A few of years ago a joke went around the Tory end of the Commons tea room. It was composed at the “Breakfast Club” of Conservative MPs and went like this:

“Have you heard that they’ve found the missing stanza from John Lennon’s masterpiece:

Imagine there’s no Gover,

It isn’t hard to do,

No more scheming nor Cummings,

And no Nick Boles too.”

The land of might-have-been is heavily populated with such refrains, and figures who wander around muttering “if only…” and “had I had my way…”. The tea room of the House of Commons is just such a territory. Usually, its denizens are dismissed as the dispossessed and the never-possessed, or just plain jokesters, unserious politicians.  But occasionally it may be worth cocking an alert ear at the things they say. It was thinking of all the likely talk in the tea room about the Conservative leadership, the princes and their paladins, that reminded me of that piece of beta-poetry. And it gave me the idea that we might have a look over the wall, at that imaginary world in which Michael Gove did not exist.

Imagine for a moment if Michael Gove had not been at the centre of our national affairs these last fourteen years

I do not mean to sound unkind. I worked with Michael Gove at the now defunct DLUHC and always got on with him. A world without Michael Gove would be a world much reduced. The Times in particular, and journalism in general, would be without a writer of perspicacity and incisiveness. The House of Commons would be less a debater of the most penetrating calibre, minus an orator whose fluency and acuity wiped the floor with Jeremy Corbyn. The metropolitan elites, not known for their politeness, particularly towards the modern minorities (e.g. white working classes) whose politics they despise, would be all the less polite without Michael Gove whose lavish civility is legendary.

But imagine for a moment if Michael Gove had not been at the centre of our national affairs these last fourteen years. How different might those affairs have been?

To begin at the beginning.  In May 2010, Michael Gove joined David Cameron’s first Coalition Cabinet as Education Secretary. His four year tenure at the DfE was bookended by two developments: The fiasco that beset his decision to scrap Building Schools of the Future and the initial triumph of the Teach First initiative. Sandwiched in between was the appointment of Dominic Cummings, Mr Gove’s chief adviser. The first bookend almost cost Mr Gove his job, or at least the civil servants out to trip him, nearly did. The second was long lauded as the moment when real experts, and not political activists, started to take up teaching. But would either have happened had, for example, Justine Greening, been Secretary of State? The “BSF” imbroglio had to be fixed no matter who was in charge. A bureaucratic nightmare that cost taxpayers millions before any bricks were laid was always going to be ditched. There were plenty of other ministers prepared to swing the wrecking ball.  And, crucially, they would have had the backing of the Treasury. Teach First, whilst it may not have been pursued with the same unswerving determination by anyone other than Michael Gove, was also in sympathy with George Osborne’s desire to bring private business and its people into the domain of public service – and in place of the public servants who occupied its roles. It is likely, therefore, that some form of policy would have been promulgated in any event.

And what of Brexit? On 23^rd June 2016 Britain voted clearly, if not overwhelmingly, to leave the European Union. Michael Gove was one the small gang of leading Conservatives who defied David Cameron and chose to back Vote Leave. His consiglieri, Dominic Cummings, was deeply involved too. But did Gove make a decisive difference to the Referendum that had such profound constitutional consequences for Britain, not to mention to the career of Lord Cameron?  Certainly his involvement gave an intellectual credibility to the Leave cause which in consequence made it more difficult for the media establishment to sneer. His media performances also, gave and edge to the arguments the country heard in those critical final days.  He doubtless swayed some wobbly Conservative MPs too. But for all his importance, Michael Gove did not clinch the argument for Leave. He may have stemmed the sneers but he did not stop them; and sneer Sopel, Maitlis, Goodall and all the other groovy guys in the gang certainly did.  It was Boris Johnson, the sneering Establishment (it would be churlish to deny them their part in Brexit) and David Cameron’s fateful decision to campaign for Remain, that were the crucial factors in Leave’s success. Michael Gove might have widened the margin of victory, but he did not win it. Nor would his absence have necessarily meant the absence of Cummings whose anti-EU credentials predate those of Mr Gove himself.

Michael Gove calculatedly withdrew his support from Boris Johnson

And Covid? During the Covid emergency, Michael Gove, by then translated to the office of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and de facto, if not de jure, deputy Prime Minister, was a key voice amongst the Covid hawks. These policy makers believed that the only way to vanquish the virus was to lock the country firmly behind its front doors until the danger had passed. Theirs was a controversial, draconian strategy, and one not shared by everyone, particularly not in the Conservative Party. But although Mr Gove was assuredly on the Diego Deza wing of the lockdown auto-da-fé, he was not the only one. The Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, also displayed marked Torquemada tendencies and in any case the approach was enthusiastically supported by officials in the Government, the NHS hierarchy, Keir Starmer and the Labour Opposition, and nearly all of the media. It can hardly be supposed that without Michael Gove, the history of Covid and our prolonged, painful response to it, would have been widely different. And yet, and yet….

At midday on 30^th June 2016, nominations to succeed David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party closed. Just a few hours beforehand, on the eighty second anniversary of the first Night Of The Long Knives, Michael Gove calculatedly withdrew his support from Boris Johnson, so sliding a stiletto skilfully between his ally’s shoulder blades. Johnson’s candidacy collapsed, the Conservative Party convulsed, its leadership election concertinaed and Theresa May became the unexpected, unelected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Had there been no Gove, the imaginers say, there would still have been a Johnson candidacy. But there would have been no Hurlingham Club trickery, no Nick Boles duplicity, no carefully crafted interview on the Today Programme. Johnson would have been nominated. His campaign, though unlikely to have been the Williamson/Shapps slam dunk of 2019, would almost certainly have delivered him the keys to Downing Street. And that might have meant an early General Election, but one in which the Conservative vote was more efficiently distributed and the majority that eluded Mrs May secured. And with that majority Johnson could have delivered a Brexit much sooner and much smoother than the tortuous two years following 2017 that paralysed parliament and empowered a berserk Speaker. Close your eyes and imagine it. A clear Conservative majority in 2016. None of the gridlock that slowly crushed Mrs May nor any danger from Corbyn. A quick and clean Brexit agreed with Europe in 2017, then three clear years in which to govern Britain and Level Up before Covid struck. And then, a Covid-bounce general election victory in 2021. All of it more than possible; all of it very likely. And all of it in a world without Michael Gove.

Mr Gove has many admirers, in the media and in politics. He has many outstanding qualities, and many much needed in the modern Conservative Party. A world without Michael Gove would have meant the absence of those qualities for he has been an elemental force. But the weather without Michael Gove, though not always sunny, might have been different in ways that perhaps neither his admirers nor the man himself, might care to forecast.