Gove joined the Oxford University Conservative Association and was secretary of Aberdeen South Young Conservatives.[32] He helped to write speeches for Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet ministers, including Peter Lilley and Michael Howard.[33] 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.[34]
Gove had been chairman of Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank launched in 2002.[35][36] He was involved in founding the right-leaning magazine Standpoint, to which he occasionally contributes.[37] Gove expressed admiration in late-February 2003 for New Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair because of the way he was handling the crisis in Iraq: "As a right-wing polemicist, all I can say looking at Mr Blair now is, what's not to like?" Blair, he thought, was "behaving like a true Thatcherite".[38]
Member of Parliament
Gove first entered the House of Commons after the 2005 general election having been elected as the Conservative Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath, after the sitting Conservative MP Nick Hawkins was deselected by the local Conservative Association.[39][40] When David Cameron was first elected as Leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005, he appointed Gove as Shadow Housing Spokesman.[41] Gove is seen as part of an influential set of Conservatives, sometimes referred to as the Notting Hill Set, which includes: former Prime Minister David Cameron, former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, Edward Vaizey, Nicholas Boles and Rachel Whetstone.[42]
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. 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.[43]
In June 2012, Michael Portillo backed Gove to be a serious contender in a future race for the Conservative Party leadership,[44] 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."[45]
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,[46] announcing plans to allow schools rated as "outstanding" by Ofsted to become academies,[47] and cutting the previous government's school-building programme.[48] 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.[49]
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 [and] the situation as they go through gets worse".[50]
Building Schools for the Future and school capital projects
In February 2011, a judicial review deemed Gove's decision to axe Building Schools for the Future (BSF) projects in six local authority areas was unlawful as he had failed to consult before imposing the cuts.[51] The judge also said that, in five of the cases, the failure was "so unfair as to amount to an abuse of power" and that "however pressing the economic problems, there was no overriding public interest which precluded consultation or justifies the lack of any consultation".[51] The councils' response was that the government would have to reconsider but the government said it had won the case on the substantial issues.[51] The judge made clear that, contrary to the councils' position, they could not expect that their projects would be funded.[51]
In March 2011, Gove was criticised for not understanding the importance of school architecture and having misrepresented the cost.[52] In February 2011, he gave "not-quite-true information to Parliament" by saying that one individual 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.[52] He told a Free Schools conference that "no one in this room is here to make architects richer" and specifically mentioned architect Richard Rogers.[53]
Exam and curriculum reforms
Gove's views on exam systems became clear in December 2014 after the release of archive papers from 1986. GCSEs were the brainchild of Sir Keith Joseph. Margaret Thatcher, believing they lacked rigour, fiercely opposed them. However, opposition to the new exams from the teaching unions persuaded her to introduce them immediately, purely so as not to appear weak. Although Gove had sought but failed to replace them, his special advisor, Dominic Cummings, described the 1986 decision as catastrophic, leading to a collapse in the integrity of the exam system.[54]
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 are not required to follow the national curriculum, and so would not be affected by the reforms. Children who fail to write coherently and grammatically, and who are weak in spelling, would be penalised under new examinations. Historian Simon Schama would give advice to government to ensure that pupils learnt Britain's "island story". Standards in mathematics and science would also be strengthened. He said that this was needed because left-wing ideologues had undermined education. Theirs was the view, he thought, that schools "shouldn't be doing anything so old-fashioned as passing on knowledge, requiring children to work hard, or immersing them in anything like dates in history or times tables in mathematics. These ideologues may have been inspired by generous ideals but the result of their approach has been countless children condemned to a prison house of ignorance".[55]
In a November 2010 white paper, Gove declared reforms would include the compulsory study of foreign languages up to the age of sixteen years, a shake-up of league tables in which schools are ranked higher for the number of pupils taking GCSEs[56] in five core subjects (English, mathematics, science, a language and one of the humanities), and the introduction of targets for primary schools. It proposed that trainee teachers should spend more time in the classroom, teacher training applicants should be more rigorously tested — including tests of character and emotional intelligence — and sponsorships for former troops to retrain as teachers to improve discipline. It also said teachers would receive guidance on how to search pupils for more items, including mobile phones and pornography, and when they can use force.
In April 2011, Gove criticised schools for not studying pre-twentieth century classics and blamed "England's constricted and unreformed exam system" for failing to encourage children to read. Gove also blamed an "anti-knowledge culture" for reducing achievement and said children benefited when expectations were set higher.[58] In June 2011, his "ignorance of science" was criticised[by whom?] after he called for students to have "a rooting in the basic scientific principles" and by way of example assigned Lord Kelvin's laws of thermodynamics to Sir Isaac Newton.[59]
In June 2012, the Daily Mail published leaked plans to scrap GCSE examinations, return to O-level exams and allow less academic students to take alternative qualifications. The Liberal Democrats claimed that the plans had not been discussed with the Deputy Prime Minister and were subsequently heavily criticised by some teachers, trade unions and Labour Party MPs;[60][61][62] they had been discussed with the Prime Minister at Cabinet level, and a subsequent YouGov/Sunday Times poll suggested that the public supported this policy by a margin of 50% to 32%.[63][64] They received praise from the then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who said that he "could be... singing a hymn of praises for my old chum Gove and his brilliant new Gove-levels."[65] The leaked documents also suggested that Gove was intending to create a single exam board to organise all exams, and to scrap the National Curriculum in its current form. However, there were "rebukes" from both the Welsh and Northern Ireland Education ministers who said it was important to communicate before making announcements on proposed changes to jointly owned qualifications.[66]
In February 2013, shortly after the draft Programmes of Study for History in the national curriculum was released by the DfE,[67] the representatives of the principal organisations for historians in the UK wrote to The Observer to register "significant reservations" about its contents and the way in which it had been devised. They described it as "too narrowly and exclusively focused on British history" and argued that structuring history teaching in a strictly chronological sequence meant that students would learn about pre-modern history only in the early stages of their studies.[68]
In March 2013, 100 academics wrote an open letter arguing that Gove's curriculum placed too much emphasis upon memorisation of facts and rules over understanding, and would lead to more rote learning.[69] Gove retorted that "there is good academia and bad academia."[70] In response, one signatory to the letter opined that Gove suffered from a "blinkered, almost messianic, self-belief, which appears to have continually ignored the expertise and wisdom of teachers, head-teachers, advisers and academics, whom he often claims to have consulted",[71] A senior civil servant admitted that one of the most controversial parts of the proposed secondary curriculum had been written internally by the DfE, without any input from experts.[72]
In May, Simon Schama, earlier mooted as a supporter of Gove's reforms of the history curriculum, delivered an excoriating speech in which he characterised the finalised proposals as "insulting and offensive" and "pedantic and utopian", accusing Gove of constructing a "ridiculous shopping list" of subjects. He urged the audience at the Hay Festival: "Tell Michael Gove what you think of it. Let him know."[73] In June, leaked documents revealed that a member of the government's curriculum advisory group had described the reform process as having had "a very chaotic feel. It's typical of government policy at the moment: they don't think things through very carefully, they don't listen to anyone and then just go ahead and rush into major changes."[74] In September, Robin Alexander said that the proposed reforms to the primary-level national curriculum were "neo Victorian", "educationally inappropriate and pedagogically counter-productive".[75] In October, almost 200 people, including: Carol Ann Duffy, Melvin Burgess and Michael Rosen, as well as academics from Oxford, Bristol and Newcastle universities signed a letter to The Times condemning Gove's reforms, warning of the "enormous" and negative risks they posed to children and their education.[76]
That same month saw Oxford's head of admissions warn that the timetable for secondary-level reforms would "just wreck the English education system."[77]
2012 English GCSE results
In September 2012, following the furore surrounding the downgrading of GCSE English results, he refused, during his answers to the Parliamentary Education Committee on 12 September, to instruct Ofqual to intervene, and attacked his Welsh counterpart as "irresponsible and mistaken" for ordering disputed GCSEs to be regraded.[78] On 17 September he announced to the House of Commons an English Baccalaureate Certificate to replace GCSE, comprising English, Maths, Science, together with a Humanities subject and language, to be first examined in 2017. His plans to replace GCSE examinations with an English Baccalaureate were rejected by Parliament in February 2013.[79]
Education vouchers
As Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Gove advocated the introduction of a Swedish-style voucher system, whereby parents can choose where their child should be educated, with the state paying what they would have cost in a state-school. He has also advocated Swedish-style free schools, to be managed by parents and funded by the state,[80] with the possibility that such schools may be allowed to be run on a for-profit model.[81]
Creationist schools
In June 2012, Gove approved three creationist schools, including Grindon Hall Christian School in Sunderland,[82] which opened in September 2012. This led to concerns about whether Department for Education (DfE) requirements not to teach creationism or intelligent design as science would be met.[83] The other creationist schools included Exemplar-Newark Business Academy, whose previous application was rejected because of concerns over creationism, and a third school in Kent. Both schools said they would teach creationism in RE but not in Science.[83]
The British Humanist Association (BHA) said teaching creationism in any syllabus was unacceptable.[83] In 2014, Gove's department acceded to the BHA's campaign by banning creationism from being taught as science in state-funded English schools, including Academies and Free Schools, as well as introducing a requirement that such schools must teach evolution.
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