Michael Gove has a rose-tinted take on 14 years of Tory turmoil – how will history remember it?
As a decade and a half dominated by Cameron, May, Boris et al comes crashing towards an end, a new degree course offers the chance to dive deep into the political weeds of a turbulent era, write Jack Brown and the Independent’s John Rentoul
You may have noticed that it is election year. After 14 years, the governing party is contemplating its record.
Before his warning that if someone doesn’t start building some houses, young people may “abandon democracy” altogether, Michael Gove sketched out a list of achievements the Conservatives may want to highlight in their campaign for re-election.
As a surviving member of David Cameron’s first cabinet in 2010, along with Jeremy Hunt and Cameron himself, he is well placed to do so.
His list copied an idea from Gordon Brown’s 2009 Labour conference speech, in which the Labour prime minister rattled through a machine-gun delivery of what he and Tony Blair had achieved in a single paragraph.
Brown’s list was rather shorter and more substantial than Gove’s. Some of Gove’s claims risked getting ahead of themselves. “New nuclear submarines on the way” might be better judged when actually delivered, and the extent to which nationalism is “in retreat in Scotland” would be better measured at the general election.
Most of Gove’s claims, in fact, deserve closer scrutiny. Neither list included the negatives, the misjudgements and mistakes that need to be taken into account to provide a balanced assessment. Nor did either list include the external challenges to which governments and prime ministers had to respond.
One of Brown’s strongest claims to a place in history, for example, was his handling of the financial crash, nationalising the banks and rallying G20 leaders behind an expansionary fiscal policy that probably “saved the world” from worse recession and higher unemployment.
Gove’s list, meanwhile, did not include the Boris Johnson government’s response to the pandemic, except for “the fastest vaccine rollout in the world”.
This may reflect the popular view that the initial response was handled badly, but it also leaves out Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme and business support, which was admired at the time for again averting recession and saving jobs.
Nor did Gove mention the Sunak government’s subsidy of gas and electricity bills during the world energy price crisis, a third huge state intervention to protect people’s living standards. Had people simply come to expect the government to bail them out with borrowed money by then?
These kinds of questions are what makes ultra-contemporary history so interesting. The Strand Group’s new MA in Government Studies at King’s College London will offer students a chance to study the last 14 years as history, with a module called “The Conservative Years: Governing in an Age of Turmoil”. It will build on the success of “The New Labour Years: The Blair-Brown Revolution”, which will also be part of the new programme.
The New Labour course, which started as “The Blair Years” a mere 16 months after Tony Blair left office, has over the past 16 years hosted as special guests most of the leading cabinet ministers, civil servants and special advisers of the New Labour governments, including Blair himself.
Its unique approach is to apply the rigour of historical inquiry to recent events by studying primary sources – and those primary sources include the people who were “in the room where it happened”.
The Conservative Years class, led by Dr Jack Brown, will attempt to tackle even more “ultra-contemporary” history than before. The MA course launches this September, with the Conservative government probably still in office and the general election imminent.
The Conservative Years module will start in January 2025, which may be just weeks after the government it studies has come to an end.
Gove’s list will provide a useful starting point for assessing the Tory record – perhaps Gove himself will come to the class to defend it and to talk about his achievements. As education secretary, for example, he expanded New Labour’s academies programme – which either turbocharged or diluted it, depending on one’s point of view.
There are already several memoirs and diaries of the early period of Conservative-led government, including David Cameron’s For The Record and David Laws’s diaries – although nothing quite as comprehensive as Alastair Campbell’s diaries of the Blair years, which were a fuller account than the official cabinet minutes.
New Labour failed to abolish boom and bust; failed to move the party permanently to the centre; and failed to secure Britain’s place at the heart of Europe
Another primary source for the workings of government, for which we do not have to wait 20 years as with the official records, is the findings of public inquiries.
The Hutton and Chilcot inquiries revealed a great deal about the way the Blair government made decisions; the Covid inquiry has already revealed much about the very different operation of the Johnson administration – even if it will not report for some time yet.
Brown’s list, which ran from the winter fuel allowance to the Climate Change Act, could have been the starting point for one of the Blair Years classes, taught by Dr Michelle Clement, Professor Jon Davis and visiting professor John Rentoul.
Our students would have relished the task of listing the failures of the New Labour governments to be weighed on the other side of the balance. Iraq would have been chief among them, although on one occasion when a class was asked to draw up a list of “what Tony Blair got wrong”, foreign policy didn’t feature, while the failures to reform welfare and to close the gap between rich and poor came at the top of a 35-item list.
One of the big differences between the New Labour years and the period of Tory-led government that followed is that Blair and Brown had a unity of purpose, despite an ideological cleavage between them over the role of market forces in public services.
Whether it was a single period of social-democratic achievement as implied by Brown’s list, or what Blair prefers to call the “10 plus three” years of New Labour followed by plain Labour, the river flowed in the same general direction.
The Conservative period, on the other hand, was marked by changes of course, from partnership with the Liberal Democrats to single-party Tory rule committed to deep cuts in welfare, then to three years of Brexit deadlock, followed by coronavirus, the brief Liz Truss experiment, and two years of attempted stabilisation.
To regard the achievements of that period as the product of a single political project, as Gove sought to do, seems to involve not just studying history but rewriting it.
What will students studying the Conservative years uncover? Whether they will come to an end soon or surprise everyone by enduring, we will be trying to assess the last 14 years in historical context, and to reach a balanced judgement.
That judgement will change: one of the novel features of the Blair Years course was the chance to study evolving perceptions of the Labour period through the financial crash, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and the EU referendum – each of which cast Blair and Brown’s record in a different light.
New Labour failed to abolish boom and bust; failed to move the party permanently to the centre; and failed to secure Britain’s place at the heart of Europe.
Similar changes will happen to people’s perceptions of the legacy of the five Conservative prime ministers since 2010. It will be fascinating to see which parts of Gove’s list stand the test of time.
Gordon Brown’s list of Labour achievements 1997-2009:
“The winter fuel allowance, the shortest waiting times in history, crime down by a third, the creation of Sure Start, the Cancer Guarantee, record results in schools, more students than ever, the Disability Discrimination Act, devolution, civil partnerships, peace in Northern Ireland, the social chapter, half a million children out of poverty, maternity pay, paternity leave, child benefit at record levels, the minimum wage, the ban on cluster bombs, the cancelling of debt, the trebling of aid, the first ever Climate Change Act…”
Michael Gove’s list of Tory achievements 2010-24:
“Better state schools than ever before, more students from state schools at our best universities, more students securing top grades in maths, physics and chemistry, our universities the best in Europe and growing, record numbers in employment, welfare simpler, fairer and better targeted, many more hours of free childcare, a national living wage, same-sex marriage, stronger defence with two new aircraft carriers, new nuclear submarines on the way and a stronger Nato, the fastest decarbonisation of any major economy, world leaders in offshore wind, farm subsidies reformed to increase production and enhance the environment, world leadership in protecting our oceans, Brexit delivered and membership of the world’s fastest growing trade bloc secured, more than £350m extra a week for the NHS, leadership extended in life sciences, quantum computing and AI and gene technology, crime falling, over 2.5 million new homes delivered and the number of non-decent homes down by over 2 million, the Union strengthened, devolution delivered across much of England, nationalism in retreat in Scotland, the fastest vaccine rollout in the world, democracy’s strongest supporter in Ukraine.”
Dr Jack Brown is a lecturer and John Rentoul is a visiting professor at the Strand Group at King’s College London, which launches an MA in Government Studies in September 2024
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments