I knew Michael Gove as a journalist. He had a much more dangerous habit back then – pathological Euroscepticism

When you’ve worked in journalism for decades, you tend to learn about the behaviours and beliefs that politicians often try to bury years later. The environment secretary’s tended to focus on the European Union

I suppose we may as well start calling it “the Gove affair”, such is the coverage being given to Michael Gove’s consumption of cocaine. As a story it seems to be quite addictive.

As it happens, I used to know Michael Gove when he was a young journalist. Before he joined The Times I worked with him at the BBC. I wish I could say that I had burst in on him doing Charlie, so to speak, in the Television Centre bogs. Maybe he did himself host cocaine parties, snow all round those chubby chops, orgies to which I was not invited.

Had I been, I would have found the whole thing uncomfortable as I’ve not taken the stuff, but also because to me it was always a toff’s sort of drug, coke, the sort of thing they’d get high on at the Bullingdon Club at Oxford.

Or indeed at their post-graduate finishing school, the Notting Hill set. That overlay of class resentment makes the charge of drugs hypocrisy now levelled at Gove more damaging. He’d have been better off on the people’s drug, crack, the One Nation drug of choice for aspirant Tories.

Hypocrisy is an overrated crime, but the whole coke party thing does make me cringe. As well as never “trying” it I don’t feel especially sympathetic to those rich enough to get ripped to the tits on it. It feeds crime and human misery after all.

Anyway, in the media cliche, “the Gove I knew” was a rather fogeyish, bookish, very clever and witty man I did not expect to end up doing anything so foolish as running for the Tory leadership, let alone doing blow.

Gove has many qualities, really outstanding ones for the job, but I can also reveal he has a much more dangerous long-term habit, one he picked up decades ago and is still openly enjoying – pathological Euroscepticism.

I cannot speak for his rivals, but Gove has always simply hated the European Union and all it stands for. He mainlined on loathing for Jacques Delors and the Berlaymont. The Common Fisheries Policy would make the blood vessels in his nose explode. Becoming prime minister would allow him to indulge his addiction to the Brexit drug right up to the kind of ruinous levels last displayed in Trainspotting, with Gove playing the smart Renton character, Raab the violent thug Begbie, and Boris as the charming rival Sick Boy.

Like a coke hit, the next Tory government will be exhilarating for a while. But it cannot last for long; it will require ever more extreme doses of Brexit to have any effect, and it will end with most horrible hallucinations of blocked ports, medicine shortages and economic recession.

A few years later they can all express “deep regret” to the country for “a mistake”. They’ll still have jobs, mind.

Yours,

Sean O’Grady

Associate editor