“The privilege of public service” Michael Gove’s Ditchley Lecture – full text

Far too often, innovation in government is treated as though it were a mischief rather than a model.

Conservative MP Michael Gove speaks during a Conservative Party campaign event to celebrate the result of the General Election, in central London on December 13, 2019. - Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday hailed a political "earthquake" after securing a sweeping election win, which clears the way for Britain to finally leave the European Union next month after years of political deadlock. (Photo by Ben STANSALL / AFP) (Photo by BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images)

Writing in his Prison Notebooks, ninety years ago, the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci defined our times. “The crisis consists precisely of the fact that the inherited is dying – and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

Gramsci’s analysis was developed between 1929 and 1935. The stability of the Edwardian Age – of secure crowns, borderless travel, imperial administrative elites and growing economic globalisation – was a memory. The inherited world of aristocratic liberalism had gone.