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Michael Gove

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Michael Andrew Gove (born August 26, 1967, Edinburgh) is a British politician, journalist and author. He has been the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath since 2005.

Media work

Michael joined The Times in 1996 as a leader writer and has been comment editor, news editor, Saturday editor and assistant editor. He has also written a weekly column on politics and current affairs in the newspaper and contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, Prospect magazine and The Spectator. He has written a sympathetic biography of Michael Portillo MP and a critical study of the Northern Ireland peace process, The Price of Peace, for which he won the Charles Douglas-Home Prize.

Previously, Michael worked for the BBC's Today programme, On The Record, Scottish Television and the Channel 4 monologue programme A Stab In The Dark, alongside David Baddiel and Tracey MacLeod. He was a regular panelist on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze and Newsnight Review on BBC2.

Politics

Michael joined the Conservative party at university and was secretary of Aberdeen South Young Conservatives. He has helped write speeches for a variety of cabinet and shadow cabinet ministers, including Peter Lilley and Michael Howard. He once applied for a job at the Conservative Research Department, but was told he was "insufficiently political" and "insufficiently Conservative", hence his turning to journalism.

Michael was previously chairman of Policy Exchange, a centre-right think tank launched in 2002. As Conservative candidate in the safe seat of Surrey Heath, he entered Parliament in the 2005 election. Before becoming a candidate, Michael had expressed the view that the state should not generally interfere in domestic affairs, campaigned for greater personal freedom and wrote that "Section 28 is a nonsense" [1]. He had flatshared with Conservative Ivan Massow who later defected to Labour over Section 28 and Nicholas Boles. Both Ivan Massow and Nicholas Boles were openly gay at the time.

He takes a pro-Israel line and has criticised anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and several United Nations peace processes. A self-confessed neo-conservative, he called for early intervention against Saddam Hussein [2]. Surprisingly, he stated in October 2004 of Tony Blair: "I can't hold it back any more; I love Tony!" He is also a signatory of the Henry Jackson Society. He has recently been accused of harbouring hostile attitude towards Islam and Muslims, exemplified in his book Celsius 7/7. The author William Dalrymple has described the book as a "confused epic of simplistic incomprehension". [3] Gove's sympathizers Melanie Phillips and Stephen Pollard have vigorously rejected Dalrymple's analysis[4][5], and Gove himself has replied in The Times.[6]

Gove is seen as part of an influential set of young up-and-coming Tories, sometimes disparagingly referred to as the Notting Hill set, including David Cameron, George Osborne, Edward Vaizey, Nicholas Boles and Rachel Whetstone. They are seen as modernisers, but also close to Michael Howard. Michael Portillo has predicted that Gove will be leader of the Conservative party, although he has only very recently won a seat at Westminster. When Cameron was elected as the leader of the party in December 2005, Gove was appointed as the party's housing spokesman in the team shadowing the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Personal life

Michael was born in Edinburgh. At four months old, he was adopted by a family in Aberdeen, where he was brought up. His adoptive father was a fish merchant and still works part-time in the fish-processing business. His mother worked as a lab assistant at the University of Aberdeen and with deaf children for Aberdeen district council. He was educated in the state and independent sectors in Aberdeen.

He is married to Sarah Vine, a writer on The Times, and has two young children.

Bibliography

  • Michael Portillo: The Future of the Right (1995). ISBN 1-85702-335-8
  • The Price of Peace (2000). ISBN 1-903219-15-9
  • A Blue Tomorrow - New Visions for Modern Conservatives (2001) (ed. with Edward Vaizey and Nicholas Boles). ISBN 1-84275-027-5
  • Celsius 7/7 (2006). ISBN 0-297-85146-2
Parliament of the United Kingdom

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