To hippies of a certain vintage, the summer of 1969 is particularly resonant.
Millions have claimed to have been at the Woodstock Music festival when, in fact, the actual number of people present was about 400,000.
For British politicians and political obsessives, the summer of 2016 occupies a similar place in our minds. That year remains a powerful memory for the political class, a series of moments which tick permanently in one’s consciousness.
It was a year that did more damage to our political culture than we realised – and one of the chief architects has at last expressed regret.
It was, of course, the year of the Brexit Referendum, which saw political tensions rise to a pitch I had never experienced before.
It was a summer of mayhem and drama. Every MP will know exactly where they were at the moment the first results started coming in, from Newcastle and Sunderland, on that Friday morning.
The shock of the result, the elation and despair, left a lasting impression.
Yet Michael Gove’s betrayal of Boris Johnson stands out in that summer of chaos. It was as brutal as it gets. He announced his own candidacy for party leader, when he had been expected to support Boris’s effort, and said “I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead”.
Betrayal, secrecy, intrigue – all the ingredients of political theatre were there. These were questions Tory MPs were asking themselves: “When did he decide to betray a man he had known for 30 years?” “What did Michael know?”
So I was pleased to see some contrition from the old journalist, now the highly effective editor of The Spectator.
Gove says he should have kept his “profound worries” about Johnson’s capacities to himself.
In the days “immediately afterwards”, Gove now says, “the way in which Boris behaved portrayed to me a fundamental unseriousness about the scale of the task”. All this convinced him that Boris “wasn’t ready to discharge the responsibilities of being prime minister”.
At the time, Michael’s actions seemed bizarre and self-defeating. Even, from purely selfish reasons, the idea that having stuck the knife into Boris he would emerge victorious in the Tory leadership contest displayed a mind more soaked in the psychodrama of Game of Thrones, the hit show of that era, than in anything resembling reality.
Gove’s actions rather lent him a reputation for untrustworthiness that, sadly, has never quite left him.
The consequences for the cause of Brexit, a cause I supported, were even more damaging.
Michael’s actions led directly to the accession of Theresa May to the head of the government. She had supported Remain and was essentially asked to implement a policy she had campaigned against.
This simply did not work. Her attempt to win a stronger majority in 2017 backfired spectacularly. It led to the paralysed hung parliament of 2017-19 which concocted an EU deal that nobody, Brexiteer or Remainer, fully endorsed.
This led to more instability within the governing Tory party and the coronation of Boris Johnson in July 2019, a full three years after the referendum had taken place, and three years after his character assassination by Gove.
It all seemed like such a waste of energy and time. To hardcore Remainers, the whole Brexit affair was a fool’s errand, something inherently misconceived.
They will never be able to reconcile themselves to the result of the referendum.
To Brexiteers and to the majority of people, however, who have no real extreme quasi-theological view on the subject, much of the Brexit debate represents a lost opportunity.
The political games, the leadership contests and the factionalism have left their indelible mark on people’s perceptions of politics. Above all, the drama and self-indulgence of that summer created the impression that Brexit was all about Tory tribes clowning around, playing crazy games to advance their own personal interests.
This has affected views on our entire political class. Gove described Johnson in 2016 as “fundamentally unserious”. Those words could easily be a general verdict on our political establishment.
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It is good that Michael Gove, an unusually reflective and thoughtful senior politician, recognises the serious consequences of his actions.
All of us in politics will have regrets, but Michael’s spasm of self-indulgence had profound adverse consequences for the future of Brexit, Britain and its political culture.
And despite his apology, those consequences will be with us for years to come.
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