How Not To Be A Political Wife

Sarah Vine’s account of the misery of being Mrs Michael Gove

Another Tory account of the worst successive governments in modern history, with barely a sorry in it. Another magnificent acquisition from Beckenham library, just to reassure you, dear loyal readers, that I’m not contributing a penny to Sarah Vine’s hardship fund. More of that later.Think of this as selfless public service on my part. I’ve read this dull trudge so that you don’t have to.

On the surface, this was a book with massive potential. It tells the story, from an insider’s point of view, of the rise and fall of Michael Gove, one of the key movers and shakers in the Cameron project, and Brexit, and its aftermath. It’s a tale rich in snobbery, sycophancy, the psychological alienation of the class traitor and Shakespearean levels of betrayal. Throw in a broken marriage and a trail of lost friendships and you have a recipe for a juicy stew. Unfortunately, it tastes like a tin of bland, mass -produced soup with not enough salt.

Just like that other towering political tome, Ungovernable by that Complete Unknown, Simon Hart, Vine’s book is a virtuoso display of Not Reading The Room. The levels of denial, delusion and deceit are off the scale. Vine and her ilk simply cannot conceive that any other government than a Conservative one is either possible or legitimate. Any break in that hegemony is merely a temporary blip, an annoying hiatus while the ruling class have to wait a bit until the billionaires do their work through the media, mainstream and social, telling enough lies to make the electorate forget exactly how ghastly they were in office. For years the enemy for the Ghastly Party was Labour, but strange things have happened in recent years. Now, Labour in government have metamorphosed into a vile tribute act for the people they replaced, saying and enacting a whole series of authoritarian, dumbass policy positions that are just as bad ( and in some cases worse) of those espoused by the party that have just been ousted. Their brilliant advisors have concluded that the thing that will really seal the deal with an electorate who were heartily sickened by the corruption and incompetence of the Tories, apparently untouched by the collapse of civil society and its infrastructure, is to, um, pretend to be the Tories. New Labour transformed miraculously into New Tory. Was this Blair’s secret plan all along? Yes, Peter, that will do it. You really are a tactical and strategic genius.

I digress. Vine’s book provides a terrifying portrait of the world inhabited by the ruling classes and those temporarily given house room in return for services rendered: Skiing holidays (where she copped off with Michael Gove – that tells you how bad it must have been), Tuscan villas, hobnobbing with minor royals, wine-fueled jollies at Chequers. And it’s made very clear that both Gove and Vine were intruders, not quite made of the same right stuff as the Golden Cameroons and their entourage. There’s a telling recollection of George Osborne’s reaction to the news that Gove was hitching his colours to the Leave campaign.

“But..but..” he spluttered, “We made Michael Gove. Who was he before? He owes us his whole bloody career! How can he not support us?”

Class will out. In their eyes, Gove and Vine (particularly Gove), were oiks, to be laughed at behind their backs. Vine shows a Gove desperate to keep up, to be accepted, to varnish over his background. Spending too much on wine, clothes, stuff, anything and everything to signal he knew what the accessories were that were needed to keep your place, socially and in terms of your career, at the top table.

Vine is also strangely keen to put to bed, as it were, the persistent rumours that have dogged Gove about his sexuality. To do so she furnishes the sympathetic reader with clinching details about Michael’s life, including how he is always drenched in the most expensive and exclusive fragrances, beautifully dressed and before he met Vine shared a number of flats with scores of very gay and very out men. Honestly, it’s astonishing the hurtful rumours began in the first place.

“Michael enjoyed the intellectual company of men probably more than women. And he did have a lot of gay friends (still does) plus as a minister he had a habit of surrounding himself with incredibly handsome gay men. But that was all circumstantial. A few swallows do not a summer make.”

Vine’s razor sharp wielding of evidence to the fore as usual. That’s those rumours comprehensively scotched.

Other details are helpfully provided to give a full and rounded picture of Gove the polymath. Her account of his heroic struggle to liberate Working Class children from the tentacles of the Communist Education Establishment (aka Local Education Authorities) is a textbook example of the careless disregard of facts so entrenched in Journalism (particularly those taking the Daily Mail shilling). Take a few vague and fuzzy impressions circulated endlessly by the establishment (Working Class kids are thick, State schools are useless, Posshies are innately superior), come up with some populist “common sense” solutions (make kids read 19th century Literature, turn the curriculum into a relentless list of facts to be learned, swamp the system with grinding and irrelevant exams and resits) and bingo you have a recipe that will inevitably have to be unpicked at some point in the future as the full scale of the disaster it will inevitably create becomes impossible to defend.

She adds stories that illustrate Gove’s difficulties in navigating the humdrum world of us mere mortals: repeatedly crashing the car, not doing the washing up, head always stuck in a very expensive book (he’s very clever you know). This latter habit was deployed very helpfully when Mrs Gove was in labour and again when they were moving out of the family home. Not for Mikey the workaday drudgery of filling packing cases or loading the car or checking on the children. No sir – he had to take care of the polymath type tasks, reading another impenetrable, expensive (but oh so impressve) tome on yet another 19th century Tory bigwig politician grandee. Much more effective than insisting the midwife bring on the epidural. “What is pain?” mused the Govester loftily, in between his wife’s screams, as he sipped another glass of vintage red after a hard day in the House of Commons.

Well, we all know what he got up to there. And in clubs across the land after his unfortunate divorce.

https://share.google/images/HtaTeVFvyBXyzu8Uv

The book only becomes interesting when Vine talks about her childhood. It’s a sad tale, and one that succeeds in creating some sympathy for the hitherto unlikeable author. Her father sounds absolutely ghastly and Vine’s life was made very difficult by the incessant undermining and criticising of her by a drunken, philandering patriarch. She’s done well to survive it, quite frankly.

But that’s as far as my sympathy extends. It’s hard to feel for someone who makes their money from endless articles in The Daily Mail churning out utter tripe – nasty, vindictive, xenophobic, classist nonsense designed to tickle the prejudices of their “patriotic” readership. She (and it) have a lot to answer for.

Finally, we get to the main psychological cry for help that runs like a golden thread throughout the book: her friendship with Samantha Cameron. Her evident neediness makes it uncomfortable to read at times. The fallout from Gove jumping ship over Brexit led to an immediate and draconian excommunication from the Golden Circle of The Cameroons. Vine howls in disbelief, pain, apology. You can almost see the snot-stained, tear-drenched face of the deranged jilted lover.

To parody John Crace, the digested read of this book can be only one thing:

“Please, please, Sam, (cos I’m her closest friend, readers) take me back. Be my friend again. Let me back in. Please… I’ll do the washing up”

Tory Education Minister thinks the unthinkable

_{Marcus Grovelle, the Tory Education Secretary, in an eerie foreshadowing of Gavin Williamson, solves the problems of the NHS, Social care and Teacher recruitment at a stroke}.

In this extract from “Zero Tolerance”, Grovelle, speaking at a conference of POCSE, a teachers’ group designed to raise exam performance, tackles the pressing issues of the day.

Grovelle’s speech was reaching its zenith and the crowd, seduced by the charisma of power, were lapping it up, with its strange mixture of flattery, eccentricity and outright madness.

“And there are so many points of agreement between this Government’s challenging of the status quo and the Partnership’s challenging of sloppy teaching and low standards in exams. We have broken the dead hand of Local Authorities and their monopoly control of education, we’ve provided real choice with the creation of Academies that have transformed educational standards in this country and took that step further with a whole new category of Free Schools, giving parents the right to set up schools that will give greater priority to standards and old-fashioned values. We’ve finally dealt with the runaway grade inflation and cheating that flourished under the last socialist government, introducing exams that are rigorous and which don’t patronise working class children and instead expect the same high standards for students whether they come from a council estate or a country estate.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, we are clearly cut from the same cloth. We want the same things, we have the same passion, we refuse to accept the same old excuses. Now, I ask you to join me in our new venture, the next step in transforming Britain’s education system and moving from being the laughing stock of the free world to being the best in the world. I can announce today, that after consultation, from next September we will be introducing the following major reforms:

All students will have an entitlement to follow a five-year course, leading to GCSE, of Latin and Greek. These courses will be double weighted in the performance tables, to incentivise more timid institutions to embrace the reform. Let’s bring back the standards from historically our finest institutions and spread them to Bash Street Kids Comprehensive.

We are going to tackle the problem of teacher recruitment with a series of bold and innovative initiatives. Every University, College and Higher Education Institute will be affiliated to a network of local schools and undergraduates will be able to supplement their Maintenance Loans by taking up the places that will be on offer as affiliated teachers. This will, at a stroke, get the brightest and the best of our young people working in the Secondary School system without the need for costly and time-consuming training, most of which frankly, could have come out of Jeremy Corbyn’s Marxist handbook.”

Here he paused and beamed at his audience, evidently delighted with his clever joke, one he had personally inserted in the text of the speech, against the wishes of his Central Office writers. The audience nervously blinked back, not sure of what their response should be to these extraordinary proposals. Grovelle steamed forward.

“We will tackle once and for all the divide between vocational education and academic. For too long we have been in thrall to the crazy notion that everyone should go to University. We have denigrated practical subjects and sneered at those who have chosen to follow their aptitude for hands-on work. Our new apprenticeships were a start in tackling the ludicrous, over-complicated schemes of the last Labour Government, but now we are going to go one step further. I am delighted to be able to announce today that, from September, from the age of fourteen all students will be able to choose to sign up to do National Service, either in any of the armed forces, or, and this idea is truly inspired and revolutionary, in our National Health Service, with particular emphasis on Social Care. The sneering naysayers in the Remoaners camp, who constantly talk this great country of ours down, have carped and moaned continually about how our great institutions would collapse without foreign workers to staff them. Why on earth should we condemn the bottom forty percent of our young people to failure in the academic exam system, just for the sake of political correctness? We anticipate that, in the first instance, there will be a traditional gender split, with boys opting for the armed forces and girls for the caring professions, but the choice will be available for anyone who to express a preference for either. The only obstacle they would have to face would be the comments of their friends.” Again, Grovelle paused to allow the audience to show their appreciation of his daring joke. He was rewarded with a few nervous titters.

“Imagine, the problems of Social care, the NHS, the Armed Forces in the face of the conventional threat posed by Russia and by terrorism and the academic standards of the bottom 40% of our young people, all solved at a stroke.”

The expressions on the sea of faces in front of him told their own story of people picturing the reality of what had just been described to them. There were expressions of bafflement, incomprehension, with a few furrowed brows of those who were turning to anger. Grovelle, oblivious to his audience, ploughed on. The unthinkable had to be thought, and he was the man to think it.

Will Williamson have more success than Grovelle? Read the rest of “Zero Tolerance” to find out.

https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/contemporary/zero-tolerance/

The Demon Headmaster- Satire or Instruction Manual?

Back in the 1980’s grateful English teachers seized upon “The Demon Headmaster” as an engaging playscript for Key Stage 3 classes. It started life as novel by Gillian Cross, but it was the script that was most in demand. We taught it as a satire, a bit of light relief. Its shelf life was extended by the TV version in the nineties, and its dystopian vision of the school of the future, run by crazed, sinister and nameless aliens retained its appeal. It was a clever, far-fetched, mad idea that teachers and school leaders might have strange ideas of power and control over unsuspecting humans. It allowed for the perennially attractive idea of a resistance movement, secretly fighting against the monolithic powers of darkness and oppression. And just like “The Handmaid’s Tale”, it’s back, with added relevance for the strange times we are living through. Strangely, it’s set in an Academy, with a robotic Head teacher who has weird ideas of how to treat children and staff. Where do they get these crazy ideas from?

How we laughed at the idea of silent corridors, kids chanting oppressive mantras in the playground, a Headteacher whose big idea was the importance of order above all other things! Little did we know that it was destined to be a set text on NPQH programmes, a sort of “Headteachering for Dummies” guide. Senior leaders everywhere, who are trying to hold the line of ethical leadership against the rising tide of the New Authoritarianism, stand firm! You may get your feet wet, but the tide will turn.

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2019-02-11/the-demon-headmaster-bbc-reboot

Gove’s Greatest Gaffes

Number 3. The Free School Programme

Another great example of ideological correctness trumping effectiveness. At a time of unprecedented austerity, His Goviness decreed that Free Schools were The Answer, and hang the expense. If they were the answer, it must have been a very silly question. On the back of zero credible evidence (I’m discounting the report in Which magazine comparing the best school systems in the world that came between the list of best small family saloons and the best bagless cylinder vacuum cleaners) Gove pumped billions of pounds of tax payer dosh into this madcap scheme to let anybody set up a school. You could use any derelict building in the High Street (and, let’s face it, the supply of derelict buildings rocketed round about this time) to put the students in and you could get any Tom, Dick or Harry to teach them. If you remember, this was also the time of Gove’s other stroke of genius, getting ex-service veterans fast tracked through teacher training, to sort out local-authority -sponsored feral student behaviour.

There didn’t even seem to be a fit and proper person test, similar to the one that so effectively inoculates Premier League football clubs from being taken over by dodgy Russian oligarchs, drugs barons and people with pending court cases regarding human rights abuses. ( Oh. Hang on a minute…) There quite clearly couldn’t have been such a test, because the poster boy for this libertarian movement was Toby Young, a man whose brain could not cope with the onerous task of tweeting messages while considering , at the same time, all social norms of acceptable behaviour with regard to women and minorities.

In a report published in Schools Week in January this year, ( https://schoolsweek.co.uk/revealed-the-hidden-cost-of-free-schools )

it was revealed that between 2010 and 2017, the DFE spent £3.6 billion on setting up Free School. A quarter of it was spent on Lawyers’ fees. £3.6bn! That’s nearly four bungs to the DUP. At a time when class sizes are rising, teacher pay has been frozen for years and class teachers are resourcing teaching materials out of their own pockets. Value for Money, as Conservative spokespeople are wont to say. Value for Money my arse, as Jim Royle was wont to say. You can’t put a price on ideological purity.