He's told the Tories that it's no good harking back to the golden days of the 80s if they want to appeal to the young. Margaret Thatcher is no role model for those who want a gentler, kinder, less profit-centered kind of Tory.
I'm mapping back to when I was 20, in the 80s. The 80s are thirty or so years ago now. So the equivalent would have been Norman Fowler, lets say, telling us the Tories shouldn't hark back to Anthony Eden.
Even to say that is ridiculous, of course. The Tory grandees of the 50s were mediocrities and failures. Unfit even to buckle Thatcher's slingbacks.
And now the generational cycle of history turns. And Margaret Thatcher is in the distance past while Gove, as he poses in the mirror in the morning, imagines himself the new, kinder, consensual Tory.
You know what Margaret Thatcher did? She was tough with Europe, but believed in it. She was a driver for the single market. She wasn't some chancing mediocrity become, against all possible logic, a cabinet minister, with the charisma of a breeze block. She was somebody who knew that cooperation and easy trade, with our nearest neighbours, was the best bet for all concerned. She was, unlike the current shower of flag -wavers and incompetents, pro-business. Not in a "freedom to poison your workforce" way, like Jacob Rees-Mogg. In a "let's make business easier" way.
You know what young people want? They want to enjoy all the benefits of being part of the EU that their grandparents did. Before a bunch of people whose touchstone in history is a war almost nobody can remember, took it away.
If Michael Gove wants to get down with the kids, he should remember Maggie. Maggie knows best.
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The flock knows a fellow called Gove,
ReplyDeleteFor oft in his wellies he strove...
Who could forget or forgive the Back Stabber Gove. His treachery against Boris, deserved as it was, gives us an insight into his character, that isn't pretty.
ReplyDeleteNow he is responsible for the environment as is trying to reinvent himself as a luvvy green. He is looking to Caroline Lucas for inspiration, but she is the Leftie's lefty. More socialist that Mr Corbyn, without being as extreme as the revamped Mr McDonnel.
He could do worse, but embracing green policies, means doing the dirty on diesel car drivers and the land owners who derive huge amounts of cash from subsidies, lining their pockets at the taxpayers expense. Virtually stabbing them in the back, true to form.
Mr Gove is my ideal of Mr Pastry, who was still around in his youth. A fools, fool and completely untrustworthy. I'm surprised his voters put him back in last time.