This morning, while Americans slept, Michael Gove, who campaigned side by side with Boris Johnson led the successful campaign for Brexit, announced that he was not, as expected, supporting Johnson for Conservative party leader and therefore prime minister, but was running himself.
“I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead,” he said around 9:30 in the morning. Two hours later, just before noon, Johnson announced that he would not run. “Having consulted colleagues and in view of the circumstances in Parliament, I have concluded that that person cannot be me,” he told a stunned press conference.
I’ve known Michael Gove over many years now and admire his intellect, speaking ability, invariable courtesy, devotion to principle and capacity to get things done. As education secretary, he was hugely successful in creating hundreds of academies (roughly similar to American charter schools) and of imposing rigorous intellectual standards, as academy founder Toby Young testifies.
Before the 2015 election, however, he was removed from that position by Prime Minister David Cameron on the advice of the Conservatives’ Australian political consultant Lynton Crosby, who feared that teacher union members viscerally (and viciously) opposed to Gove’s reforms would campaign more vigorously against the party if he were still in office. Cameron and Gove had been good friends, and Gove even privately expressed no bitterness about his removal; after Conservatives to their surprise won a parliamentary majority he was named justice secretary.
Gove surprised many people, surely not least Cameron and his close ally Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, when he came out for Brexit earlier this year, and he surprised even more people when he came out against Boris Johnson this morning and announced he was running himself. He has said publicly many times that he is not temperamentally suited to be prime minister, but in these cases he demonstrated the ruthlessness that prime ministers from William Pitt the Younger and William Gladstone said was a necessary attribute for the job.
Whether he will become party leader and prime minister is unclear. Theresa May, the home secretary for a seldom-equalled six years, announced her candidacy this morning as well; she opposed Brexit, but quietly, without taking to the stump much and without uttering the dire warnings that Cameron and Osborne frequently voiced. Also running are former defense secretary Liam Fox, work and pensions minister Stephen Crabb and energy minister Andrea Leadsom. On Tuesday Conservative MPs will vote, likely in multiple ballots in which the number of contenders will be reduced to two. Those names will be sent out to Conservative party members, and a new party leader—and thus prime minister—is scheduled to be announced September 9.
Meanwhile, the Labour party is in even greater chaos. The left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn has refused to resign despite losing on Tuesday a vote of confidence among Labour MPs by an astonishing margin of 172 to 40. Corbyn’s base is left-wingers, many of them young, who paid £3 (less than $5) to become Labour party members and voted for him in large numbers on the postal ballots. He has long appeared on panels with supporters of Hezbollah and Hamas and aroused huge criticism from, among others, Britain’s former Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, for just this week suggesting that “Israel and the Netanyahu government” were morally equivalent to ISIS.
Angela Eagle, the shadow business secretary, had planned to announce her candidacy for leader, widely supported by Labour MPs, today, but postponed her announcement. The names of leader candidates supported by 50 or more Labour MPs go on the ballot sent out to party members; it’s not clear that Corbyn could get 50 signatures now, but his backers argue that as incumbent leader his name should appear automatically.
