The Reckless by-election in Rochester and Strood is held on 20 November. When he defected on the eve of the Conservative conference, there was a hope within the party that they could hold the seat. CCHQ again direct massive resources into the contest. ‘We threw everything at it to try to win and this made for a very intense and hard-fought campaign,’ says Feldman.26 Cameron himself goes to the Kentish constituency five times, with the final visit taking place on 18 November, two days before polling.27 UKIP recruit many new activists over the summer and they too put everything into the contest, which they end up winning with 42.1% of the vote and a majority of just under 3,000. It is a damaging blow for the Conservatives, although there is relief that the UKIP majority is not higher.
The Carswell and Reckless defections change everything. In November 2014, just six months out from the general election, a YouGov poll puts UKIP on 17%.28 ‘I don’t think we have ever found a very clear policy on how to deal with UKIP,’ confirms one of Cameron’s close team that month. Even as late as December, Cameron is still toying with the idea of launching a withering attack on UKIP, saying that only the Conservatives can guarantee the referendum on the EU, and that UKIP will cut the country off from the rest of the world, with a disastrous effect on economic prosperity.
But by early 2015, Crosby’s diagnosis is still the only show in town. He helps yank the Conservative case back in a more populist direction. ‘Lynton never subscribed to the view the Conservative Party was the “nasty party”,’ an insider recalls, ‘but he thought it was a party full of out-of-touch wankers, frankly, who were privileged and divorced from the lives of ordinary people.’ Crosby’s polling after the European elections reveals a despair amongst much of the electorate: ‘there is a sense of disillusion and frustration that none of the current parties properly are understanding’. But even before the short campaign begins in April 2015, it is Crosby’s own prognosis that is coming under attack. UKIP foxed the Conservatives when Farage became their leader just after the 2010 general election, they continued to fox them midterm, and they foxed them all the way through to the general election. Cameron’s Conservative critics remained full of anger to the end that he did not handle UKIP better; but did a magic bullet exist that would have shot the UKIP fox?
THIRTY-TWO
The Gove Reshuffle
July 2014
‘I’d like you to become chief whip, Michael,’ Cameron says to Gove on Tuesday 8 July, six days before the second of his major reshuffles. The prime minister has invited the Education Secretary, one of his closest friends in politics, for their least comfortable drink ever. ‘Of course you can stay at Education if you want, but I’d really like you to take on this new job.’ Gove admits he is taken aback and doesn’t know what to say. Cameron distinctly remembers Gove himself offering mid-parliament to become chief whip to help sort out the ramshackle and rebellious parliamentary party. Along with George Osborne, Gove is one of the very few ministers that Cameron trusts totally and admires. Cameron has not found it easy to find his ideal chief whip in government: Patrick McLoughlin was good but almost too gentlemanly, Mitchell was only briefly in post and much the other way, while George Young, available to fill Mitchell’s place quickly, is seen as again too nice to fully grip the very tricky parliamentary party.
Cameron explains his thinking to Gove. A point of critical mass has been reached, education policy is one of the great achievements of the government and he now needs Gove by his side as they put the team in place for the general election and, they hope, beyond. ‘You can safely move now because the legislative agenda for this parliament has been completed,’ Cameron tells him. As Gove is preparing to leave the study, Cameron adds, ‘I would like to have your answer, if possible, by tomorrow morning.’ The reshuffle is imminent, and he needs to have the new chief whip in place and part of the debate over several still-undecided changes. Gove goes home deep in thought. He’s enjoyed being Education Secretary, and needs more time to complete his disputed agenda. He doesn’t want to leave. But he decides nevertheless to call Cameron that evening: ‘I won’t be an unwilling continuer in an office in the knowledge you’d rather I move on. So, yes,’ he tells the PM. He knows there is more to the move than said.
Cameron hates giving bad news, particularly to friends and loyal political allies, and has listened to powerful voices for and against. He sees the attraction of a Eurosceptic chief whip, unlike both McLoughlin and Young, in preparing for an EU referendum. Against this, Gove and his education reforms are particularly popular in the party and with Conservative commentators, a point made by Osborne. He knows, however he dresses it up, that his remarks are not what Gove wants to hear. He’s particularly pained because of the very close personal and family relationship that exists between the Goves and Camerons, including between Samantha and Gove’s journalist wife Sarah Vine, a friendship that has protected Gove for several difficult months when the knives were out for him. Sarah had looked after Cameron’s children on election night in 2010, and had even been tipped to join the Number 10 team.1 Close foursomes are rare at the top of politics and rarely last: the Blairs with Alastair Campbell and his partner Fiona Millar was one such, till breaking apart spectacularly. ‘People accused Cameron of being ruthless towards Gove,’ says a close observer, ‘but actually, he grappled for months with options other than moving Gove from the education brief, against the advice of his own advisers, until it got to the point that inaction was potentially weakening his authority.’
In the few days remaining to the reshuffle, Gove’s initial doubts increase. Despite vociferous criticism from parts of the educational establishment, he believes his mission to narrow the attainment gap between rich and poor children, and raise educational standards overall, has begun to bear fruit. ‘Everyone here is united in their desire to give the next generation the best possible start in life,’ he tells a two-day summit in July 2014. He is joined in addressing the event by education ministers from Poland, Spain and the Netherlands, as well as by Labour’s shadow education spokesman Tristram Hunt, and a range of international experts. Surrounded by fellow reformers and educationalists at Lancaster House, Gove’s pleasure at the apparent success of his crusade is bittersweet. Amongst those at the summit, he alone knows that this is his last speech as Secretary of State for Education.
Osborne sees more clearly than anyone that Gove’s departure from Education will slow hard-fought momentum and cause problems on the right. Only late in the day does he give his consent to it, swayed by the case that in the run-up to the general election, they will both need someone as chief whip they can trust 100%. Cameron and his chancellor hope that Gove will be an authoritative chief whip, akin to John Wakeham for Thatcher and Alastair Goodlad for Major. As late as October 2013 at the party conference, Cameron had been praising Gove to the skies: ‘Three and a half years ago, one man came into the Department of Education … Michael Gove. There he is, with a belief in excellence and massive energy, like a cross between Mr Chips and the Duracell bunny.’2 ‘In October 2013, education was our biggest positive for the government,’ says one Cameron aide. By July 2014 the Number 10 team were telling the PM that Gove had become a media and voter liability. What had happened so quickly that was so worrying that Cameron himself reluctantly had to agree? Gove’s move was only one in a complex set of ministerial changes in the July 2014 reshuffle. But, given the toxicity and rancour surrounding it, this single move came to overshadow the entire reshuffle.
Where Lansley had stumbled and fallen at Health, and IDS encountered constant woes at the DWP, all had seemed plain sailing for the Education Secretary. The reasons for his success are not hard to divine. Crucially, Gove had the total support of not only the prime minister, but also the chancellor. He had a solid policy platform, inherited from Labour with Andrew Adonis the principal architect, which Brown’s Education Secretary, Ed Balls, had not killed off. At the heart of this agenda lay a drive to improve academic standards for all, to attract the best graduates into teaching, halt
rampant grade inflation and award financial and managerial autonomy to head teachers. Unlike Lansley, Gove had not tried to reinvent the wheel, but built on existing success, citing Tony Blair as well as Adonis as the true architects of reform.
It helped explain why he had a relatively easy ride from Labour, who left the broad thrust of his policy largely unchallenged and did not posit a distinctive vision of its own, preferring instead to highlight particular issues, such as the need for greater scrutiny over free schools (independent state schools set up by parents, teachers and charities) and for all teachers to have qualified teacher status.3 Indeed, as the schools minister David Laws says, it was the Lib Dems who saw themselves as the real check on what Gove was doing.4 He was fortunate too to receive little criticism or challenge from the media. As a former journalist himself, and married to another, he knows many of the key commentators and editors personally: he is assiduous at cultivating journalists, always returns their calls, understands a good story, and feeds the outlets well. While Gove’s ultimate goals are simple, the volume and detail of the policies are complex. Few of those writing on education mastered the minutiae of the reforms, such as changes to the English baccalaureate performance measure, clamping down on unauthorised absence and truancy, and making vocational qualifications more rigorous and relevant. These reforms are structural – the transfer of power from local authorities – and far-reaching, as well as beefing up tests, exams and the curriculum which will often take many years to complete.
In Number 10, many of Cameron’s team do not fully understand the detail of what Gove is doing. ‘He outsources education to Michael completely,’ insists David Laws, ‘he is one of the few people in Cabinet who the PM rarely challenges and almost never overrules. The Treasury has such a tight grip on other departments. But it’s obvious the chancellor totally trusts Michael.’5 ‘David Cameron gave me very clear riding instructions when he appointed me. He was very supportive of the policies I advocated and simply trusted me to get on with it,’ says Gove.6 Cameron himself was, of course, shadow Education Secretary – ‘I worked on many of the ideas myself,’ he says.7 He supports the broad principles, the ‘standards’ and the autonomy agenda, even if the details of what Gove is doing escape him. ‘I don’t think he or his immediate team appreciated the coherence of the whole education policy reform agenda, or had even heard of E. D. Hirsch,’ says one official. (E. D. Hirsch is a Gove guru, an American academic best known for writing The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them and Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and for being founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation.)
After becoming shadow Schools Secretary in 2007, Gove drew around him a group of true believers, including special adviser Dominic Cummings, Policy Exchange’s Dean Godson, free-school enthusiast Rachel Wolf, and fellow Conservative MP Nick Gibb. In some ways they resembled the group of highly ideological soulmates whom Thatcher gathered around her in the 1970s; where she and her fellow travellers looked to Austrian classical economist and philosopher F. A. Hayek, many in Gove’s team looked for inspiration to E. D. Hirsch. Gibb in particular seized on Hirsch’s idea that the aspirations of the poor have been limited because they lack the cultural signposts that allow them to access the canon of the Western intellectual tradition, which will allow them to appreciate the higher levels of the curriculum and to move on to a top university. Progressive teaching methods were another bête noire of this group: Gibb was withering in his attacks on progressive teaching, ‘child-centred’ learning and time being spent at school on pursuits which lack intellectual rigour. Gibb also believed that academic teaching was the key to social mobility: he was full of zeal about research which purported to show that class sizes matter less in improving results than the aspirations of the school and quality of the teaching. All of Gove’s team wanted objective data and empirical evaluation to replace subjective and fuzzy judgements, where ‘happy and healthy’ was an equivalent measure to academic achievement. They believed all schools can and must achieve measurable targets, and that more focus should be given to international comparisons. Where Gibb was particularly interested in the writings of Hirsch, Cummings and Wolf were much more libertarian and focused on school autonomy. The differences within Gove’s ideas-rich team over standards and structures, different agendas that were sometimes in conflict, were held together by Gove himself, interested as he was in both.
Becoming Education Secretary in May 2010 is Gove’s dream. Adopted by a Labour-supporting family in Aberdeen, educated initially at a state school, he won a scholarship to the independent Robert Gordon’s College. He worked hard and gained a place at Oxford. He thinks everyone can succeed, even those from disadvantaged circumstances, if only they have the right education. He used his three years in Opposition from 2007 to develop a coherent reform plan, to visit countries like Finland and the US, and consult experts, rare for an incoming Secretary of State, particularly in recent times. Gove and his team arrive at the DfE all guns blazing but their experience and knowledge of education are not matched by the experience of working in the machinery of state. The shift from Ed Balls’s broadly focused Department for Children, Schools and Families to a renamed Department for Education focused on teaching and standards is significant. Gove’s team are frustrated by the time it takes for the department to respond to their agenda, and are dismayed by some early departmental errors, exemplified by the bungled announcement to end the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) funding programme. He presses ahead with reform, passing the Academies Act before the summer recess, which allows all state schools to become academies, with greater freedom from local education authority control. In November 2010, he publishes a White Paper encouraging the teaching of modern languages in schools, a tightening of league tables, and a greater emphasis to be placed on each child securing passes in five GCSEs including English and maths.8 The first signs of a backlash to a perceived restricted curriculum and traditional approach are evident. Steve Hilton from Number 10 shares Gove’s mounting impatience with the DfE’s weakness in communicating the ‘why’ and not just the ‘what’ and ‘how’.
From early 2011, Gove becomes more confident in navigating the Whitehall machine, and therefore more assertive. With Coulson’s departure, there is no longer anyone preventing Dominic Cummings officially joining Gove’s team of special advisers, and, less controversially, he ‘opens up’ the Civil Service’s closed shop of advice, appointing outside advisers to help him develop and deliver innovative policy changes, including Paul Bew on the primary-school assessment, Alison Wolf on vocational education and Charlie Taylor on truancy and behaviour. With the declining influence of Hilton, Gove is also left more alone by Number 10, with the exception of child protection and social work, adoption and fostering reform. At the same time, he continues with the expansion of academies, forges ahead with free schools and drives forward his plans on the curriculum and examinations. Gove is at the peak of his effectiveness and authority from the passage of the Education Act 2011, which receives Royal Assent that November, through to the summer and autumn of 2013. He advances on many fronts at once, and appears unstoppable, until the tide starts to turn at the end of the year.
Differences with the Lib Dems have been apparent from the outset. In mid-2012 there is a huge battle, when the Daily Mail publishes Cumming’s thoughts about scrapping GCSEs and the national curriculum, and having a single exam board.9 A furore breaks out. Such proposals would return Britain to the polarised society of the 1950s, Lib Dems allege.10 Gove is furious at their reaction. ‘I got the PM to agree to replace GCSEs: but when the Lib Dems cut up rough, we had to negotiate a compromise. It was a great shame’.11 After the September 2012 reshuffle and David Laws’ appointment as schools minister, political differences become a serious problem. Gove finds it hard that, whereas the PM will almost invariably give him the green light to whatever he proposes, the default response from Nick Clegg is amber, if not red. He believes Clegg has reached the conclusion that middle-class profe
ssionals – particularly those who work in the public sector, who were upset by tuition fee increases and the NHS reforms – are now focusing their attention on Gove’s school reforms. Clegg tells Gove outright that his attacks are necessary to placate his own core supporters by emphasising points of difference with the Conservatives. Their personal relationship deteriorates. Cummings allegedly leaks to the Mail on Sunday the false allegation that money from DfE has gone to the charity Book Trust because of the charity’s relationship with Miriam González Durántez, Clegg’s wife. Clegg is furious and believes that Gove and Cummings ‘stoop low’ to damage him. ‘I don’t want anything more to do with Gove,’ he tells Laws. He says to Cameron: ‘I can’t work with a Cabinet minister who says one thing to my face and another behind my back.’
Disagreements over local government are a key reason for the acrimony: Lib Dems are aggrieved that the push for free schools and academies is at the loss of local authority oversight and control. Cameron shares Gove’s frustration on this: ‘We could be doing much more on academies and free schools, but we can’t go any further because of the Lib Dems,’ he says in January 2014.
The irony is that Gove personally rates Laws, briefly Chief Secretary to the Treasury in May 2010, who had helped protect the education budget from cuts and secured the money for the pupil premium, which gave additional funding to help pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, in the very first days of the government. He fights for him to become minister of state. But as Gove soon finds, ‘I would get David to agree to various policies, but then people would get to Nick, and we lost that support.’12 To try to improve their frayed relationship, Clegg’s staff suggest that Clegg and Gove have a weekly meeting to help keep in step. Gove’s office declines: ‘It would have been a disaster and only made things worse,’ says an insider.
Cameron at 10 Page 45
