There is a video, taken in August 2021, that has achieved a certain immortality on the internet. Michael Gove, then fifty-four years old and serving as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster—a title so magnificently archaic it could have been invented by Evelyn Waugh—dancing alone in an Aberdeen nightclub at two-thirty in the morning. He is wearing a dark suit. His arms are raised. He appears to be experiencing something that might, in another person, be called joy.
The techno pounds. The drum and bass thuds. Gove throws shapes. This phrase—"throwing shapes"—is perfect, implying as it does a kind of geometric violence, a boxing match with the invisible forces of rhythm and time. He dances for ninety minutes without stopping, the club manager later reports, with "incredible energy and stamina."
I have watched this video perhaps twenty times. Each viewing reveals new layers. The solitude of it. The abandon. The sheer strangeness of a senior government minister, fresh from the collapse of his marriage, returning to his birthplace to dance alone among strangers in the small hours. When asked about the five-pound entry fee, he reportedly asked: "Even for the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster?" A joke, presumably. Or not.
What does it mean to be adopted? To be Graeme Andrew Logan at birth and Michael Andrew Gove at four months old? To be taken from one narrative and inserted into another, like a character transplanted between novels?
Gove was born in Aberdeen in 1967 to a twenty-three-year-old cookery demonstrator. He spent four months in care. Then Ernest and Christine Gove arrived—Ernest who ran a fish processing business, Christine who worked as a lab assistant—and the baby became theirs, became Michael, became something new.
For years he believed he was born in Edinburgh. Then a biography revealed the truth: a maternity hospital in Fonthill Road, Aberdeen. Even his origin story required correction, amendment, the replacement of one fact with another.
In "Bartleby, the Scrivener," Melville's copyist gradually stops doing anything at all. "I would prefer not to," he says, again and again, until preference becomes refusal becomes a kind of existential collapse. But what of the opposite condition? What of the person who cannot stop doing, who must always be engaged, always performing, always in motion?
Gove on the dance floor. Gove in the debating chamber. Gove as journalist, as minister, as conspirator, as editor. The man in a hurry, as Owen Bennett titled his biography. A hurry toward what, exactly? Away from what?
Oxford, 1985. An eighteen-year-old Gove arrives wearing a green tweed suit purchased at the Salvation Army for £1.50. He is already, impossibly, a young fogey. Boris Johnson, twenty-one, Etonian, golden, surveys the freshers for useful allies. He identifies Gove as what he calls a "stain"—Johnson's term for the middle-class strivers who could be enlisted for the drudge work of ambition.
"I was Boris's stooge," Gove later admits. "I became a votary of the Boris cult."
Votary. A wonderful word. From the Latin votum: a vow, a wish, a devotion. The relationship between the two men would span thirty-seven years, ending only when Johnson, in one of his final acts as Prime Minister, sacked Gove in July 2022. Wooster and Jeeves, someone called them. Though in this version, Jeeves occasionally murders his master's career prospects.
June 30, 2016. Johnson is preparing to announce his candidacy for Prime Minister. Gove has been his campaign manager, his ally, his votary. Then, hours before the deadline, Gove withdraws his support and announces his own candidacy. The statement is devastating: "I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead."
The Daily Telegraph calls it "the most spectacular political assassination in a generation." David Cameron, in his memoir, describes Gove as "mendacious" and notes that "one quality shone through, disloyalty."
But here is the peculiar thing: Gove claims he was doing Johnson a favor. He believed his friend was unfit for office. By destroying his leadership bid, he was performing a kind of mercy killing. This is either breathtaking self-delusion or a philosophical position so advanced it resembles insanity.
I think often of the five-year-olds required, under Gove's education reforms, to study fractions. Of the teachers who passed motions of no confidence in his policies at four separate union conferences. Of the historians who called his proposed history curriculum "narrow," "nationalistic," an exercise in "insulting" pedagogy.
Robin Alexander said the reforms were "neo-Victorian." Simon Schama—initially mooted as a supporter—delivered a speech calling the final proposals "insulting and offensive," a "ridiculous shopping list." He urged his audience: "Tell Michael Gove what you think of it."
They did. Teachers went on strike. Pass rates declined for the first time since records began. The entire educational establishment rose in opposition. And yet Gove seemed to relish it, even to require it. He spoke of "the Blob"—his term for the educational establishment—with something approaching glee. The worse they thought of him, the more certain he became that he was right.
On class: Gove once complained to the Financial Times about the concentration of privileged old Etonians in Cameron's inner circle. Later, when announcing his leadership bid, he noted he had no "charisma" or "glamour"—which everyone understood to mean: I am not upper-class like Boris.
The fish processor's son. The adopted child. The Aberdeen scholarship boy in his tweed suit. Always the votary, never the god. And yet also always the plotter, the schemer, the one who wields the dagger.
The saying in politics: he who wields the dagger seldom wears the crown. Gove wielded it twice—once against Johnson in 2016, again effectively in 2022 when his call for Johnson to resign helped topple the Prime Minister. Neither time did he wear the crown. Both times he finished third in leadership contests.
Consider the cocaine. In 2019, as Gove launched his second leadership bid, it emerged that he had used the drug "on several occasions" while working as a journalist twenty years earlier. He called it a "mistake" and said he was "fortunate" not to have gone to prison.
The hypocrisy was spectacular. As Education Secretary, he had overseen a policy of firing teachers caught with class A drugs. As Justice Secretary, he presided over a system that could sentence people to seven years for possession. And all the while, he carried this secret.
More delicious still: The Mail on Sunday revealed he had hosted a "cocaine-fueled party" in his London flat hours after writing an article attacking "middle-class professionals" who took drugs. The piece was headlined "When it's right to be a hypocrite."
One could write a dissertation on that headline alone.
The dance floor again. Why can I not stop thinking about it?
Perhaps because it is the only moment where Gove appears free. Free from ambition, from scheming, from the weight of being Michael Gove. Just a man in a suit, moving to drum and bass, buying drinks, posing for photos with strangers who cannot quite believe what they are seeing.
He tells the club manager: "I love to dance." Simple. Direct. True.
Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel Horwood gives Gove's performance a three out of ten, adding that he "should be a little bit more technical if you are going to be in public doing it – at least rehearse it at home."
But this misses the point entirely. The beauty of the Aberdeen dancing is precisely its lack of rehearsal, its complete abandon. For once, Michael Gove is not performing Michael Gove. He is simply performing.
In October 2024, Gove becomes editor of The Spectator, returning to journalism after nearly two decades in politics. The magazine's new owner, hedge fund manager Paul Marshall, pays £100 million for the publication. Fraser Nelson, who edited it for fifteen years, calls Gove "a first-class journalist who took a detour into politics."
But was it a detour? Or was journalism itself the detour, a brief interlude before the main event of political ambition? Or were they always the same thing: the performance of expertise, the cultivation of influence, the wielding of words as weapons?
There is a photograph of Gove from his university days. He is speaking at the Oxford Union, young, earnest, already wearing the intellectual's uniform of spectacles and serious expression. He looks like he is arguing for something, which is to say, he looks like Michael Gove.
At Oxford he joined the Conservative Association after briefly flirting with Labour. He campaigned for Michael Foot in 1983, then underwent a complete political conversion. Some people discover their principles at university. Gove discovered his career.
The Aberdeen dancing reminds me of something Geoff Dyer writes about John Berger's dancing: "He was graceful in a way that seemed to derive from a complete lack of self-consciousness." But Gove is not graceful, and one suspects he has never lacked self-consciousness in his life. His dancing is ungraceful, self-conscious, and somehow more affecting for it.
It is the dancing of a man who knows exactly how he looks and has decided not to care. Which is its own kind of grace.
On adoption again: The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes that "adopted children are always asking themselves what might have been." What if Graeme Andrew Logan had not become Michael Andrew Gove? What if the cookery demonstrator had kept her son? What if Ernest and Christine had chosen a different child?
Gove has said he is "passionately committed to raising standards in state schools and helping children from less privileged backgrounds to maximise their potential." Is this about policy, or is it autobiography? Is every politician's platform just their childhood disguised as principle?
The Boris betrayal in 2016 happened, according to reports, because Gove attended a barbecue at Johnson's house after the Brexit vote and found him and his team "relaxing in the sun" rather than preparing for governance. This infuriated Gove, who believes in seriousness, in preparation, in work.
But there is another interpretation: Gove looked at Johnson—handsome, effortless, beloved—and saw everything he himself was not and could never be. And in that moment, envy curdled into action.
"What was it like for Gove," asks one psychological analysis of the betrayal, "sitting next to Johnson on their Brexit bus, seeing how easily Johnson related to the crowds? Effortless charm, seemingly at ease. Privileged, entitled and adored."
I have never met Michael Gove. I have only seen the videos, read the articles, studied the photographs. But I feel I know something about him, or think I do, which is the same thing.
He is the adoptee who reinvents himself. The provincial boy who conquers the metropolis. The votary who becomes the assassin. The hypocrite who writes articles defending hypocrisy. The politician who returns to journalism. The serious man dancing alone in the dark.
Consider the titles he has held: Secretary of State for Education. Lord Chancellor. Secretary of State for Justice. Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Minister for Intergovernmental Relations.
This last one is my favorite. Minister for Intergovernmental Relations. It sounds like something from a science fiction novel about bureaucracy. What does a Minister for Intergovernmental Relations do? Relate to governments, presumably. Inter-governmentally.
And now: Editor of The Spectator. A title that actually means something you can picture.
In 2021, Gove and his wife Sarah Vine announce their separation after twenty years of marriage. They have two children. Vine is a columnist at the Daily Mail. During Gove's time as Education Secretary, she accused socialists of sending their family "vicious and aggressive death threats."
The marriage ends around the time Gove starts dancing in Aberdeen nightclubs. Coincidence? Perhaps. Or perhaps the ending of one thing creates space for another. Perhaps dancing alone in the dark is what you do when you are no longer part of a couple, when you are returned to yourself, when you are free.
On Brexit: Gove said on the morning after the referendum, "The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards." This proved to be untrue. But at the time, he believed it, or said he believed it, which amounts to the same thing in politics.
David Cameron writes that Gove "went further" in the campaign than he initially intended, pushed by Dominic Cummings, driven by his own moral certainty. Later, Gove admits to "moral cowardice" in not being upfront with Cameron about his position earlier.
Moral cowardice. From a man who has been called mendacious, duplicitous, Machiavellian. But also: serious, intellectual, committed to detail. Everything and its opposite, somehow simultaneously true.
At Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen, teachers remembered young Gove as confident and intellectually curious. "At the start of every lesson a hand would go up and it would be Michael," one teacher recalled. He rode an old-fashioned bicycle, wore suits, recited poetry.
He was also "less strong at sport." This detail feels important. The boy who could not play football becomes the man who dances alone. Different kinds of embodiment. Different relationships with grace.
The Trojan Horse scandal of 2014: allegations of Islamic extremism in Birmingham schools. Gove clashed with Home Secretary Theresa May over who was responsible. The dispute became so public that David Cameron had to intervene.
Later that year, Cameron moved Gove from Education to Chief Whip, widely seen as a demotion. Gove felt he had been treated "like staff." Interesting phrase. As if he had been reminded of his actual position in the hierarchy, the adopted son mistaken for the heir.
I return to the dancing because it contains everything. The solitude. The stamina. The suit that is never removed. The music he claims to love. The insistence on paying the entry fee like everyone else, after first joking about his status. The photographs with strangers. The leaving at 3am, alone, as he arrived.
It is the most honest thing Michael Gove has ever done in public. Which is why it went viral. Which is why we cannot look away.
As Education Secretary, Gove terminated Labour's Building Schools for the Future program. He expanded academy schools. He reformed GCSEs and A-Levels in favor of final examinations. He introduced the phonics check for six-year-olds. He insisted on more Shakespeare in the curriculum.
Some of this was ideological. Some was pedagogical. All of it was controversial. The question remains: did he make education better or worse? The answer depends on whom you ask, which is to say, it depends on everything.
Gove once said he didn't believe "past mistakes disqualify you." He was talking about cocaine use, but the principle extends further. The question is not whether you have made mistakes but whether you have learned from them, grown beyond them, become someone new.
But can anyone become someone new? Or are we always, fundamentally, the same person we were at eighteen, at eight, at four months old when we were given a new name?
The Spectator editorship feels like a return, a completion, a circle closing. Gove told Fraser Nelson he first declared his ambition to edit the magazine "in an Aberdeen classroom at the age of seven." If true, this is extraordinary. Seven years old and already plotting your career trajectory.
Or perhaps it is a story Gove tells now to make sense of his life, to give it narrative coherence. We all do this. We construct the story backwards, making it seem inevitable.
In May 2025, Gove was created Baron Gove, of Torry in the City of Aberdeen. Torry was where his adoptive father was born. He chose to be a life peer rather than a hereditary one, which makes sense—how can an adopted child create a dynasty?
The title seems fitting. Lord Gove. It has a ring to it, both pompous and somehow right. The fish processor's son made good. The provincial boy who conquered London. The journalist who became a minister who became an editor who became a lord.
There is a recurring pattern in Gove's career: he arrives, he reforms everything, he makes enemies, he is moved. Education to Chief Whip. Justice to Environment. Back to Cabinet, then out again. Up and down, round and round, never quite reaching the center but never quite leaving the game.
He is the longest-serving Cabinet minister in recent history under multiple prime ministers. This is either a testament to his competence or evidence of his indispensability or proof that the Conservative Party couldn't figure out what else to do with him.
I think of W.H. Auden's line: "We would rather be ruined than changed." But Gove seems to embrace change, to require it. New policies, new positions, new enemies, new battles. The man in a hurry cannot stand still.
And yet beneath all the movement, something remains constant. The boy with his hand up at the start of every lesson. The votary serving his gods. The dancer alone in the dark.
Geoff Dyer writes about late style, about what happens to artists as they age. But what of late style in politicians? What does it mean when a politician returns to journalism, when the performance of power becomes the performance of commentary?
Gove is fifty-seven now. Not old, but no longer young. His career in elected politics is over. His peerage is for life but confers no real power. His influence now comes from words, from the magazine he edits, from the positions he promotes.
Is this decline or evolution? Defeat or reinvention? The beginning of the end or a new beginning?
In 2024, Gove presented a BBC Radio 4 series called "Surviving Politics." He interviewed politicians about "how to deal with the job when things get tough." The title is revealing. Not "Thriving in Politics" or "Mastering Politics" but "Surviving Politics."
Survival implies difficulty, danger, the need for endurance. What must one survive? The pressure, presumably. The scrutiny. The betrayals and disappointments. The realization that you will not become Prime Minister, that history will remember you as the man who destroyed his friend's career, as the Education Secretary who made teachers strike, as the dancer in the nightclub at 3am.
The last days of Michael Gove are not yet here. He edits The Spectator. He sits in the House of Lords. He writes, he broadcasts, he influences. He continues.
But the last days of something are here. The last days of his political career. The last days of his relevance as anything other than a commentator. The last days of the hope—if he ever had it—that he might wear the crown rather than wield the dagger.
And perhaps that is enough. Perhaps the real achievement is not in reaching the summit but in enduring, in surviving, in remaining relevant and necessary and impossible to ignore. In dancing when you want to dance, alone if necessary, in a nightclub in Aberdeen at 2:30am, arms raised, suit jacket still on, throwing shapes against the darkness, against time, against the weight of being who you are and knowing you will never be anyone else.
The music plays. Gove dances. The night continues. What more is there?