Bagehot did not mean to write to the courteous IT consultant from Nashville, Tennessee, whose e-mail address he mistakenly saved to his phone. He was after another Michael Gove, the British education secretary, who hardly anyone would wish to be confused with just now.
This Mr Gove is one of the most disliked men in British politics—unfairly, in Bagehot’s view, and worryingly. For it is an indicator of how diminished is the radical centrism that David Cameron’s coalition government once promised and of which he is the last undaunted exponent.
The battering comes from all sides. The opposition Labour Party calls his effort to free schools from local-authority control a wrecking job. A senior Liberal Democrat, the coalition’s junior partner, calls Mr Gove an “ideologically obsessed zealot”—a phrase that denigrates him without quite dissociating the Lib Dems from reforms they helped pass. A petition calling for Mr Gove’s sacking has over 120,000 signatures, and more will be added. Hating Mr Gove unites not only the self-righteous teachers’ unions but also the legions of teaching assistants, caretakers, dinner ladies, lollipop men and parents—half of society, at least—who come under their influence. “It’s amazing how many people loathe him,” says a Tory high-up.
For Mr Gove and his small band of diehard supporters, the abuse is an unpleasant sort of vindication. It reflects how entrenched and widespread are the interests they are attacking: a complacent and self-serving education establishment, whose ill-deserved privileges Mr Gove has dedicated himself to removing. Besides liberating existing schools and allowing parents to launch new ones, he has accordingly pushed performance-based pay for teachers while shaking up exam boards, the curriculum and the schools inspectorate. In the process he has reversed a long demise in foreign language and science teaching, and brought many smaller changes besides. He has done so, moreover, while repeatedly demonstrating that he is not the high-handed elitist his critics describe. Mr Gove is a high-handed liberal, who sees good, state-provided education as a form of social justice. Having enjoyed a poor start in life—he was given up for adoption as the newborn baby of an unknown mother—he is messianic in his regard for education’s transformative power, especially among the poor.