Gove struggles to escape the fall-out from his treachery

In the end, the Daily Mail came out for Theresa May. This was not in the Goves’ plan

If Gove were to win the leadership, it would be difficult for him to persuade Tory MPs to trust him (Getty)

On Tuesday, Rupert Murdoch told the CEO Summit staged by his newspaper The Times that Michael Gove should be the next prime minister. There was only one problem: Gove was not a candidate, and was backing Boris Johnson. Or so Boris thought.

Murdoch, Britain’s most powerful media mogul, likes Boris and meets him regularly, but has never rated him as a future PM – in contrast to his view of Gove, a senior journalist at The Times before becoming an MP.

Murdoch and Gove have a lot in common. As the wine flowed at a dinner party at Murdoch’s Mayfair flat in 2013, a loquacious Gove told guests: “Boris is incapable of focusing on serious issues and has no gravitas. He isn’t a team player and plays to the gallery the whole time. The whole Boris routine will wear thin with the electorate very quickly if he became PM. And he can’t make tough decisions.” (For good measure, Gove also said his now leadership rival Theresa May “has little chance of gaining the support of the electorate – she can’t even gain the support of her colleagues”.)

Gove seemed to have bonded with Boris when they jointly headed the Vote Leave campaign in the EU referendum. He looked set to be Johnson’s campaign manager in the Tory leadership election. But behind the scenes all was not well.

Gove’s doubts about Johnson surfaced on Wednesday in an email he received from his journalist wife Sarah Vine, urging him to seek “SPECIFIC assurances” from Johnson before guaranteeing him his support. Vine added that, without her husband’s backing, Tory members would not back Boris. Nor would Murdoch or Paul Dacre, her boss as editor of the Daily Mail, both of whom “instinctively dislike Boris but trust your ability enough to support a Boris/Gove ticket”.

The email was sent “accidentally” to a member of the public. Remarkably, it was passed on to two Murdoch outlets – Sky News and The Times. Looking back, Johnson allies are now convinced that the email was leaked as part of a plot by Gove to kill Boris politically and supplant him as the Leavers’ candidate – and that Murdoch was part of the “stop Boris” plan, or at least encouraged his favoured PM to stand.

Remain campaign organisers blame Murdoch and Dacre for “poisoning the well” during the referendum campaign by pushing immigration to the top of the agenda and filtering out the arguments for staying in the EU. Typical of the coverage was a Mail front page picturing a group of migrants who arrived in Britain the back of a lorry. “We’re from Europe – let us in!” screamed the headline. The following day, a tiny correction on page two admitted the migrants were from the Middle East. “We were swimming against the tide,” one Remain figure said. “Even when we had good ammunition, they turned it against us.” When the Institute for Fiscal Studies put out a report on the cost of Brexit for the anti-EU newspapers, it became an attack by Vote Leave on the EU-funded IFS. “It wasn’t a level playing field because this agenda was followed by the broadcasters,” said the Remain source.

Not content with completing their crusade to take Britain out of the EU, Murdoch and Dacre now seem to want to dictate who should be our next Prime Minister.

At his campaign launch on Friday, Gove made a joke about his wife’s emails. She, too, seems to see the funny side. In her Mail column this week, she reflected on their shock at winning the referendum. She revealed that she told her husband on the morning of the result: “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.” A pity that millions of people will be hit by the economic shockwaves. The Goves may be fans of Game of Thrones, but you start to wonder whether this is all a game of Tory thrones that wrecks a real country. In contrast, at her campaign launch May, talking about struggling working class families, said that some in Westminster “need to be told that it isn’t a game. It’s a serious business that has real consequences for people’s lives”.

However, it seems that Gove may struggle to escape the fall-out from his act of treachery. It was no surprise that he got sympathetic coverage in Murdoch’s Times and The Sun for forcing the Boris bandwagon off the road. But the Mail was not impressed, even though it employs his wife. It came out for May, saying that “we cannot see Mr Gove as a Prime Minister for these turbulent times”. This was not in the Goves’ plan.

If Gove were to win the leadership, it would be difficult for him to persuade Tory MPs to trust him. In the space of a week, he has killed politically two of his long-standing friends in David Cameron and Johnson; Tory MPs would be forgiven for asking what he does to his enemies. In politics, there are some things you do not recover from.

The one who stands to benefit is May, who offers stability and a port in the raging Tory storm. Many Tory MPs are now rushing towards it.