On the anniversary of Lord Michael Gove taking up editorship of Britain’s oldest weekly magazine, it behoves us to ask the question: what the hell is he up to?
When the rising UK media magnate Sir Paul Marshall chose the former education secretary to edit The Spectator, it looked an inspired appointment. As a former leader writer for The Times who learnt how to detect a story on his home city’s paper, the Aberdeen Press and Journal, Gove is both a Conservative heavyweight and an experienced journalist.
Who better to lead the so-called house journal of the Tory party than Rishi Sunak’s former levelling-up secretary, someone with an unrivalled insider’s perspective on the formulation of Brexit and its fallout?
Yet Conservatives might look on Gove’s Spectator with bewilderment. Rather than plotting a way back for Kemi Badenoch’s party, with which it has been a mostly sympathetic fellow traveller for nearly two centuries, the magazine brims with enthusiasm for the demagogue Tommy Robinson and his followers.
It recently ran a fawning interview with the “manosphere” social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, who face 21 charges of rape, actual bodily harm and human trafficking, if UK authorities are able to extradite them from Romania. “Perhaps I am gullible, or toxically male, but I can’t help believing them,” said the writer Freddy Gray of the brothers’ protestations of innocence.
The magazine’s latest edition carries a “Letter from Moscow” declaring that “Russia is great… the streets are clean and safe, with no danger of London-style stabbings or mobile-phone jackings”.
And in an emotional piece by Gove himself, the editor has argued that modern Britain has come to resemble pre-war Germany.
“We can hear the echoes of the Weimar Republic in our current crisis,” he writes.
“The appetite for a future right-wing government in Britain to rule without constraint, with existing conventions discarded, is growing,” he claims.
According to Gove, the late German political theorist and active Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt is “enjoying a new vogue today among the right’s young intellectuals”, while inflation is taking the pound “close to Reichsmark territory”.
What is striking about Gove’s Weimar comparison, and apparent more widely across the pages of The Spectator, is the warmth for Robinson and the suggestion that the major threat to society comes not from nationalist extremists – as in Germany at the time of “the Austrian corporal”, as Gove placidly calls him – but by those opposing them.
The “most chilling” parallel with Weimar that Gove can see is that “antisemitism is the new normal in contemporary Britain”. The implication is that those who rally under “the Palestinian banner” are the new Nazis. Restoring Britain demands “facing down the rainbow-crescent alliance of radical leftists and revolutionary Islamists who feed on national self-doubt”, he writes.
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The Spectator columnist Rod Liddle agrees. “Given a choice between Robinson and Stand Up to Racism, I know what side I am on,” he concludes, after favourably comparing the mood at Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom protest to the Notting Hill Carnival.
In a piece headlined “First they came for the Jews…”, political commentator Douglas Murray suggests that the natural successors to the Nazis are those protesting against genocide in Gaza, “the strange lost souls who have decided that their life’s purpose can best be found by dyeing their hair blue, wearing some Palestinian terrorist-chic headscarf and insisting that no one will be free until ‘Palestine’ is free”.
Gove referred to the Unite the Kingdom march as the “Pilgrimage of Tommy”. In a Spectator podcast, he compared the 150,000 marchers to the voters who flocked to Democrat US President Franklin D Roosevelt after his “the forgotten man” speech in 1932.
It is certainly true that, alongside extremists, some decent people took to London’s streets to protest over living conditions and listen to divisive figures such as Robinson, political commentator Katie Hopkins and X owner Elon Musk, who told them that “violence is coming to you”.
But it does seem like The Spectator is shifting from its (mostly) distinguished traditions. Its gushing treatment of the Tates, regardless of the offences they face, prompted four of their alleged victims to complain to the press regulator.
Gove has had a strange year. In June, his ex-wife Sarah Vine published an unsparing memoir blaming his political career for the breakdown of their marriage.
Earlier in the year, he was handed a peerage, offering him a potential way back into Conservative politics.
But a recent Spectator interview with Danny Kruger, the latest Tory MP to defect to Reform UK, was billed with the cover line: “The Conservative Party is over.”
Next week, Gove is due to attend the Tory conference in Manchester. He will lead a Spectator debate entitled “Can the Tories turn it around?” It feels as if the editor has already made up his mind.
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