Michael Gove is invariably held up as the Leader-in-Waiting by breathless people who insist that the Conservative Party is entirely other than it is or ever has been.
Gove has been very aggressively in favour of same-sex "marriage" at least since his days on The Moral Maze, a decade and more ago now, when the New Labour Government of the day was specifically and articulately ruling it out.
Gove has been very aggressively in favour of same-sex "marriage" at least since his days on The Moral Maze, a decade and more ago now, when the New Labour Government of the day was specifically and articulately ruling it out.
That was Gove's only discernible point of dissent from New Labour. Even after he had been selected as the Conservative Party's candidate for one of its safest seats, he was still using his Times column to express his schoolgirl crush on Tony Blair.
While heaping praise on the subsequently disgraced old Trotskyist Stephen Byers, on the erstwhile Trotskyist bookseller Alan Milburn, and on the SDP and Lib Dem veteran Andrew Adonis. All of whom he announced as a fact would have seats in a Cameron Cabinet.
As would indeed have happened in the extremely unlikely event of a Conservative overall majority in 2010. Gove now fills the position that Adonis would have done. From it, Gove is destroying Religious Education in state schools. But we are at least spared the direct influence of his psychotic views on foreign policy.
While heaping praise on the subsequently disgraced old Trotskyist Stephen Byers, on the erstwhile Trotskyist bookseller Alan Milburn, and on the SDP and Lib Dem veteran Andrew Adonis. All of whom he announced as a fact would have seats in a Cameron Cabinet.
As would indeed have happened in the extremely unlikely event of a Conservative overall majority in 2010. Gove now fills the position that Adonis would have done. From it, Gove is destroying Religious Education in state schools. But we are at least spared the direct influence of his psychotic views on foreign policy.
On coming down from Oxford, Gove was refused employment by the Conservative Research Department on the grounds that he was not traceably a Conservative, or even political at all. Instead, then, he became an employee of Rupert Murdoch, with whom he continues to have regular, off-the-record meetings.
Gove's wafting first into Parliament and then into the Cabinet constitutes a worse assault on our sovereignty even than John Major's appointment of Jonathan Aitken as Minister of Defence Procurement on the orders of the Saudi Royal Family. Aitken was at least an MP already, and his preferment was at least to a non-Cabinet post.
There is hardly the vocabulary to describe what would have befallen this Realm if Gove were to progress any further.
Gove's wafting first into Parliament and then into the Cabinet constitutes a worse assault on our sovereignty even than John Major's appointment of Jonathan Aitken as Minister of Defence Procurement on the orders of the Saudi Royal Family. Aitken was at least an MP already, and his preferment was at least to a non-Cabinet post.
There is hardly the vocabulary to describe what would have befallen this Realm if Gove were to progress any further.
"...Gove is destroying Religious Education in state schools."
ReplyDeleteI wasn't aware the RE in State schools, indeed any schools, was proving its worth David. There seem to be a lot less faithful among the younger generations than in times gone by. Many churches seem to have been built for larger congregations than turn up on a Sunday nowadays. I'm sure the Sunday service in Lanchester is still full, but by the time you reach the average age of the other prominent lay people who help run the church, will there be that many congregants about? Will the church be able to have its own dedicated priest, or will it have to share one with other RC Churches in County Durham?
Oh, we have a lot of young families. We are doing all right. Well, middle-class areas always do, don't they? I pass no comment on that. I merely observe it.
ReplyDeleteI think I understand what you mean by about middle-class areas & young families in church.
ReplyDeleteThank you David.
We have a really interesting social mix. And the full spread of generations.
ReplyDeleteI know that you are too much of a man of Lanchester to join the priesthood as you would have to move away from your home area. But at least you will be there in Lanchester as a leading voice among the Catholic lay people.
ReplyDeleteWIth the ongoing decline of the C of E, do you ever see a time when the Roman Catholic church becomes the de facto church in England?
In much of England, She has been for a hundred years; in great tracts more, for about 50, since the decline of Methodism. Look at the debate on marriage, and who has made the running.
ReplyDeleteBut the reason that you state is not why I shall never be a priest. Even were I in better health, I should still simply never be a priest. Halfway to 70, I'd have done it by now.
And we are straying rather off topic.