About To Do That

"Michael Gove is so close to power he can almost smell the Government dispatch box. In 18 months, barring the mother of all comebacks by Gordon Brown, this eloquent, earnest-looking Aberdonian will be putting Ed Balls out of gainful employment. All the future Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families has to do is not say anything stupid in an interview. And he is not about to do that."

So begins this decidedly non-investigative piece by one of those teenage Cameron groupies on the Telegraph who also turn up in the Catholic Herald. Gove's ferocious anti-Catholicism in his Moral Maze days goes completely unmentioned.

I always thought that when Cameron made Andrew Adonis Education Secretary and William Hague a European Commissioner (a job to which, as a non-bastard Cabinet Minister from the Maastricht days, he would be perfectly suited), he would confer the position of Foreign Secretary on Michael Gove. (Who is the Shadow Foreign Secretary this week? Then again, who cares?) But I am beginning to think that Gove might be made Chancellor. After all, it's not going to be Osborne, is it?

Anyway, when it comes to saying anything stupid in an interview, how about "But the crucial thing is we mustn't have selection by ability"? In a one-line paragraph towards the end, we are also told, somewhat superfluously, that "He also rules out grammar schools."

As this article itself puts it:

"He landed the plum Tory seat of Surrey Heath, entering Parliament in the Tory partial revival of 2005. But this is his second stab at politics - before landing a job in Fleet Street he was rejected by the Tory party on the grounds of being "not a Conservative"."

Well, quite.

Supporters of the Boer Republic set up as an explicit act of anti-British revenge in a former Dominion of the Crown, and the sponsor of an act of treason against the present Queen, were not conservatives.

And opponents of grammar schools still aren't.