Michael gove

That should have been a tap-in. London is currently crippled by a Tube strike thanks to the noted beach enthusiast, Bob Crow, and his high-earning chums at the RMT. So David Cameron had a superb chance to tip a bucket of manure over Ed Miliband’s head. The political connections are self-evident. Red Ed, union militancy, London throttled, all Labour’s fault. But Cameron was nutmegged by Miliband’s tactics. Ignoring the strike, the Labour leader asked about the newly formed inland sea which used to be known as the West Country. He accused the government of a slow, tight-fisted and shambolic response. Cameron assumed the facial expression of pumped-up severity that he

Michael Gove’s speech today was, as James explained at the weekend, a pitch from the Tories to be the optimists of the 2015 election. He wanted to have a little boast about the success of the government’s education reforms in raising the desirability of a state education. He said: ‘When Channel Four make documentaries about great comprehensives – academies – in Essex and Yorkshire, when BBC3 make heroes out of tough young teachers, when even Tatler publishes a guide to the best state schools – you know tectonic plates have started to shift.’ This is hardly the running down of teachers or state schools that Gove’s critics like to complain

David Laws’ attack on his former BFF Michael Gove is leading the news bulletins today, and rightly. Its wider significance lies in that the Liberal Democrats have decided it’s time to start picking fights not just with Tories in general but Michael Gove in particular. So Gove, having offered all that hospitality to David Laws, finds the guy he thought was his clansman wield the dagger on the instructions of his commander. This isn’t quite Westmister’s equivalent of the Glencoe Massacre, but the dynamics of the coalition have changed – in precisely the way that James Forsyth outlines in his political column this week. The LibDems’ support halved soon after

Finally, Britain’s children will be equipped for the Internet age. In a speech to the BETT education conference today, Michael Gove announced the details of the new computing curriculum, which will take effect from this September. As well a new Computer Science GCSE and a beefed-up A-Level (hopefully more schools will offer it), the new computing curriculum will begin for five year olds, and will consist of three strands. These are information technology (how to use computers in the real world), ‘digital literacy’ (confidently and safely using computers) and ‘computer science’ strands. The Computer Science strand is by far the most important. Since computers became significantly easier to use in

While Michael Gove and academic lefties continue to row about the causes of the Great War, the education secretary’s wife, Sarah Vine, has helpfully poured some fuel on the fire. Vine’s always-mischievous Mail column reveals that her husband admires the Germans: ‘While I wasn’t looking, my husband, Michael Gove, appears to have declared war on Germany. This has prompted some commentators to compare him to Basil ‘Don’t mention the War’ Fawlty. This is understandable, but wrong: he actually loves Germany and all things Teutonic, from Richard Wagner to bratwurst.’  She mentioned it once; but I think she got away with it.

Boris Johnson insisted today that critics of his comments about IQ had chosen to ‘wilfully misconstrue what I said’. He told LBC radio this morning that ‘what I was saying actually is that there is too much inequality, and my speech was actually a warning, as correctly reported by many newspapers, actually a warning against letting this thing go unchecked. Because if you look at what’s happened in the last 20 to 30 years, there’s been a widening in income between rich and poor – there’s no question about that.’ He also managed to fail an IQ test, which was an inevitable consequence of this whole debacle. But Labour is

Boris Johnson’s speech at the Centre for Policy Studies, much misrepresented, is still grabbing headlines. Boris gave the Margaret Thatcher memorial lecture, so it’s no surprise it has been interpreted as a bid to succeed her. But another relationship is just as intriguing: was Boris also stealing Michael Gove’s clothes? The Mayor said much about the significance of the Conservatives’ past, but the Govian aspects of his speech offer a glimpse of what the party’s immediate future might look like, particularly when it comes to a future leadership contest. Boris’ ‘cornflake packet’ argument about meritocracy is a classic piece of Govian thinking. Posing the question ‘what would Maggie do?’, Boris

The blob strikes again. A video called Gove vs Reality is doing the rounds, taking pot shots at Michael Gove’s education policies, or ‘challenging his assumptions and the evidence he advances to support his approach’ as the producers put it. It’s had nearly 50,000 views so far, but is there any truth in it? With absurdly dramatic music, handpicked headlines and sound bites from the likes of Tom Watson, one might think that Michael Gove has been a complete disaster. Well, not surprisingly, there are a few untruths in the video: Gove has taken too many ‘urgency pills’ — shock, a minister who wants to get something done! As Matthew