Why Gove must be reincarnated as an olive

I repeat my suggestion that Michael Gove could be prime minister one day, in my column in The Independent on Sunday today.

I asked Gove if he wanted to be Tory leader on BBC television’s Head to Head in August 2007, when he had recently started wearing contact lenses. He spluttered that there was more chance of “my being reincarnated as an olive”, which was one of Boris Johnson’s formulae of denial.

Charles Moore in the Telegraph yesterday praised Gove to the skies in similar terms. Interesting, because Moore was a Tory admirer of Tony Blair. A Blairite coalition is being reassembled, but its centre of gravity has shifted slightly so that it is over the party line, on the Conservative side rather than Labour’s.

Toby Young, hired as columnist for the new Sun on Sunday, also devotes part of his launch effort today to praising Gove as a possible prime minister – despite his £15,000 bet (curiously he didn’t mention the sum in the SoS) with Nigella Lawson that Boris Johnson would be Tory leader by 2018.

This Gove festschrift has prompted a certain amount of apoplexy among the Guardian-reading religion (Charlotte Simpson is bringing up her two-year-old as a Guardian reader). And it is true that Gove is not perfect. By the standards of modern politics he is not tall enough, English enough or bland enough to be a super-salesman prime minister.

Nor is he right about everything. I disagree with him about people taking their children out of school for holidays; I am not keen on the Bible thing; and I would like to see sectarian discrimination in schools admissions diminished rather than strengthened.

But he is right about academies. A recent study showed that not only do they tend to produce better results for their own pupils but that they encourage neighbouring schools to improve too. (More on academies here.) Gove’s new “converter academies” are a different sort of school, and are too new to have produced conclusive results yet, but I think the reforms are going decisively in the right direction.

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