Michael Gove's New Vision For Britain: A 30 Year Plan he cannot see

“I did almost everything not to be a candidate for the leadership of this party,” Mr Gove said, apart from standing for the leadership

Michael Gove delivers his speech after announcing his bid to become Conservative Party leader (Reuters)

No one in public life thinks Britain is in more urgent need of reform than Michael Gove and now we know why.

For thirty years he has worked with Boris Johnson. They’ve written rival newspaper columns together, lied about the NHS together, knifed their friends together, that sort of thing. And yet it was only at midnight on Wednesday, he said, that he “came to realise that Boris was not the person for the task” of being Prime Minister.

How tough life must be if it takes a full three decades working so closely alongside someone to realise with seconds to spare that they're not up to the task you've been machinating to make sure they get.

Poor Michael Gove. Every week his cleaner turns up in her big muddy wellies, traipsing up and down the stairs, emptying the bins all over the living room, polishing the sofa, ironing the crisps and picking up her thirty quid and going home again. In thirty years, he will realise she is 'not the right person for the task’, but not just yet.

Meanwhile, his accountant keeps trying to fix his boiler, his dentist is still struggling to MOT the car, his hairdresser just cannot get to grips with his tax return and every time he takes a leisurely stroll down to his favourite curry house, where he’s been going since the mid eighties, the answer is the same: ‘No Michael. We cannot do you a chicken dupiaza. We are a shoe repairers.”

Broken Britain eh? Thank god for Michael Gove’s “New Vision” for it, which ran to a full 5,000 words, all of which was produced in the 36 hours since he decided, at midnight on Wednesday, that he had been left with no choice to run for the party leadership.

“I did almost everything not to be a candidate for the leadership of this party,” he said, redefining both the words almost and everything with trademark Govian vision so as to stop short of including within their parameters knifing the front runner at midnight and then, actually, standing for the leadership himself.

“I am standing for the leadership not as a result of calculation,” he said. He had to pause for laughter at this point. “I am standing here with the burning desire to transform our country.”

It involves, this vision, Britain building “a new, more dynamic economy,” which will have to be done in the middle of an entirely self-inflicted recession.

It involves taking on the, “Far too many people in financial services who are paid vast fortunes as if they are outstandingly skilful but in many cases are simply lucky.”

Indeed they are lucky. So lucky that Frankfurt, Brussels and Amsterdam are already machinating to have a bit of that luck for themselves. Luck that contributes 18 per cent of the nation’s GDP. Luck that, were it to run out, would lead to a recession more severe and more long lasting even than the one Michael Gove foresaw for us all when he drove round the country in the big red bullshit bus campaigning for it.

That’s the bus that said, ‘Let’s give the NHS the £350 million we send to Brussels each week,” right down the side of it.

Gove’s ‘New Vision For Britain’ involves, he said, ‘Giving the NHS £100m extra a week by 2020,” an amount equal to a 1 per cent increase per year, which were it not for the self-inflicted recession was liable to happen anyway. 2020, by the way, is when George Osborne had forecast the budget to have been in surplus. While Gove set out his Vision for Britain, that target was abandoned.

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. Having betrayed his friend the Prime Minister by campaigning for Brexit, and now having betrayed his campaign partner too, he’ll be out the race before the end of the weekend, and his New Vision for Britain will never come to pass. Sometime in the next thirty years, it’s possible he’ll work this out.