Michael Gove might seem an unlikely role model for Labour. The former cabinet minister became something of a pantomime villain for the party during his time as education secretary. Yet as I reported earlier this year, Gove’s approach was studied by Labour in opposition as a model of how to deliver transformative change. His school reforms were introduced with ruthless speed after the Conservatives entered power in 2010 and have endured.
What, then, does Gove make of Labour’s opening months in office? We got a chance to find out last night at an IPPR event in the Conduit, central London, entitled “Insurgent government: how to combat rising populism?” (The think tank’s head Harry Quilter-Pinner wrote recently for us on how to “govern like Gove”).
Gove, who appeared alongside panellists including Josh Simons MP, the former director of Labour Together, praised the new government’s determination to reform the UK’s anachronistic planning laws.
“Marginal issues aside, I think that Angela Rayner and Matthew Pennycook [the housing and planning minister] have made the right arguments overall,” he said. “I’d quibble with some of the detail but I think they’re absolutely right to do that [reform planning].”
During the Q&A session, I asked Gove two questions: was Starmer’s government too gloomy and was it right to means-test winter fuel payments?
On the latter, Gove supported the proposal put forward by the consumer champion Martin Lewis. “Of course it’s sensible to withdraw winter fuel payments from the very rich but pension credit is an inadequate way of targeting it,” Gove told me. “The payments should also be extended to people in council tax bands A to D.”
This, as it happens, is the compromise that some Labour ministers privately believe Rachel Reeves should embrace (pension credit guarantees an income of just £11,300 a year). But as I write in this week’s cover story, the Chancellor is in no mood for turning.
To my first question, Gove gave a lengthy and fascinating answer: “Too gloomy? Yes, I do think that,” he said. “I could quibble with some things the government has done, I could approve of others but overall one of the concerns I would have were I a Labour MP – and of course I’m not – is that Keir Starmer’s gospel of ordinary hope is more ordinary and less hope.
“I completely understand, both from his character and from what we [the last government] did, that he thinks extravagant promises and some of the rhetoric he would associate with Boris, some of the execution over the 44 days of Liz Truss, would mean that the last thing he wants to do is to indulge in hyperbolic boosterism and catastrophic ideological excess.
“But at the same time there are some remarkable things about which this government can, not boast, but channel: having a majority in each part of the United Kingdom and so on. While Starmer is understandably allergic to promises that can’t be fulfilled, I do think that there needs to be an extra level of poetry in what he says.”
The fact Labour won a majority of seats in England, Scotland and Wales – the first time any party has done so since 2001 – was hailed by Starmer at his first No 10 press conference following the general election. But, as Gove suggests, this has not yet been developed into a wider narrative about the UK’s past and future.
He went on to praise Gordon Brown as someone who was “absolutely devoted to successful policy implementation but also capable of soaring rhetoric. You see that in what I think was one of the best speeches made by a British politician in the last 25 years: the speech he gave during the Scottish referendum in Glasgow. Keir Starmer can’t be Gordon Brown but he needs to recover some of that.”
Labour privately recognises that Starmer’s party conference speech on 25 September needs to offer a more optimistic vision than his gloomy Rose Garden address (“things will get worse before they get better”). The question, to adapt Gove, is whether it will be more hope and less ordinary.
[See also: Netanyahu’s all-out war]
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