159. Michael Gove: My Journey From Left to Right (Part 1)

26:37You know, George Osborne. And as I say, Ed Balls was a leader writer at the Financial Times. Yvette wrote for The Independent before then becoming a special advisor and so on. And just in passing, you know, some people are scornful of special advisors. I think, again, it's impossible to generalize. There are some people who become special advisors who get high on their own supply, as it were, of inside dope, as Damien McBride has acknowledged that he did. There are other people who are undergoing a very serious apprenticeship in the art of politics and go on to become successful ministers. Okay, Alison Michael, quick break and then back for more.

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29:17Now.

29:20Let me just ask about your time as a journalist. And I always get the sense that Rupert Murdoch was a sort of huge figure in your life. Yes. A big influence. I don't know if you've listened to the excellent miniseries that the Rest is Apologies is running at the moment about Rupert Murdoch. but it's fair to say I'm not as big a fan as you are. How big an influence was he? How do you define his contribution to public life? And do you think we've got the relationship between media and politics right? So I'm a big admirer of Rupert Murdoch's and I admire what he did at Wapping. I think that he saved or certainly gave a significant extension of life to the UK newspaper industry.

30:05The Independent, Yvette Cooper's paper, would never have existed without that change. I think that he is someone who loves journalism and who devotes a significant additional amount of time and energy to journalism out of proportion to what it generates for his business empire overall. I think he's shown even recently with the Wall Street Journal publishing details of Trump's cartoon that he put in the Epstein birthday book, that he's prepared to stand by journalism, even when there are sometimes political enemies who would rather that he crumpled. And I once went to a retreat. Rupert Murdoch used to organize them every three years or so for executives and journalists from his newspapers and for outside business people and politicians.

30:56We went to one famously in Australia. Yes. The one I went to was in the US. Gordon Brown and Douglas Alexander were there. Sorry to drop them in it. Albeit briefly. Was this the moment when Tony Blair was in government and they were plotting against him trying to get themselves in pole positions? Possibly. It was in the early... I'll defer to Alistair. It was... I don't know. I think it was in the Blair first term. Yes, yeah, exactly. I think they're probably there without permission trying to set up Brown's run. Very suspicious. But the thing I remember is that he, Rupert Murdoch sort of gave the closing speech, the equivalent of the leader's speech at a conference.

31:31And in it, he told the story, which I dimly knew and had never heard, and certainly not from his own lips, of the attempt that was made on the death of his father by the Adelaide establishment to take his father's newspapers away from him and his mother and effectively close him down. his determination not to allow that to happen, the freezing out of his mother, and his determination then not to allow the establishment to crush him. And I got a sort of affirmation of that sense then, that he was a restless, creative, you can't keep him down spirit. And most of Rupert Murdoch's political positions are very similar to mine.

32:11And I've arrived at them for my own reasons, but they happen to coincide in Not in every area, but in most areas. So I can't help liking and admiring him more for that. And then on the relationship between the media and politics, I think that's changing. So I think you can argue the dominance of certain newspaper titles at certain points meant that the playing field was tilted in terms of print media against the left. I think that's true. But I don't think that holds any longer just because of the way in which the media landscape is much more diverse now. Can I bring you in on Murdoch and Michael?

32:45I mean, having spent a long time thinking about Rufus Murdoch, what's your response hearing Michael talk about all that stuff? Well, I agree with him. He's a phenomenal, that's the reason we did the series. He's an extraordinary figure in media and political history. And that's why we talk about him a lot. I do think that the relationship was exposed brutally at Leveson, and I regret the fact that that hasn't led to serious change. I think that was criminality and mendacity of a pretty institutional kind. And I also will talk later about America today. But I think Fox News has been an absolute catastrophe for the world.

33:27So I come at it from a very different place. One thing I do want to ask you, though, is whether you think that Murdoch backed Tony Blair in 1997 because he believed in Tony Blair and Labour or because he knew we were going to win? Both. So I actually think that at the time he saw in Blair what he would also have seen at certain points in his career in Australian labor. He saw a tough right wing leader who was unsentimental, who had little time for what became known as political correctness or woke. He knew that the Conservative Party was exhausted and discredited at that time. In particular, he felt cheated by the Conservative Party over their treatment of Margaret Thatcher.

34:23And while John Major was hardly a toff, he had very little time for the sort of the wet grandees who were around John Major at that time. You know, the Douglas Herd figures and so on. They were the people whom he really didn't like. Is that kind of weird class thing? Well. Because he wasn't working class. No, he wasn't. But he was a Marxist when he was at Oxford, briefly. It's an Australian thing, and it's also, you sometimes see it in America, which is that they dislike a particular type of grit condescension that they detect, even if it's not actually present, but they do detect it. So I think that actually he would probably have been on balance inclined to support Tony Blair anyway.

35:06And the fact that Labour were almost certain to win just put the cherry on the cake. One more. You mentioned that you coincidentally have a lot of views that you share with him. But I wonder whether, I've always find your stance on the Middle East and Israel strange. Yes. Because you strike me as being uber passionate. Yes. Which I always felt Murdoch was as well. I remember witnessing once a huge argument between Murdoch and James Murdoch, his son, in front of Tony Blair, about Israel-Palestine. And so I just wonder, is that an influence? Or how have you independently got to a position that feels to me a little bit extreme?

35:44It predates it. It's certainly the case that if you look at the sort of spectrum of opinion, particularly in the UK at the moment, I don't think you could describe my position as mainstream. I think that's probably fair. I don't know how often you could describe any of my positions as mainstream. That is certainly true. But it's something that I have grown up with. So I mentioned that my mum was a regular attender of the Church of Scotland. And as I grew up and attended it with her, the Church of Scotland at that time, things have changed, had a very close attachment to the Holy Land. And the story of the Jewish people was part of the sort of backdrop to my growing up.

36:23And I had a romantic attachment to their story. And again, you may recall, Alistair Rory, the speech that Gordon Brown gave in the Knesset. And this was, of course, some time ago, when he talked about, for generations, you did not have a land, now you have a land. And it reflected a similar, but not identical background to mine, obviously not identical. And his father was a minister in the Church of Scotland. So there's that. And then the second thing is that I feel a very strong identification, love actually, for the Jewish community in Britain and everything that they've achieved and done and admire so much about it.

37:08And then the third thing is that when I look at the position in which Israel finds itself, I can run through my understanding of the history, which you both might want to correct or challenge. But it just seems to me that this is one of the most amazing stories in humanity and Israel's achievement is one of the most moving and powerful. And that obviously doesn't mean that it doesn't make mistakes. But my overall view is there's a queue of people who want to criticize Israel. And that's fine, but I'm not going to join them. I'm going to be on the side wherever I can defending it. Even when they're doing what they're doing in Gaza?

37:48Well, of course I can take a view that they're making mistakes. And, you know, for example, you can look at individual tactical decisions, like the bombing of the Hamas political leadership in Qatar. In Gaza, I think that the fundamental issue there is Hamas's control. But if you'd have been part of a war cabinet in Britain, engaged in a military conflict with whomsoever it may be, would you not have wanted to argue more for genuinely seeking to protect civilian life? Well, I believe that there were people who did. And I believe that the IDF, which is a citizen army in a rules-based democracy, has done everything it can.

38:32Really? You believe that? I do. In a grotesque conflict. And arithmetic here is horrendous because we're talking about individual lives lost. And we're talking about the lives of innocents who've been caught up in this horrible, horrible, horrible war. But the arithmetic would suggest that if you're talking about counterinsurgency warfare in an urban area, the level of casualties that the IDF have inflicted has been lower than we did or the Americans have done in similar through not identical conflicts. Now, it's horrible. Previous generations as well. Attitudes change. Attitudes change and so on.

39:10But we have never, thank God, been in a position where we've endured what Israel endured on October the 7th, nor have we faced what the people of Gaza have had to face. So emotions are bound to be engaged overall, and it's difficult to put oneself completely in those shoes. But as I say, there are so many people who, I think fairly and with sincerity and good faith, will criticize Israel. I sometimes think those criticisms are wrong. But I don't think that, I mean, there are some people who do argue in bad faith. But I think it's important to have some people who do see things instinctively as a starting point from Israel's point of view.

39:52The instinctive bit interests me because given that you've decided to take such a strong position on this, how much time have you spent in Israel, in the West Bank, in Gaza? I mean, how much do you actually know about this region? I mean, so what worries me, obviously, listening to you, I think, spent a lot of my life working in that region. Yes, of course. And when I was in parliament, I avoided taking pro-Arab or pro-Israeli positions when you were right in there. Yes. How much time have you spent in the region? I think I've been to Israel and the West Bank five or six times now. And for how long at a time in the West Bank?

40:28Do you spend the night there? I have never been overnight in the West Bank. I've spent days there. I've visited Romala. I've talked to people in the Fatah political leadership. I've talked to people in Palestinian civil society. So you've been there for a few hours. You've been there maybe 20, 30 hours? I would say, yeah, that would probably be. I would say more than that, but not much more than that. Okay, so 2030. So if I went to, said I've been to Manchester on five occasions, and I've met some of the leaders, and I'm now going to make Manchester my big issue, and I'm going to have very strong views on Manchester, and I'm going to...

41:09Would people not say, what the hell do you think you're doing? You've spent five days on the ground, you don't know anything about it. Well, the first thing is, I have been there. The second thing, though, is... I've been to Manchester too, but I'm not setting myself up as an expert on Manchester after five years. No, I'm not setting myself up as an expert on, for the sake of argument, the precise boundaries of… And also, you may remember that the country's tired of experts. We'll come back to that. The precise geography of a particular settlement in a particular location. The other thing is that the fate of Israel concerns us all.

41:40Because it is the case that the criticism directed at Israel falls into at least two categories. is there's a natural criticism that one democracy would extend towards another when it believes that a fellow democracy or an ally is falling short of the standards that you would expect. But it is also the case that there is opposition to Israel, not because of what it does, but because of what it is. Israel's success is a standing rebuke to a particular view of the world, two particular views of the world. It's a standing rebuke to the Islamist view of the world, and it's a standing rebuke to the left-wing decolonization narrative because Israel is a nation composed in almost entirely of refugees and asylum seekers with no natural resources that when it was born had all of its neighbors attempting to strangle it in its cradle.

42:31It's now become the single most... Michael, you don't really need to give me a lecture on that. No, but I have to explain that it is the single freest and most impressive jurisdiction. The single freest and most impressive jurisdiction. From Morocco to Delhi. And you have to ask, well, why has that happened? But also, why does it inspire such strong feelings? So when I was at the Labour Party conference, I asked Owen Jones why he spent all his time criticizing Israel and didn't show any concern for Sudan or for what was happening in Xinjiang. And could it possibly be that Sudan is not presented as our central ally?

43:19That Sudan is not a country that the United States has been providing billions of dollars of direct military support to? That Sudan has not been at the center of our entire political structures for 60, 70 years in the way that you, and that actually to compare Israel to Sudan, given that Israel is a liberal democracy and one of our closest allies, is profoundly patronizing to Israel. No, I think what happens is that people want to... Because it seems to me it's a possible double standards here, right? Well, there are double standards and they apply to Israel. On the one hand... Israel is held to different standards from other countries.

43:52This is becoming very whataboutery. So on the one hand, a liberal democracy within a rules-based international order. And on the other hand, Sudan. Okay? These are not comparable countries, right? If Denmark suddenly started doing something and I said, well, how come you're not criticizing Congo in the same way that you're criticizing Denmark? the answer would be Israel would hope to be held to a higher standard than Sudan. And it does operate to a far higher standard. But the question, of course, is why is it that the United Nations has chosen to single out Israel in the way that it has with the Zionism is racism motion being passed?

44:28Why is it the case that there is such hostility that's directed towards it? American support for Israel is like American support for Germany and NATO. It's support for a democracy or democracies that have been embattled. Why is it that all of Israel's enemies, its neighbors until recently, have tried to not just check its manners or see an alteration in its policy, but eliminate it? And why is it that it's so important that we recognize that? because antisemitism mutates over time and antisemitism from having been a religious prejudice and having been an ethnic prejudice is now a prejudice against the Jewish home and a desire to tear it down.

45:12Last one on this, Michael, because I understand your position. I was always profoundly confused in parliament by British parliamentarians setting themselves up as advocates and friends for foreign countries. I didn't take paid trips to Denmark. I didn't take paid trips to India or Israel or Saudi. I mean, these things were, I didn't think I needed to be a conservative friend of Israel, conservative friend of the Middle East. When people said, you know, what's my position on Kashmir? My answer would be, I'm a British politician. And that's somebody who spent most of his life working on foreign affairs.

45:54So one of the things that interests me is, would you say what you said about the Jewish community in Britain, about the Muslim community. Would you say that you feel, what was your phrase? I would say love and affection and admiration for what they've achieved. Would you say that about the Muslim community? I would say that about people from within the Muslim community. I would say that about very, very dear Muslim friends. But I think there is something about the Jewish story, and in particular, the Jewish experience in the 20th century, and the efforts which we've seen to destroy Jewish civilization, Jewish race and Judaism.

46:29That touches me in a way that isn't true of other communities. And I think that it is the case now that history teaches a certain lesson. And one of those lessons is that the safety and security of the Jewish community in any country at any time is the surest guide to how admirable and liberal that country is. As opposed to how we look after the poor, as opposed to how we look after prisoners, as opposed to how we treat Muslims, as opposed to many other questions. I think it is the absolute acme. It is the gold standard of how civilized a society is. Why logically? Because history shows you that whenever countries are moving towards authoritarianism, whenever they're moving into dark territory, it's the Jews who are turned on.

47:17But Michael, it's also the case that if one looks at those societies that were most liberal at any time, the Netherlands, for example, in the 16th and 17th century, Britain at the end of the 19th century, America throughout most of the 20th century, the most enlightened countries are those in which Jewish people have felt most safe. In which Jewish people feel most safe, and I agree with you on that, and in which minorities in general feel most safe, and in which human rights are respected, and particularly the human rights minority groups, of which the Jewish community is an incredibly important example.

47:45But the treatment of the Muslim community in Britain would also be a gold standard test for a civilized society. The treatment of British Muslims, the treatment of British Hindus, the treatment of British Sikhs matters to me because, like you, I have a certain idea of Britishness, which means that how you treat every citizen, and indeed every person, even if they're not a citizen, who is subject to British laws and paying British taxes, is a key element in civilization. All I would say is that there's never been, thank heavens, anything to compare with the Holocaust. It was a unique crime, the worst evil of which mankind has ever been guilty.

48:30And it was directed not at a section of any population for random reasons. It was directed explicitly at the Jewish people. And that is why when we see a rising tide of anti-Semitism now, it's a moral obligation on all of us to ask why to look at it. And certainly, of course, you can make a judgment about the government of Israel and its actions, but to blame the government of Israel's actions automatically for an increase in anti-Semitism as though that were a mathematical formula and a rational one is once again to blame Jews for prejudice against them. Who's doing that? Well, I mean, you're talking to me as though I'm doing that.

49:16No, you're not doing it. Okay, right. But it is emphatically the case that if you venture onto our streets or walk into the whirlpool of social media, you will find people who will, we've seen it in recent weeks and some of the people who've been commenting, on whether or not the fans of Maccabee Tel Aviv should be allowed to watch their team play Aston Villa. That doesn't mean that you can't make a judgment that that might be a mistake in good faith, but there's a lot of bad faith out there. But Michael, there are a lot of Muslims who feel deeply unsafe in Britain right now. Yes. If you were walking through central London when Tommy Robinson had 150 ,000 people out on the streets, and I mean, I don't like the whataboutery, but I sort of feel they're being lost in this debate.

50:04And I also, would you not agree with me that one of the consequences of what's happened in the last couple of years in the Israeli debate is it's kind of been exposed as a bit of a myth that they ever really believed in a two-state solution? Well, I don't think it's a myth. I think that it was very strongly the case that a lot of the Israeli population, a majority, have believed in a two-state solution. There's a very powerful speech that Bill Clinton gave, I think, when he was campaigning for Kamala Harris, when he explains the missed opportunity where the Palestinians were offered what was not a perfect, but certainly a good deal.

50:41And they walked away. I think things have changed. undoubtedly. I think support for a two-state solution in Israel has been ebbing. And I think it's been ebbing as a result of what's happened in Gaza. Israel, of course, withdrew, Hamas took over. The nature of that rule and other factors has meant that that's diminished. And then without, I hope, being naive, because who knows where the Trump peace plan will go, if it is the case that that you have an absence of violence and Palestinian civil society is given the chance to develop, then I think that you could see support for a two-state solution within the Israeli population growing again.

51:26Because I think the number of people in Israel who actually think the Palestinians should never have a state is small. The number of people - Very powerful. There are some very strong advocates of that position. That's not your position? No. I think that there are a number of people in Israel who think, I can't contemplate a Palestinian state at the moment if that Palestinian state is going to be run by or under the influence of the sort of people who were running Gaza when October the 7th happened. Now, the original plan that Rory and I had was to get through much of your ministerial career in part one.

52:04We haven't even got... Sorry. You haven't even become an MP yet. Yeah. Can we move on to that? Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating aspect of your personality, this desire. Maybe it's your debating thing to be immensely combative about Israel, which we had no real interest in talking about. As you can tell, it is an issue that I feel very strongly about. We were really hoping that you could talk about stuff you really knew about, like schools and justice. Oh, he doesn't know anything about schools. But what is it that when you have the opportunity to talk about stuff you really know about and are really absorbed in, like all the work you did on schools, all the work you did on the environment, all the work you did on justice.

52:41To be fair, we did ask him. Yeah, but it becomes something where it's disproportionate, it feels to me. And it's something that interests me because I think it's a theme in your life that compared to the really interesting stuff, which is the granular absorbed detail and stuff that you actually do and do well, you have these massive ideological things that you want to have huge arguments about. I don't want to, but I'm certainly prepared to. You love arguing. I love getting to the heart of certain questions, but both as a journalist and as a politician, both member of parliament and minister, I spent far more time thinking, talking and worrying about other questions.

53:28So as Alistair established, my views on this question are not mainstream UK views. And as you've heard, they're very strongly and passionately held. And I think it's a very important issue. But the amount of sort of bandwidth that I've given to that in my professional career is relatively small compared to other questions, the questions that you've just touched on. Well, so we've got, Michael has not yet really become an MP as this canter through his life. But what we're going to have to do in part two, Michael, is cover your entire ministerial career. And in particular, two subjects in which, you know, I'm very, very interested in arguing with you, education and Brexit.

54:12Looking forward. If you want to hear part two straight away, rather than wait for a week, just sign up at the restispolitics.com.

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