Michael Gove And Homosexuailty

As Cabinet Office minister Michael “Oiky” Gove continues to maintain an uncharacteristically low profile, so the interest in him is sated by revelations about his recent and not so recent past, not least those published by the Independent, concerning a number of comments made in speeches during Gove’s student days, and after.

The BBC attempted to be restrained. “In 1987, Mr Gove then president-elect of Oxford University's debating society took part in an inter-university debating competition in Cambridge. Speaking in favour of the motion ‘this house believes that the British Empire was lost on the playing fields of Eton’, Mr Gove used a racist term to describe black people, which was met with a shout of ‘shame’ from a member of the audience”.

He used the term “fuzzy-wuzzy”. Gove also talked remarkably frankly about Mrs T: “We are at last experiencing a new empire, an empire where the happy south stamps over the cruel, dirty, toothless face of the northerner. At last Mrs Thatcher is saying I don't give a fig for what half the population is saying, because the richer half will keep me in power. This may be amoral. This may be immoral. But it's politics and it's pragmatism”.

But it was his comments on homosexuality that had rather more people stroking their chins. Gove claimed that gay people “thrive primarily on short-term relations[hips]”. As someone who isn’t gay, and who doesn’t make a habit of asking LGBT people about the length of their relationships, I wouldn’t have the foggiest on the subject. But Gove, who praised Thatcher’s “rigorously, vigorously, virulently, virilely heterosexual” policies, did.

He also declared that John Maynard Keynes, that greatest of economists and economic thinkers, was a “homosexualist”. It is true that Keynes had close relationships with other men. But it is also true that from 1925 he was married to ballerina Lydia Lopokova - “What a marriage of beauty and brains, the fair Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes”.

Keynes - targeted by Gove

A man who had gay relationships, but was married for over 20 years? Moving right along from the Indy’s revelations, we arrive at a recent article by Mary Wakefield, wife of former chief Downing Street polecat Dominic Cummings, in the increasingly alt-right Spectator magazine, titled “My husband’s ‘gay affair’ with Gove … After this little storm, I’ll be much more cautious about the people ‘everyone knows’ are gay”. Affair? Do tell.

“A few weeks ago I discovered that while he should have been focused on the fight of his life during the referendum campaign, David Cameron was instead obsessing over whether or not his justice secretary, Michael Gove, had had an affair with my husband, Dom Cummings, campaign director of Vote Leave”. Dom. More manly that Dominic, see.

After noting that “[Gavin] Williamson had, said the MoS, dashed into No. 10 ‘in the heat of the bitter EU campaign’ to deliver news of the fling to the PM”, she dismisses the idea. "It’s all just utter cobblers, isn’t it? There’s certainly nothing moral about all this fictitious ‘outing’ … The great gay rumour mill churns on”. Is she sincere? Or protesting too much?

Is Michael Gove gay? I don’t [yet] have the answer to that one. But at leat one major newspaper group does, yet has decided not to enlighten its readers.

So why not tell us? We’re in the 21st Century, after all. Unless you’re in the Tory Party.

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