Michael Gove's leadership pitch: the brutal man of principle

Every candidate comes into a leadership contest needing to answer questions about their flaws and experience. But the questions that Michael Gove is having to answer about his own bid are of altogether a different order. The Justice Secretary spent the first chunk of his interview with Andrew Marr this morning having to explain not just why he decided to chuck Boris Johnson, but also why he did it in such a brutal way.

“You are our Frank Underwood” Andrew to @Gove2016 @HouseofCards #marr https://t.co/9Qv9NUIIi5— The Andrew Marr Show (@MarrShow) July 3, 2016

Marr repeatedly pressed him, not so much for his reasons for turning on the Mayor, but for an explanation of why he was so brutal. Why did he not notice Boris’s flaws during the many years in which they were friends? Why didn’t he even contact him before he announced he was pulling out to run his own campaign? Gove’s response was that he was doing this for the same reasons that he’d let his friend David Cameron down: he’s a principled politician. It is better, he argued to make a decision based on principles, rather than to preserve principles. This may be the case, but principled people can also be courteous enough to tell their friends they are about to let them down, rather than letting them find out from journalists. This is Gove’s problem: even if his line about principles plays well (it worked well in the Labour leadership contest last year), the way in which he has enacted those principles will not, and it will dominate at least the early interviews in which he tries to set out his stall. That stall is a compelling one, with Gove building later in the interview on his call for Tories to be ‘warriors for the dispossessed’. He is right to claim that he is the candidate who has done the most on this. But his actions in the past week will inevitably draw attention away from that – and Gove can only blame himself for that.

“Boris could have gone on without me if he wished to” Gove tells #Marrhttps://t.co/w3fgZLOR7k https://t.co/QUaOQMsGmG— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) July 3, 2016