Taking The Mickey

Why does no one listen to what Michael Gove is telling them? He obviously missed the passage in Leo Strauss about the importance of lying to the common herd, so he is completely honest.

None of Gove's curriculum changes applies to the schools that he favours in every possible way, namely the academies and the "free" schools. They will not, for example, be required to teach his new History syllabus. Nor is there the slightest possibility that they will do so.

As to the schools that will be so obliged, we may only hope that History will not therefore be deprived of most of its curriculum time on account of having been so utterly dumbed down. If it is not, then teachers will be able to carry on teaching it regardless, and will simply not tell the pupils how little of what they were being taught they would need for an examination which awarded a mark for the name of each of the wives of Henry VIII plus a seventh mark for having listed them in the right order.

But remember, like everything else that Gove is doing, it will only apply to the schools that in any case he thinks are for losers. Nowhere that, to his mind, matters will have to teach any part of it. Or will do so.

More broadly, there is Gove's attempt to present himself as the Great White Hope of social conservatism. He voted in favour of same-sex "marriage", as of course he had always made it perfectly clear that he intended to do. He has been advocating that measure since back in the days when Jack Straw, as Justice Secretary, was specifically ruling it out on behalf of the then Labour Government.

But such details never make any difference to his devotees. They have a similar view of Nigel Farage, who is still on record in favour of that change, just as he is in favour of the legalisation of drugs and prostitution. Gove, too, like Boris Johnson, last expressed any view on drugs by expressing himself in favour of legalisation.

Such is "the West" that Gove wishes not merely to defend, but to expand across the whole wide earth by means of the force of arms. That does at least make him a consistent neoconservative. Melanie Phillips, for example, wants such an expansion of things that she despises in her own country, and strongly supports Israel for holding (as, in any case, it barely does these days, and less so all the time) to features and values against which she rails in Britain.

But Gove wants an extremely liberal Britain at the forefront of the forcible military creation of an extremely liberal world. He has been saying this for nearly 20 years, and giving it practical policy effect for as long as he has been in any position to do so. Why does no one ever believe him?