If what you want is to understand Michael Gove as a public figure in charge of the nation’s educational needs, there is little point in debating what he might call his “ideas” (Letters, 4 February). One needs rather to focus on three things. First, and notwithstanding the acquired, but now melting, patina of Oxford cleverness, his manifest stupidity, apparently incorrigible. Only an idiot could seriously maintain that a day will come, causally engineered by none other than Michael Gove himself, when it will be impossible to distinguish state schools from fee-paying schools – a deft account of the sheer idiocy of this view is provided by Peter Wilby (Comment, 4 February).
Second, his fantasy life, that of a man lost in translation between past and present, and more precisely the fantasy, bordering on obsession, of the arriviste, wannabe toff drooling over the lexicon of long ago while dreaming of the glory days of “prep” and “lines”. Third, the political ambition. Despite all the guff about linking educational “standards” and “social mobility”, everything that Gove does as secretary of state for education serves a very precise purpose. Gove wants to be the next leader of the Tory party and one day perhaps prime minister.
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