The malicious monstering of Michael Gove is mad

There now follows a short statement.

When I was in my twenties I did some things I bitterly regret.  I started smoking twenty cigarettes a day, in the mistaken belief that the habit added a dash of doomed romantic allure. For several months in 1993, I mispronounced the name of the Spanish wine region Rioja. Many of us, looking for tastier alternatives to cheap German white wine and budget Italian red wine, did this. Offered tickets to see the Stone Roses, I foolishly turned down the opportunity and went to see Paul McCartney play live instead. Later, I did go to  see a new band called Oasis several times and, missing the point that the band lacked a worthy lyricist, briefly overrated their talent. I am not proud of any of this. It was a confusing time. It was the 1990s. After too many Rolling Rock lagers I even voted for Neil Kinnock. I was young, I didn’t know what I was doing.

But I can confirm that I never – never – took drugs.

(Campaign aide puts piece of paper on podium and whispers in my ear that a friend from university has emerged in the Mail to reveal that once at a party he did hand me a joint containing a prohibited substance, and believing it to be a roll-up fag I did smoke it for at least ninety seconds, but it had no discernible effect because of all the lager and Marlboro Lights.)

Thank you. I would now like to clarify my earlier statement. When I said that I have never taken drugs, what I meant was…

(Campaign aide pulls plug on power feed for Sky News and BBC, plunging the building into darkness.) 

It’s easy to mock the state of the terrible Tory leadership race, bogged down in an argument about which candidates took which drugs and when. The unfolding smash would be funny if the implications for the country were not so serious. But I’m finding the mad monstering of Michael Gove over his drugs “confession” particularly baffling.

Of course, these contests are mad. We all know they take wild twists that make and break the individuals involved. They have long been this way. Doomed Portillo in 2001 running but not really wanting to win was the maddest.

Michael Gove was Portillo’s biographer, of course. Mid-campaign there was a great storm about whether heroin(e) of the Right Margaret Thatcher was backing Portillo or not. She wasn’t. Or was she? It seemed to matter at the time. Iain Duncan Smith beat Ken Clarke after Portillo was knocked out.

Eighteen years later, and Gove is running himself. In a leadership race that is short on ideas, at a time when the country faces a crisis and surely needs imaginative leadership, it seems bizarre to destroy the career of a skilled administrator and thinker rather than listening to what he has to say about the state of the country.

The Environment Secretary – and moderate Brexiteers Brexiteer – finds himself at the centre of a “drugs storm” – of the kind that used to be tabloid fodder. In the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Gove confirmed on Saturday in the Mail that he has taken cocaine on various occasions twenty years ago. He had a tough time from Andrew Marr, the BBC interviewer. By Monday morning the chatter was that Gove is toast and on the verge of withdrawal.

This drugs row is a bonkers basis on which to choose the next Tory leader and Prime Minister. For a start, Gove and the contenders are not taking on the Dalai Lama. They are up against Boris Johnson. A candidate less squeaky-clean it is hard to imagine.

There is another reason it makes no sense. If this is the test we are now applying – hypocrisy over taking drugs two decades ago – then we are hugely limiting our options when it comes to selecting talented leaders in all fields. All the evidence suggests that a great many people – now in politics, business, public sector or the media – dabbled at one time or another and kept it quiet from employers and their parents. Are they now to be barred from leadership positions? Must they publicly ‘fess up for what they did in early adulthood? What’s the process here?

It keeps being said that in this age of maximum scrutiny and social media fakery we crave authenticity and straight answers. Yet, when we hear it – from Gove – it seems we (media, political class) don’t like it.

By the time you read this, Gove might have withdrawn from the race. I hope he hasn’t and I hope he doesn’t. The Tories have, with months of warning that it was coming, laid on a terrible contest, with far too little public debate between the candidates about the substance – policy, not drugs. They – and the rest of us – need to see a better battle fought out over the future of Britain, at the very least to test the frontrunner.

Gove has energy and ideas. What a pitiful mess the Tories are in if he is forced out over 1990s indiscretions and Boris waltzes through unchallenged.