Michael Gove: Britain’s Political Cockroach and the World’s Favourite Disaster Tourist
Michael Gove: The Eternal Rebound Whose Career Refuses to Die
A global tour of the man who keeps re-inventing himself like a budget Bond villain
PARIS — Every country has one: the political cockroach who survives scandals, reshuffles, and the occasional electoral Raid can. In France, we call them “les intouchables.” In Japan, they’re the “zombie ministers.” In the United Kingdom, they simply call him Michael Gove, and he’s quietly becoming an international case study in how to fail upward with the persistence of a low-budget streaming service sequel.
Gove’s latest metamorphosis—levelling-up secretary, then levelling-up ex-secretary, then levelling-up secretary again—has bemused foreign capitals that long ago wrote off Britain as a reality show with nuclear weapons. From Berlin to Brasília, diplomats now keep Gove bingo cards (“Will he quote Cicero or Enoch Powell today?”) and hedge their bets on which ideology he’ll wear next like a thrift-store overcoat. The spectacle is prime-time in Brussels, where officials still remember him as the Vote Leave emcee who promised £350 million a week for the NHS, then ghosted harder than a Tinder date who “just needs space.”
Yet Gove matters beyond the English Channel’s churning soap opera. In the age of polycrisis—where climate, inflation, and TikTok diplomacy collide—he is the platonic ideal of the adaptable technocrat who can be parachuted into any portfolio, recite three talking points, and leak a memo blaming someone else by teatime. Emerging-market leaders study him the way they study Boeing 737s: something that should have been grounded years ago but keeps banking left, right, and occasionally upside-down without ever quite crashing.
Take housing. Britain’s answer to the global shelter shortage is to appoint a man who once said “we’ve had enough of experts” and task him with building 300,000 homes a year. The international development community watches with the morbid fascination of med students observing a self-appendectomy: will he deregulate green belts, turbo-charge nimbyism, or simply commission another white paper written in Comic Sans? So far the score is: feasibility studies 12, actual roofs 0. Still, property analysts in Dubai and Singapore keep a Gove index on their Bloomberg terminals—every time he promises “radical reform,” luxury-flat futures in Knightsbridge tick up five basis points.
Then there’s the culture war export business. Gove’s knack for weaponising history syllabi has been franchised globally. Hungarian officials cite his battle against “left-wing madrassas” when they rewrite textbooks; Brazilian pundits borrow his phrase “the blob” to smear universities. Like cheap gin in the 18th century, Goveism is Britain’s new imperial export: intoxicating, mildly poisonous, and surprisingly popular in hot climates.
The environmental angle is darker comedy. Tasked with COP-ready planning reforms, Gove once proposed “investment zones” that could reclassify wetlands as enterprise parks if someone utters the word “jobs” within 500 metres. Nordic diplomats, who regard peat bogs as sacred, now practise mindfulness breathing before bilateral meetings. Meanwhile, small island states have begun adding “Gove-proofing” clauses into climate accords—any policy susceptible to a last-minute U-turn must be printed on dissolvable paper.
Of course, the joke may be on the rest of us. While the world laughs, Gove keeps accruing institutional memory like a veteran waiter who knows where every body is buried under the restaurant floorboards. Should the next prime minister need a human Swiss-army-knife who can quote Leviticus, Oliver Letwin, and Lynton Crosby in a single sentence, there he’ll be—smiling the smile of a man who has already written tomorrow’s anonymous briefing against himself, just in case.
The broader significance? In an era when democracies fret about populist demolition crews, Gove is the gentler, iterative corrosion: the minister who never quite wrecks the building, merely removes load-bearing walls while insisting it’s “creative renovation.” International civil servants now study him as a living flow-chart: How to Retain Power by Sounding Thoughtful While Doing Very Little. The syllabus is already being emailed from Ottawa to Canberra with the subject line “Low-cost stability hacks (no referendums required).”
One day, archaeologists will dig up a hard-drive labeled “Gove, M., 2005-2050” and mistake it for a server farm of post-truth performance art. Until then, the global audience keeps watching, half-horrified, half-impressed, like passengers on a budget airline who’ve just heard the pilot say, “This is your captain, Michael, and I’ve always wanted to try a barrel roll.” Seatbelts fastened, trays upright—next stop, somewhere slightly worse than before, but with better branding.
