Michael Gove might earn another promotion – if he drops the bizarre impressions

The levelling up minister’s TV interview was not his first unusual moment as Sean O’Grady explains

Gove dismissed suggestions that he is among cabinet members opposed to tearing up the Northern Ireland protocol (PA)

Once upon a time, Michael Gove was briefly an actor and an early pioneer of “right-wing” satire on short-lived Channel 4 programme A Shot in the Dark. A product of the channel’s unique set-up – soon to be scrapped by the government – Gove was an accomplished alternative-alternative performer. His performance on Wednesday morning’s media round suggests he might like to return to those days.

Aside from casually undermining the housing target in the Conservative manifesto, during one interview he launched himself into a dazzling display of mixed metaphors and funny accents including a homage to Harry Enfield’s take on scousers and a passable impression of an American news announcer. He was making a point about how the media can get a story all wrong, but it lost something in the telling.

It’s not the first sign of unusual activity. Some weeks ago he appeared to have “lost it” at the despatch box after a chorus of criticisms from opposition MPs about the failure of the Ukraine refugee scheme.

Events in Gove’s private life and his separation from his activist journalist wife, Sarah Vine, who writes for the Daily Mail, have been well covered in the media. He has gone rather quiet in recent months, probably a blessing for all concerned, and has contented himself with “getting on with the job”. When required he will defend government policy and colleagues, though sometimes to the point of self-parody. Contrary to the testimony of Dominic Cummings and a cursory glance at the real-world progress of Brexit, Gove describes Boris Johnson as “an expert negotiator”. He talks up the prospects for success in renegotiating Brexit: “There are some actors who will say certain things. And that’s fine, I’m not going to criticise them. Boris and Liz [Truss] – they are negotiating duo whom I place my trust.”

It is worth mentioning that it was the courteous and conscientious Gove who was once in charge of post-Brexit arrangements with the EU before the responsibility was wrenched from him and handed to Lord Frost, who has of course now resigned from the government and denounced the deal he and Johnson negotiated. Experts, indeed.

We should also recall Gove’s words when he “stabbed Boris in the front” as the press had it. Despite being close partners in Vote Leave, Gove blew up Johnson’s leadership campaign, and indeed his own prospects, when he took a deep breath and declared that “while Boris has great attributes, he is not capable of uniting that team and leading the party and the country in the way that I would have hoped”. The leadership soon after then fell into the hands of Theresa May, who sacked Gove and hired Johnson as foreign secretary. It was the chaotic beginning of six years of chaotic Tory governance.

Where next for the animated secretary of state for levelling up? Given the sceptical attitude of the Treasury, the sketchy white paper and modest new bill, perhaps not the transformation of vast swathes of the left-behind areas that turned to Brexit and Johnson as their saviours. As ever, Gove will make the best of the brief, and stay publicly loyal to his chief, just as he did with May when she was trying to get her version of Brexit done. He might have one more promotion in him, perhaps to the bed of nails that is the Home Office, and apply some post-Patel rationality to asylum and migration. That might happen under Johnson, who seems curiously reluctant to hand Gove a “great office of state”. Either way, he should probably drop the impressions.