“Is it true?” I asked.
“I’m still undecided. Torn between what I feel about the EU and loyalty to the PM.”
So I said: “Not many people get the chance in their lives to save Britain. Drake; Nelson; Churchill. Your call.”
“No pressure then,” said the Lord Chancellor.
I’d love to be able to claim that it was me wot swung it. But I honestly don’t believe that, for all his professed vacillations, Gove was ever capable of doing anything other than nailing his colours to the Brexit mast.
The same is true, for different reasons, of Boris Johnson.
Last week, when lots of other armchair experts didn’t, I correctly predicted that both men would inevitably vote out.
I’m very glad they did since I think it will make all the difference to the #Brexit campaign. Put it this way, had Gove and Johnson not come out for Brexit, the “Leave” camp would never have stood a chance of persuading wavering middle-ground voters to take the plunge. With Boris’s charisma and popularity and Gove’s intellectual heft to back it Brexit now stands a serious chance of becoming reality.
Let me explain – briefly, because I’m ill and mustn’t write too much – what I think made up their minds.
First Gove. Gove’s decision is the easiest to explain: integrity. Of all my Oxford contemporaries to go into politics Gove is the only one who has not been intellectually or morally corrupted by the process. I’m sure almost everyone who goes into politics (in Britain, at any rate; less so, perhaps, in, say Nigeria) does so for the noblest of reasons. But what they quickly realise is that if they are ever to enjoy career advancement, they must compromise their ideals for whatever is thought at the time to be the “greater good” of their party. In the Cameroon era this has meant squishy, ideology-free centrism.
Read the rest at Breitbart.
