All In This Together

Whom has Coffee House found to pen a spirited defence of Michael Gove? None other than Andrew Adonis.

The hung Parliament compelled David Cameron to fill five Cabinet seats with Lib Dems, rather than, as originally intended and publicly announced, with Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, James Purnell and Andrew Adonis, the middle three ennobled for the purpose, and all five in receipt of the Labour Whip even while serving under Cameron. David Miliband would also have attended Cabinet as Leader of the "Opposition", but that, too, failed to go according to plan.

The matter-of-fact statements made in and to various media could not have meant anything else, but were treated by those media as unremarkable. They wouldn't have brought the Labour Party with them, but neither they nor it would have cared. As much as anything else, they had all either left the Commons or never been in it. The deal with Adonis notably fell through because of his - not the Conservative Party's, but his - support for grammar schools.

In any case, the voters had other ideas, expressed first by the electorate, in general and then in the enormous trade union section of the Labour Electoral College, the only involvement in the election of any Party Leader of people other than paid politicians or political hobbyists.

In the absence of such colleagues, however, Cameron has pressed on regardless, with the policies that Lord Milburn would have pursued as Health Secretary, and with the policies that Lord Purnell would have pursued as restored Work and Pensions Secretary, having already begun to implement them when he had last held that office.

Gove's extravagant enthusiasm for all six of them, and for Tony Blair, has long been a matter of record, as has the reciprocation of that ardour. Yet there really are people thick enough to imagine that that Gove is their great hope of a "right-wing" Leader who would "restore" the Conservative Party that has only ever existed in their own fevered imaginations.

Grow up.

Cameron is the Heir to Blair, and Gove is the Heir to the Heir to Blair, fully supported by the likes of Adonis after their BBC and Murdoch allies failed to order the Labour Party to elect the man who devised the entire Coalition programme while he was running Blair's Policy Unit but who could not get it past Gordon Brown, and whose only objection to the cuts is that they do not go far enough or punish the poor hard enough.