Latest news with #MichaelGove
Daily Mail
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE 'You're a danger to your children': Shocking comment a doctor made to SARAH VINE after the trials of motherhood and marriage left her balding, struggling to shift the baby weight and full of self-hatred
Most people are first impressed with someone's looks, their physical prowess, their ability to dance. I fell for Michael Gove 's modesty, the fact that his physical bumbling was in such contrast to his razor-sharp brain and his wit: there is no funnier person in the room. I'd met him when a friend told me someone dropped out of a skiing holiday and I decided a short break would be a good idea. Michael, who was also going, was comment editor of The Times. I'd just become a commissioning editor of one of its supplements and was yet to start my new job.
Times
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Sarah Vine's battle of the Notting Hill diaries
As Sarah Vine, the ex-wife of the ex-minister Michael Gove, publishes her memoir, it seems clear that the phrase 'With friends like these, who needs enemies?' was made for the Notting Hill set. The book is throwing fresh paraffin on the ashes of Vine's friendship with former-PM David Cameron and his wife Samantha, and things can only get bitter. So, is it coincidence that the former Evening Standard editor and sister of Sam Cam, Emily Sheffield, has now scheduled a big party to clash with Vine's book launch on June 19? Other groups might settle things physically, but this lot believe the only appropriate way to clash is in the diary. Johnson's busy night 'I feel very popular,' says the columnist Rachel Johnson, who is one of the many who will try to keep both sides of Notting Hill happy on this forthcoming night. She even has a third clash: June 19 is also her brother Boris's birthday. At least we can be sure that neither the Camerons nor Michael Gove will be having to decline an invitation for that one. Turquoise blues Reform UK are so good at winning elections that they're keen to rerun them. A number of their new councillors have already resigned and triggered by-elections, at the cost of thousands of pounds — something Reform's Doge squad could perhaps turn their attention to. Even the party's election campaigns are proving chaotic. In Higham Ferrers, North Northamptonshire, they have nominated three candidates for a two-member ward, splitting their own vote and ensuring that at least one of their people goes home disgruntled. Or maybe this is a valiant attempt to avoid yet another by-election. According to Election Maps UK, one of Reform's three nominees will not take their seat if elected, because they have moved to China. All this from the party of common sense. History mystery Academics can never be too careful with their words. The historian Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads, told London's Institut Français that his book was sailing high in the bestsellers list when a historian he respected called him about a 'problem' with the book. 'Is it too popular?' Frankopan whispered, aware that this could be a cardinal sin in academia. 'No,' said the elder. 'You should have called it 'A New World History', not 'A New History of the World'.' Frankopan (not unreasonably) asked: 'Are they so different?'. The don huffed 'It's like night and day!' and hung up. Frankopan still wonders about the difference. Chip out of the blocks Perhaps we do live in an era of gentler politics. After Saturday's TMS mentioned how Will Self and Mark Francois narrowly avoided an on-air fight, my attention was directed to an incident from 20 years ago where the Labour MP Steve Pound and the Tory MP Philip Davies debated the death penalty on Talksport (you read that correctly). The two resorted to fisticuffs, were broken apart and then resumed when out of the studio. A source says that the pair were finally separated by someone who 'displayed more intelligence than either of the respected legislators'. This was Chip, a guide dog who belonged to a producer, who could see that the two MPs were barking.
The Independent
17 hours ago
- Business
- The Independent
Calling David Cameron a ‘man baby' for resigning over Brexit is childish
We hardly need reminding that Brexit is barely living up to the ideal of the buccaneering, 'Global Britain' we were promised. RIght now, it's more like a clown show. Leaving the European Union is the malign gift that keeps on giving. It has caused the social and economic damage we see around us, cramping living standards, public services and even the defence of the realm for want of the prosperity we once took for granted. It has had a baleful effect on investment and growth, and left Britain a meaner, poorer, grubbier place. Indeed, it may well be said that Brexit broke Britain, and created a new wave of grievances for Nigel Farage to exploit. It's his Ponzi scheme. So won't someone spare a thought for those who got us into this mess? Those like Michael Gove and his now-former wife Sarah Vine, who has written a memoir of her life as a Westminster wag. Always a fluent writer, trenchant and not especially likeable, it's clear from the extracts published thus far that not only did Brexit break Britain, it also broke hers and Gove's somewhat one-sided and demi-mercenary 'friendship' with David and Samantha Cameron. It doesn't seem to have done much good to the Goves' relationship either (albeit only one of the many strains of being a political couple). At any rate, Vine still despises Cameron. This is personal. Her illusions about the true nature of their friendship were shattered when she felt the 'abyss of class' between them. Gove was havering about which side to back in the EU referendum, torn by a genuine Euroscepticism (unlike Boris Johnson's), and the loyalty he felt to his party leader. Cameron, pink-faced and charming but always with the whiff of Flashman about him, barked at her to 'get her husband under control. For f***'s sake, Sarah, I'm fighting for my political life here.' But it's also a political contempt that Vine feels, so she also charges Cameron with cowardice – being a 'man baby' when he lost the Brexit referendum and immediately resigned as prime minister. As she puts it: 'What an impossible, irresponsible child, throwing his toys out of the pram because he hadn't got his own way. It felt a bit like he would sooner bring the country down than let Leave have its victory. Et tu, Pontius Pilate.' Fair? Certainly, it's childish. But, in many ways, it feels like it no longer matters. Aside from a brief and, in the end, futile return as foreign secretary under Rishi Sunak, Cameron's political career was over the moment that David Dimbleby declared 'We're out' on the television. Same for all of them. Gove is now an elder statesman, a peer and editor of The Spectator and a one-time Svengali to Kemi Badenoch – but his party is in the toilet. A return to power for any of the personnel concerned looks about as likely as Elvis Presley being found alive on the moon. The chumocracy was as broken by Brexit as Britain. Boris Johnson, never that close to Gove, fell out with him shortly after the referendum vote when Gove stabbed him in the front during the post-Cameron leadership election. Only George Osborne seems to have emerged from it all without serious PTSD. For what it's worth, it seems to me that Cameron did certainly break his promise to the British people, that whatever the result of the referendum, he would carry on as premier. But on that grim morning when everything changed, that felt like a ridiculous idea. It was his referendum. It was his idea. Osborne had cautioned against it, and Gove might have preferred that it hadn't happened, because, in the end, it finished off his chances of ever getting the top job, and for his missus to be Britain's 'First Lady', as opposed to just First Lady of Fleet Street. It would have been impossible for Cameron to carry on and negotiate Brexit. Farage would have claimed he wasn't a 'true believer' (correct, obviously), and Cameron would never have been safe from Johnson's unquenchable ambition. Vine's weakest argument is that Gove and Johnson has solemnly sworn, in writing, to serve Cameron even if Leave won. From Johnson's point of view, the whole point of the EU referendum was that it would be lost but still weaken Cameron, strengthening his claim to a senior cabinet job and installing him as the heir apparent, elbowing Osborne and Gove out of the way. With the Leave win, Johnson over-achieved. At that point, he wanted the premiership more than Cameron did; but it was Theresa May, not Johnson, Gove or Cameron, who became the first post-Brexit premier (of five, amazingly). After it was her turn to foul up, she was followed by the successive failures of Johnson, Liz Truss (last seen promoting Irish whiskey with a cage fighter) and Sunak, who may yet prove to have been the last Conservative prime minister in every sense. What these flawed personalities all have in common is an iron will to avoid the blame for what they and their political movement visited upon the country. Badenoch is their legacy. Soon, the 10th anniversary commemorations of Brexit will begin, and the old wounds will be opened up once again, just as they were, briefly, with the recent modest 'reset'. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems very obvious now that, apart from the economy and those who rely on what's left of the welfare state, the biggest loser of all from Brexit has been the Conservative Party. Fractious and fractured as ever, it is now electorally smashed, rudderless, assailed by Reform UK, with its last generation of leaders not on speaking terms, cry babies all. In her own bitter way, Vine is the ideal chronicler of their pathetic, self-pitying decline.
Times
a day ago
- General
- Times
How the Goves kept up with the Camerons: the cost of richer friends
I f you're keeping up with the revelations from Sarah Vine's new Westminster wife's kiss'n'tell you will know that the best bit of How Not to Be a Political Wife so far is the Gove's fallout with the Camerons. Vine, now the former Mrs Michael Gove and free to do her worst, takes us back to the very beginning (before the Tories did well enough at the 2010 election for Dave and Sam to take up residence in Downing Street … Chequers karaoke nights ahoy!) and painstakingly walks us through the gradual unspooling of their friendship. Was it Brexit that broke these two couples apart — Gove supported Leave, Dave Remain, remember — or was the friendship holed below the waterline by Cameron demoting his friend from minister for education to chief whip two years previously? Hard to say, but the other strong possibility, as Vine admits, is that their relationship was always on a ticking timer with the less powerful Goves scrabbling to keep up with their more affluent and powerful Notting Hill set chums.
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- General
- Daily Mail
'I moved out of our bedroom into the box room. I'd tried to make Michael feel loved, but he only cared about politics.' In the latest extract from her superb new memoir, SARAH VINE tells how Brexit spelled the end of her marriage...
Looking back, Brexit truly marked the beginning of the end of my marriage to Michael Gove. Politics had infected every aspect of our lives – and it caused untold damage. Our close-knit group of friends – many stretching back to university days – were slowly but surely pulled apart. Godparents were at war with each other, children who had grown up in each other's houses were suddenly on non-speakers as the adults took sides.
