Michael Gove Totally Explained

Everything about Michael Gove totally explained

Michael Andrew Gove (born August 26, 1967) is a Conservative politician, journalist and author in the United Kingdom. He is the current Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Surrey Heath since 2005.

Early life

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 studied at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, where he served as President of the Oxford Union.

Journalist

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 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.
He played the school chaplain in the family comedy "A Feast at Midnight" (External Link

),which was released in 1995.

Member of Parliament

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 right-wing think tank launched in 2002. As Conservative candidate in the safe seat of Surrey Heath, he entered Parliament in the 2005 general election.
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 and humanitarian interventionist in foreign policy. Michael Portillo has predicted that Gove will be leader of the Conservative party, although he's only recently won a seat in the House of Commons. 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.

Shadow Cabinet

On 2 July 2007, Gove was promoted to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families (a new department set up the previous week by Gordon Brown, the new prime minister), shadowing Ed Balls, a key supporter of Brown.

Personal life

He is married to Sarah Vine, a writer on The Times, and has two young children, a daughter, Beatrice, and a son, William.
Gove admitted to being a wargaming fan after reading an article by another wargamer and columnist David Aaronovitch. He has also confirmed that he played Dungeons and Dragons

Politicial Views

Before becoming a candidate, Gove had expressed the view that the state shouldn't generally interfere in domestic affairs, campaigned for greater personal freedom and wrote that "Section 28 is a nonsense" (External Link

). He had flatshared with Conservative Ivan Massow who later defected to Labour over Section 28 and Nicholas Boles. Both Ivan Massow and Nicholas Boles are openly gay.
He takes a pro-Israel line, and has criticised anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and several United Nations peace processes. A self-identified 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 (External Link

). 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'd 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. (External Link

) Gove's friends Melanie Phillips and Stephen Pollard have vigorously rejected Dalrymple's analysis(External Link

)(External Link

), and Gove himself has replied in The Times.(External Link

)

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

Further Information

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