The fact he staggered to a club at 1am, red of face and out of place, made me feel an unexpected glimmer of warmth for him
If you had asked me yesterday to imagine a scenario in which I experienced any kind of warmth towards Michael Gove, well … I won’t say I couldn’t have done it, I’ll just say it would have taken some time. But it turns out all he had to do was go to a nightclub in Aberdeen and dance on his own, and not only did I momentarily forget his drawling self-importance, but the people of Scotland did too. You would think the other revellers would have chased him off the dancefloor, pausing only to spray paint him first, like a fur-coat wearer at an animal rights protest. If Aberdeen is famous for anything but granite, it’s the oil industry – and whatever you think of fossil fuels, that means the city is rammed with experts. So Saturday night could have been the perfect opportunity to express that, maybe, they had had enough of Gove.
Instead, they posed for selfies with him, swapped tall tales (did he, or did he not, try to evade the £5 entry fee by saying he was the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster?) and made the man feel like a visiting and esteemed dignitary to the land of trance and bacchanalia. There’s a Narnia thing, a code of values older than politics; it’s worse than unkind to mock someone who is dancing – it’s also cynical, joyless and where does it end? You would be like that woman who put a cat in a wheelie bin. What else might she dispose of so casually? Your dreams?
