THIRTY-TWO
July 2014
‘I’d like you to become chief whip, Michael,’ Cameron says to Gove on Tuesday 8 July, six days before the second of his major reshuffles. The prime minister has invited the Education Secretary, one of his closest friends in politics, for their least comfortable drink ever. ‘Of course you can stay at Education if you want, but I’d really like you to take on this new job.’ Gove admits he is taken aback and doesn’t know what to say. Cameron distinctly remembers Gove himself offering mid-parliament to become chief whip to help sort out the ramshackle and rebellious parliamentary party. Along with George Osborne, Gove is one of the very few ministers that Cameron trusts totally and admires. Cameron has not found it easy to find his ideal chief whip in government: Patrick McLoughlin was good but almost too gentlemanly, Mitchell was only briefly in post and much the other way, while George Young, available to fill Mitchell’s place quickly, is seen as again too nice to fully grip the very tricky parliamentary party.
Cameron explains his thinking to Gove. A point of critical mass has been reached, education policy is one of the great achievements of the government and he now needs Gove by his side as they put the team in place for the general election and, they hope, beyond. ‘You can safely move now because the legislative agenda for this parliament has been completed,’ Cameron tells him. As Gove is preparing to leave the study, Cameron adds, ‘I would like to have your answer, if possible, by tomorrow morning.’ The reshuffle is imminent, and he needs to have the new chief whip in place and part of the debate over several still-undecided changes. Gove goes home deep in thought. He’s enjoyed being Education Secretary, and needs more time to complete his disputed agenda. He doesn’t want to leave. But he decides nevertheless to call Cameron that evening: ‘I won’t be an unwilling continuer in an office in the knowledge you’d rather I move on. So, yes,’ he tells the PM. He knows there is more to the move than said.
Cameron hates giving bad news, particularly to friends and loyal political allies, and has listened to powerful voices for and against. He sees the attraction of a Eurosceptic chief whip, unlike both McLoughlin and Young, in preparing for an EU referendum. Against this, Gove and his education reforms are particularly popular in the party and with Conservative commentators, a point made by Osborne. He knows, however he dresses it up, that his remarks are not what Gove wants to hear. He’s particularly pained because of the very close personal and family relationship that exists between the Goves and Camerons, including between Samantha and Gove’s journalist wife Sarah Vine, a friendship that has protected Gove for several difficult months when the knives were out for him. Sarah had looked after Cameron’s children on election night in 2010, and had even been tipped to join the Number 10 team.1 Close foursomes are rare at the top of politics and rarely last: the Blairs with Alastair Campbell and his partner Fiona Millar was one such, till breaking apart spectacularly. ‘People accused Cameron of being ruthless towards Gove,’ says a close observer, ‘but actually, he grappled for months with options other than moving Gove from the education brief, against the advice of his own advisers, until it got to the point that inaction was potentially weakening his authority.’
In the few days remaining to the reshuffle, Gove’s initial doubts increase. Despite vociferous criticism from parts of the educational establishment, he believes his mission to narrow the attainment gap between rich and poor children, and raise educational standards overall, has begun to bear fruit. ‘Everyone here is united in their desire to give the next generation the best possible start in life,’ he tells a two-day summit in July 2014. He is joined in addressing the event by education ministers from Poland, Spain and the Netherlands, as well as by Labour’s shadow education spokesman Tristram Hunt, and a range of international experts. Surrounded by fellow reformers and educationalists at Lancaster House, Gove’s pleasure at the apparent success of his crusade is bittersweet. Amongst those at the summit, he alone knows that this is his last speech as Secretary of State for Education.
Osborne sees more clearly than anyone that Gove’s departure from Education will slow hard-fought momentum and cause problems on the right. Only late in the day does he give his consent to it, swayed by the case that in the run-up to the general election, they will both need someone as chief whip they can trust 100%. Cameron and his chancellor hope that Gove will be an authoritative chief whip, akin to John Wakeham for Thatcher and Alastair Goodlad for Major. As late as October 2013 at the party conference, Cameron had been praising Gove to the skies: ‘Three and a half years ago, one man came into the Department of Education … Michael Gove. There he is, with a belief in excellence and massive energy, like a cross between Mr Chips and the Duracell bunny.’2 ‘In October 2013, education was our biggest positive for the government,’ says one Cameron aide. By July 2014 the Number 10 team were telling the PM that Gove had become a media and voter liability. What had happened so quickly that was so worrying that Cameron himself reluctantly had to agree? Gove’s move was only one in a complex set of ministerial changes in the July 2014 reshuffle. But, given the toxicity and rancour surrounding it, this single move came to overshadow the entire reshuffle.
Where Lansley had stumbled and fallen at Health, and IDS encountered constant woes at the DWP, all had seemed plain sailing for the Education Secretary. The reasons for his success are not hard to divine. Crucially, Gove had the total support of not only the prime minister, but also the chancellor. He had a solid policy platform, inherited from Labour with Andrew Adonis the principal architect, which Brown’s Education Secretary, Ed Balls, had not killed off. At the heart of this agenda lay a drive to improve academic standards for all, to attract the best graduates into teaching, halt rampant grade inflation and award financial and managerial autonomy to head teachers. Unlike Lansley, Gove had not tried to reinvent the wheel, but built on existing success, citing Tony Blair as well as Adonis as the true architects of reform.
It helped explain why he had a relatively easy ride from Labour, who left the broad thrust of his policy largely unchallenged and did not posit a distinctive vision of its own, preferring instead to highlight particular issues, such as the need for greater scrutiny over free schools (independent state schools set up by parents, teachers and charities) and for all teachers to have qualified teacher status.3 Indeed, as the schools minister David Laws says, it was the Lib Dems who saw themselves as the real check on what Gove was doing.4 He was fortunate too to receive little criticism or challenge from the media. As a former journalist himself, and married to another, he knows many of the key commentators and editors personally: he is assiduous at cultivating journalists, always returns their calls, understands a good story, and feeds the outlets well. While Gove’s ultimate goals are simple, the volume and detail of the policies are complex. Few of those writing on education mastered the minutiae of the reforms, such as changes to the English baccalaureate performance measure, clamping down on unauthorised absence and truancy, and making vocational qualifications more rigorous and relevant. These reforms are structural – the transfer of power from local authorities – and far-reaching, as well as beefing up tests, exams and the curriculum which will often take many years to complete.
In Number 10, many of Cameron’s team do not fully understand the detail of what Gove is doing. ‘He outsources education to Michael completely,’ insists David Laws, ‘he is one of the few people in Cabinet who the PM rarely challenges and almost never overrules. The Treasury has such a tight grip on other departments. But it’s obvious the chancellor totally trusts Michael.’5 ‘David Cameron gave me very clear riding instructions when he appointed me. He was very supportive of the policies I advocated and simply trusted me to get on with it,’ says Gove.6 Cameron himself was, of course, shadow Education Secretary – ‘I worked on many of the ideas myself,’ he says.7 He supports the broad principles, the ‘standards’ and the autonomy agenda, even if the details of what Gove is doing escape him. ‘I don’t think he or his immediate team appreciated the coherence of the whole education policy reform agenda, or had even heard of E. D. Hirsch,’ says one official. (E. D. Hirsch is a Gove guru, an American academic best known for writing The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them and Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and for being founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation.)
After becoming shadow Schools Secretary in 2007, Gove drew around him a group of true believers, including special adviser Dominic Cummings, Policy Exchange’s Dean Godson, free-school enthusiast Rachel Wolf, and fellow Conservative MP Nick Gibb. In some ways they resembled the group of highly ideological soulmates whom Thatcher gathered around her in the 1970s; where she and her fellow travellers looked to Austrian classical economist and philosopher F. A. Hayek, many in Gove’s team looked for inspiration to E. D. Hirsch. Gibb in particular seized on Hirsch’s idea that the aspirations of the poor have been limited because they lack the cultural signposts that allow them to access the canon of the Western intellectual tradition, which will allow them to appreciate the higher levels of the curriculum and to move on to a top university. Progressive teaching methods were another bête noire of this group: Gibb was withering in his attacks on progressive teaching, ‘child-centred’ learning and time being spent at school on pursuits which lack intellectual rigour. Gibb also believed that academic teaching was the key to social mobility: he was full of zeal about research which purported to show that class sizes matter less in improving results than the aspirations of the school and quality of the teaching. All of Gove’s team wanted objective data and empirical evaluation to replace subjective and fuzzy judgements, where ‘happy and healthy’ was an equivalent measure to academic achievement. They believed all schools can and must achieve measurable targets, and that more focus should be given to international comparisons. Where Gibb was particularly interested in the writings of Hirsch, Cummings and Wolf were much more libertarian and focused on school autonomy. The differences within Gove’s ideas-rich team over standards and structures, different agendas that were sometimes in conflict, were held together by Gove himself, interested as he was in both.
Becoming Education Secretary in May 2010 is Gove’s dream. Adopted by a Labour-supporting family in Aberdeen, educated initially at a state school, he won a scholarship to the independent Robert Gordon’s College. He worked hard and gained a place at Oxford. He thinks everyone can succeed, even those from disadvantaged circumstances, if only they have the right education. He used his three years in Opposition from 2007 to develop a coherent reform plan, to visit countries like Finland and the US, and consult experts, rare for an incoming Secretary of State, particularly in recent times. Gove and his team arrive at the DfE all guns blazing but their experience and knowledge of education are not matched by the experience of working in the machinery of state. The shift from Ed Balls’s broadly focused Department for Children, Schools and Families to a renamed Department for Education focused on teaching and standards is significant. Gove’s team are frustrated by the time it takes for the department to respond to their agenda, and are dismayed by some early departmental errors, exemplified by the bungled announcement to end the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) funding programme. He presses ahead with reform, passing the Academies Act before the summer recess, which allows all state schools to become academies, with greater freedom from local education authority control. In November 2010, he publishes a White Paper encouraging the teaching of modern languages in schools, a tightening of league tables, and a greater emphasis to be placed on each child securing passes in five GCSEs including English and maths.8 The first signs of a backlash to a perceived restricted curriculum and traditional approach are evident. Steve Hilton from Number 10 shares Gove’s mounting impatience with the DfE’s weakness in communicating the ‘why’ and not just the ‘what’ and ‘how’.
From early 2011, Gove becomes more confident in navigating the Whitehall machine, and therefore more assertive. With Coulson’s departure, there is no longer anyone preventing Dominic Cummings officially joining Gove’s team of special advisers, and, less controversially, he ‘opens up’ the Civil Service’s closed shop of advice, appointing outside advisers to help him develop and deliver innovative policy changes, including Paul Bew on the primary-school assessment, Alison Wolf on vocational education and Charlie Taylor on truancy and behaviour. With the declining influence of Hilton, Gove is also left more alone by Number 10, with the exception of child protection and social work, adoption and fostering reform. At the same time, he continues with the expansion of academies, forges ahead with free schools and drives forward his plans on the curriculum and examinations. Gove is at the peak of his effectiveness and authority from the passage of the Education Act 2011, which receives Royal Assent that November, through to the summer and autumn of 2013. He advances on many fronts at once, and appears unstoppable, until the tide starts to turn at the end of the year.
Differences with the Lib Dems have been apparent from the outset. In mid-2012 there is a huge battle, when the Daily Mail publishes Cumming’s thoughts about scrapping GCSEs and the national curriculum, and having a single exam board.9 A furore breaks out. Such proposals would return Britain to the polarised society of the 1950s, Lib Dems allege.10 Gove is furious at their reaction. ‘I got the PM to agree to replace GCSEs: but when the Lib Dems cut up rough, we had to negotiate a compromise. It was a great shame’.11 After the September 2012 reshuffle and David Laws’ appointment as schools minister, political differences become a serious problem. Gove finds it hard that, whereas the PM will almost invariably give him the green light to whatever he proposes, the default response from Nick Clegg is amber, if not red. He believes Clegg has reached the conclusion that middle-class professionals – particularly those who work in the public sector, who were upset by tuition fee increases and the NHS reforms – are now focusing their attention on Gove’s school reforms. Clegg tells Gove outright that his attacks are necessary to placate his own core supporters by emphasising points of difference with the Conservatives. Their personal relationship deteriorates. Cummings allegedly leaks to the Mail on Sunday the false allegation that money from DfE has gone to the charity Book Trust because of the charity’s relationship with Miriam González Durántez, Clegg’s wife. Clegg is furious and believes that Gove and Cummings ‘stoop low’ to damage him. ‘I don’t want anything more to do with Gove,’ he tells Laws. He says to Cameron: ‘I can’t work with a Cabinet minister who says one thing to my face and another behind my back.’
Disagreements over local government are a key reason for the acrimony: Lib Dems are aggrieved that the push for free schools and academies is at the loss of local authority oversight and control. Cameron shares Gove’s frustration on this: ‘We could be doing much more on academies and free schools, but we can’t go any further because of the Lib Dems,’ he says in January 2014.
The irony is that Gove personally rates Laws, briefly Chief Secretary to the Treasury in May 2010, who had helped protect the education budget from cuts and secured the money for the pupil premium, which gave additional funding to help pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, in the very first days of the government. He fights for him to become minister of state. But as Gove soon finds, ‘I would get David to agree to various policies, but then people would get to Nick, and we lost that support.’12 To try to improve their frayed relationship, Clegg’s staff suggest that Clegg and Gove have a weekly meeting to help keep in step. Gove’s office declines: ‘It would have been a disaster and only made things worse,’ says an insider.
Gove may have survived the Lib Dem roadblocks were it not for an even more fundamental problem. Embedded in his very character are the seeds of his own difficulties. This is epitomised by his reliance on the mercurial if brilliant figure of Cummings, who had worked in Opposition as a special adviser for IDS, but had fallen foul of Coulson, which explains Coulson’s antipathy to him. Gove continues to draw on the advice of Cummings despite Coulson blackballing his appointment, and relies on him in the same way that Cameron relied on Hilton’s advice. Cummings is a purist with very clear ideas about education and the world. One of these is that Gove must prevail against ‘the blob’, the education establishment made up of Whitehall, local authorities, university departments and unions, which will try every trick in the book to defeat his crusade. A problem with this binary depiction of the world is that it gives such conservative forces cohesion and a venom that they might never have possessed, emboldening the very enemy which they most wanted to see pacified.
The problems have been simmering, and extending beyond volatile advisers. Suddenly, Gove seems to be fighting on all fronts as once. In early February 2013, he has to abandon his plans for an English baccalaureate, calling it ‘just one reform too many at this time’.13 Ten days later, senior historians write to the Observer registering significant concerns about Gove’s proposals for the new history curriculum.14 In March, a hundred academics write ‘to warn of the dangers posed by Michael Gove’s new national curriculum’.15 Gove’s retort is to call his critics ‘Marxists’.16 That month, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers pass a motion of ‘no confidence’ against him. In April, the National Union of Teachers do the same unanimously, the first time in its 143-year history that it has performed such an action, and calls for his resignation.17 A low point for Gove personally is when he is booed at the National Association of Head Teachers Conference in Birmingham in May, in stark contrast to earlier appearances when he had been well received.18 In October, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy is among nearly 200 academics and authors who write a letter to The Times, saying that they are ‘gravely concerned’ by his policies, and calling for reforms to the national curriculum and exams to be halted.19
Number 10 is becoming alarmed at the growing noise. Gove is gently reminded about the fate of Lansley at Health who antagonised the professionals with whom he dealt. Some at such a point would have taken a pause, reflected and rethought their strategy. But Gove’s response is to be even more fired up, returning after his Christmas holidays feistier than ever. Pressure from Number 10 is a contributing factor in the departure of Cummings, who claims he left on his own timetable though Downing Street believe that they provided the decisive push. He remains, however, a close confidant of Gove. ‘He clearly has some sort of psychic hold over Gove and the Education department. He’s a street fighter: but when he talks to us, he’s utterly sycophantic,’ says one in Number 10, who adds, ‘it’s nauseating when you know he’s being so disloyal behind your back.’ Cummings turns his fire on Clegg, who he thinks is partly responsible for Number 10’s attempts to rein in Gove. He mounts a full-frontal assault, describing him as ‘dishonest’ and ‘a revolting character’ who Cameron ‘props up’ at the expense of Gove merely in case he might need him in a new coalition after the general election.20
Rather than keep his head down, as Number 10 wants, Gove continues to make the front pages, questioning the left’s ‘Blackadder’ depiction of the First World War, and appearing to fall out with Michael Wilshaw, his chief inspector of schools. Gove and Wilshaw have been a powerful combination working together throughout the first two or three years of government, and public disagreement strikes many as unedifying and puzzling. Wilshaw, a successful state-school head before moving to Ofsted, has been talked up regularly by Gove as sharing the same determination to improve the quality of teaching and standards for all young people. Wilshaw is furious when a DfE memo about Ofsted, written by Cummings, is leaked indicating that senior department figures are ‘increasingly alarmed’, and that it is ‘worth thinking about the whole Ofsted approach with a blank sheet of paper’.21 Wilshaw lets it be known that he is ‘spitting blood’ that the department might be briefing against him. Gove continues to respect Wilshaw, though is increasingly concerned about the competence and capacity of Ofsted. Specifically, Gove recognises that the ‘Trojan Horse’ plot by Islamic extremists to take control of schools in Birmingham was missed and then mishandled. Number 10 is unhappy with Gove continuing to make headlines while Gove is equally unhappy with Wilshaw doing the same, and believes he insufficiently appreciates the impact of some of his media pronouncements on confidence in the school and inspection system.
Differences of emphasis between them, hidden over the preceding years, now come to the surface. Gove wants ‘earned autonomy’ for free schools and academies, while Wilshaw wants to retain closer scrutiny. Wilshaw is more inclined to keep the status quo, and insufficiently in tune with aspects of the Gove philosophy. Deep inside the DfE, conversations take place about how to address the Ofsted problem. Attention turns to a new chair to work with Wilshaw. Sally Morgan, a senior figure in Blair’s Number 10 team, had been appointed chair of Ofsted by Gove in March 2011 at the high noon of bipartisanship, and is concluding her first three-year term. In January 2014, it is announced that she will not be reappointed for a second term. She is a popular and respected figure, and there is predictable outcry and claims she has been ‘sacked’. Her response is that Number 10 is now determined to appoint only Conservative supporters to public bodies.22 The DfE is not unhappy to let that interpretation spread, and there is some truth in it: Number 10 has come under pressure from the media, including the Mail, to appoint more right-inclined figures to public bodies. Bar William Shawcross at the Charity Commission, they are mostly still led by New Labour appointees.
The decision not to reappoint Morgan lies far more in fact with the DfE team than with Cameron. Gove thinks a change in chair will help Wilshaw and Ofsted, but admires Morgan and does not like delivering bad news. He leaves others to explain and prepare the ground, which adds fuel to the fire of why he is removing a respected and effective chair. Wilshaw is furious at the intrusion and confused by the decision, and the episode adds further tensions between Gove and the Lib Dems, who think that ‘falling out with the chief inspector of schools is not necessary to the work an Education Secretary has to do’.
Gove’s wife Sarah Vine is not as popular in all elements of Number 10 as she is with the prime minister. Some regard her as an unguided missile, especially when she enters the fray deploying her raised profile as a weekly columnist in the Daily Mail. In early March, she writes about their decision to send their daughter Beatrice to a state comprehensive, Grey Coat Hospital, a very popular girls’ school in Westminster. She praises state education as ‘a miracle’, while dismissing private schools as polarising and built on principles of snobbery.23 Her article is very badly received in Downing Street, which is hypersensitive to adverse comments about private schooling. With unfortunate timing, Gove appears to exacerbate the problem, rather than to heed the advice to cool it. A week later, quotes from an interview he had given the previous month appear in the Financial Times saying that the number of Old Etonians in Number 10 is ‘preposterous’ and the dominance in public life of just this one school is ‘ridiculous’.24 Cameron’s inner circle contains four Old Etonians: Ed Llewellyn, Oliver Letwin, Jo Johnson and Rupert Harrison. They debate whether he has done it to protect Sarah and conclude that whatever his motivation, the impact of the ‘noises off’ is damaging the old Etonian PM.
By May, Cameron is concluding that his old friend must leave Education. For months he has heard his team complaining that Gove is no longer listening to them, that his advisers are out of control, and that he is failing to communicate his core vision: ‘He has singularly failed to get into the mindset of the British people who have no idea what a free school or an academy actually is,’ says one. Ameet Gill and Lynton Crosby try to stop him making speeches and to stick to the grid of government announcements, but to no avail. ‘We had come to the view that what we needed was someone who would continue the schools policy, but communicate it much better,’ says another. Crosby is left to take the public rap for the decision to move Gove. The press laps up this narrative: Tim Montgomerie writes in The Times that ‘when Crosby told the prime minister that Gove had become a politically toxic figure, he had all the polling data at his fingertips’.25
But the decision to move Gove had been taken long before Crosby produced his polling, the conclusions of which are by this time arguably widely known: teachers have lost faith in Gove. The decision had certainly been made well before Cummings’ diatribe against Number 10 in mid-June. In the words of the FT’s Janan Ganesh, this was when Cummings – albeit no longer a special adviser – ‘turned his Gatling gun’ from Clegg in May to ‘the only man in the country with an even grander office: the prime minister’.26 In comments to The Times, Cummings dismisses Cameron as a ‘sphinx without a riddle’ whose admiration for his Old Etonian predecessor as prime minister, Harold Macmillan, is ‘all you need to know’ about him. The comments are less damaging to a Number 10 operation which has been regularly under fire in the media and from Conservative backbenchers than to Gove himself.
In his final few months in post, frequent reports appear in the media about Gove’s ‘spats’ with other ministers. There is resentment in Cabinet and on its committees for his intervening in others’ areas with his hawkish support for action in Syria and strongly pro-Israel line. But it is a flare-up in June of his long-running spat with Theresa May that is the final straw. He blames the ‘Trojan Horse’ episode on a Home Office and security services mindset, influenced by the Prevent strategy, which he believes is intent on ‘catching crocodiles’ rather than ‘draining the swamp’ of extremists. For many years, Gove has felt passionate about taking counter-terrorism and radicalisation seriously and dealing strongly with Islamic extremism: his 2006 book Celsius 7/7, published in the wake of the bomb attacks in London in July 2005 which killed fifty-two people, likened fighting Islamists to fighting the Nazis.
In an article in The Times in June, an ‘anonymous source’ close to Gove criticises Charles Farr, a senior government counter-terrorism official, who they say typifies the Home Office’s reactive approach to terrorism.27 Farr is the partner of Fiona Cunningham, one of May’s special advisers. May and her team are incandescent, and leak a letter from her to Gove asking, ‘why did nobody act’ from his department over the Trojan Horse affair.28 The whole spat is getting out of control. Number 10 are furious at the distraction that this argument is causing, and the perception of a Cabinet with two senior ministers squabbling with each other. ‘Michael has done this over and over again – had a row internally and then leaked it – and people are frankly fed up with it,’ says an insider.29 According to another aide, ‘he had become a liability. He was too Michael.’ The wonder is that the media are so surprised at Gove’s departure from Education.
The right-wing commentariat as expected criticise the PM’s move. So do many educationalists and respected figures on the centre left, like former Blair speechwriter Philip Collins. They question Cameron’s judgement: of his three welfare ministers, he failed to exercise oversight of one (Lansley), put a second under regular threat (IDS), and dismissed the third (Gove). The Mail runs a five-page story attacking what it sees as Cameron’s folly on Gove, calling it ‘worse than a crime’.30 When the article is tweeted, conciliatory messages emanate from Number 10 towards the Goves. Cameron’s team know they are suffering from the move and do not want to add to their discomfort.
Gove is not the only figure causing difficulties in the reshuffle. Cameron’s team need to find space for promotions. They ponder moving the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, but recognise that he has done a sound job in a difficult department; moreover, his northern, ‘authentic’ accent is useful to an administration thought to be posh. Their eyes move on to Owen Paterson, Environment Secretary since the September 2012 reshuffle, and Northern Ireland Secretary before. They think that he has done well enough, but that four years as a Secretary of State has been a good innings. They have also been troubled by his gaffes and infelicities, epitomised by a row over the badger cull in parts of the West Country in October 2013 when he said ‘the badgers have moved the goalposts’, which became a national joke.31
Paterson is deeply angry. Nobody had expressed concern to him about his performance, and he resented references in the Sunday papers to his position as being ‘vulnerable’, which he assumes comes from leaks in Downing Street.32 ‘Owen, you’ve had a jolly good run in Cabinet, but I’ve got a party to run and I’ve got to move you on,’ is how Paterson recalls his conversation with Cameron in July.
‘If you get rid of me, you are smashing 12 million people in the teeth, because I’m genuinely popular in the countryside,’ he responds. ‘You will never find anyone who has my rural background. I have not just done what you asked me: I have the confidence of rural people.’ He is becoming more and more angry. ‘Only I can go to Somerset and stand in a cowshed with a Liberal at five o’clock in the morning and win them over, and then confront hardcore Eurosceptic businessmen in the evening and out-UKIP UKIP. You can’t do that.’
‘I know, but I can handle UKIP,’ Cameron replies.
Paterson gets up to leave Cameron’s room in the Commons. As he reaches the door he turns: ‘I think you’re making a terrible mistake.’
The reshuffle is largely about promoting women and younger talent. Liz Truss, an education minister, is promoted to Environment Secretary. At thirty-eight, she is the youngest member of the Cabinet, and has the additional benefit of having attended a state school (more than half of Cameron’s first Cabinet were privately educated). She has been hoping for a move to Education. Paterson is beside himself when he hears the news: ‘I think it’s bloody disgraceful what the prime minister has done to you. You’ve been in Parliament for three nanoseconds. You know about education, you wanted to go to education. But here you find yourself dummied into DEFRA, where you have no background at all. This is my phone number. Ring me anytime if you want any help.’
Nicky Morgan replaces Gove at Education. Cameron rates her highly. She is thought to be the most reliable and senior of the available women at minister-of-state level. Other women to receive promotions include Baroness Stowell as Leader of the House of Lords, and Esther McVey who becomes minister of employment. Conservatives and right-wing commentators who approved of Gove’s reforms, who are sympathetic to the rural interest, and who are not always the first in line to applaud the advancement of women, are responsible for the generally hostile reception to the reshuffle in Parliament and the media. The reshuffle is, however, well received by women, as a poll in the Daily Telegraph suggests.33
Relatively overlooked in the reshuffle is the most senior change of all. After four years in the role, William Hague feels he has been Foreign Secretary for long enough. He had originally agreed with Cameron that he would serve in that position until the general election. In early August 2013, only a few weeks before he considered resigning from the government over the Syria vote, he told Cameron that he would stand down from Parliament at the next election. He has had differences on foreign policy, but above all wanted to have his own life back with his wife Ffion and revive his career as a successful author. Hague suggests to Cameron that he would be happy to serve as Leader of the House until the election, which would free him up to have a prominent campaigning role, and allow his successor time to settle in before the election, particularly on the sensitive subject of Europe. Jeremy Hunt is briefly considered as a replacement, but it would be too much of a risk to move him from Health, where he had impressed Cameron, in the run-up to the election. Cameron eventually decides on Philip Hammond, the Eurosceptic Defence Secretary, who had been a prominent figure as shadow Chief Secretary before the 2010 election. Also departing are the veterans Ken Clarke and George Young, both in their seventies.
Cameron has always said that he doesn’t like reshuffles and thinks they create more problems than they solve, at least in the short term. If he needs vindication for this belief, the July 2014 reshuffle provides it in spades.