Michael Gove

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Michael Andrew Gove (born August 26, 1967) is a Conservative politician, journalist and author. He has been the MP for Surrey Heath since 2005.

1 Biography
2 Media work
3 Politics
4 Interests
5 Bibliography
6 Notes
7 External links

[edit] Biography

Gove was born in Edinburgh. At four months old, he was adopted by a family in Aberdeen, where he was brought up. His adoptive father was a fish merchant and still works part-time in the fish-processing business. His mother worked as a lab assistant at the University of Aberdeen and with deaf children for Aberdeen District Council. He was educated in the state and independent sectors in Aberdeen, latterly at Robert Gordon's College. He later went on to study at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University

He is married to Sarah Vine, a writer on The Times, and has two young children.

[edit] Media work

Gove joined The Times in 1996 as a leader writer and has been comment editor, news editor, Saturday editor and assistant editor. He has also written a weekly column on politics and current affairs in the newspaper and contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, Prospect magazine and The Spectator. He has written a sympathetic biography of Michael Portillo MP and a critical study of the Northern Ireland peace process, The Price of Peace, for which he won the Charles Douglas-Home Prize.

Previously, Gove worked for the BBC's Today programme, On The Record, Scottish Television and the Channel 4 monologue programme A Stab In The Dark, alongside David Baddiel and Tracey MacLeod. He was a regular panelist on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze and Newsnight Review on BBC2.

[edit] Politics

Gove joined the Conservative Party at university and was secretary of Aberdeen South Young Conservatives. He has helped write speeches for a variety of cabinet and shadow cabinet ministers, including Peter Lilley and Michael Howard. He once applied for a job at the Conservative Research Department, but was told he was "insufficiently political" and "insufficiently Conservative", hence his turning to journalism.

Gove was previously chairman of Policy Exchange, a centre-right think tank launched in 2002. As Conservative candidate in the safe seat of Surrey Heath, he entered Parliament in the 2005 general election. Before becoming a candidate, Gove had expressed the view that the state should not generally interfere in domestic affairs, campaigned for greater personal freedom and wrote that "Section 28 is a nonsense" [1]. He had flatshared with Conservative Ivan Massow who later defected to Labour over Section 28 and Nicholas Boles. Both Ivan Massow and Nicholas Boles were openly gay at the time.

He takes a pro-Israel line, and has criticised anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and several United Nations peace processes. A self-confessed neo-conservative, he called for early intervention against Saddam Hussein and was a strong proponent of the view that the invasion of Iraq would bring peace and democracy both to Iraq and the wider Middle East [2]. Surprisingly, he stated in October 2004 of Tony Blair: "I can't hold it back any more; I love Tony!" He is also a signatory of the Henry Jackson Society, which advocates a pro-active approach to the spread of democracy throughout the world. He has recently been accused of harbouring hostile attitude towards Islam and Muslims, exemplified in his book Celsius 7/7. The author William Dalrymple has described the book as a "confused epic of simplistic incomprehension" and pointed that contrary to claims on the book's jacket that Gove was an authority on Islamist terror, he had in fact never lived or travelled in any Islamic country, knew little about Islamic history or theology, and showed no sign of having met or talked to any Muslims. [3] Gove's friends Melanie Phillips and Stephen Pollard have vigorously rejected Dalrymple's analysis[4][5], and Gove himself has replied in The Times.[6] However the respected Indian writer Pankaj Mishra wrote in the Sunday Times that he believed Gove had no authority to pontificate on Islamic matters if he had so little knowledge, and no direct experience, of Islam: "We are unlikely to take seriously a writer from the Middle East or India who presumes to tell us about the problems of the West without ever having visited Europe or America. So why do we bestow intellectual authority on Gove and other instant experts on the Muslim world, who have proliferated alarmingly in recent years?" He went on to argue that Gove and his friends "have created a climate of hysteria which makes sober analysis and careful decision-making almost impossible."[7]

Gove is seen as part of an influential set of young up-and-coming Tories, sometimes disparagingly referred to as the Notting Hill set, including David Cameron, George Osborne, Edward Vaizey, Nicholas Boles and Rachel Whetstone. They are seen as modernisers in social issues, but strongly reactionary in foreign policy]. Michael Portillo has predicted that Gove will be leader of the Conservative party, although he has only very recently won a seat at Westminster. When Cameron was elected as the leader of the party in December 2005, Gove was appointed as the party's housing spokesman in the team shadowing the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

[edit] Interests

Gove admitted to being a wargaming fan ^[1] after reading an article by another wargamer and columnist David Aaronovitch

[edit] Bibliography

Michael Portillo: The Future of the Right (1995). ISBN 1-85702-335-8
The Price of Peace (2000). ISBN 1-903219-15-9
A Blue Tomorrow - New Visions for Modern Conservatives (2001) (ed. with Edward Vaizey and Nicholas Boles). ISBN 1-84275-027-5
Celsius 7/7 (2006). ISBN 0-297-85146-2