Sketch: Michael Gove's schooldays
Michael Gove: What a wizard idea
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Wednesday, 07, Oct 2009 01:58
By Matthew West.
As Michael Gove took to the stage at today's Conservative party conference I let out a rather depressed sigh. You see Gove is someone that you just can't take seriously. He's like the boy at school who was generally very tiresome and who despite your better nature you really hated. Not out of jealousy, but because he was the kind of boy that sucked up to the schoolmaster, was a stickler for the rules and was always telling people like me why my life would amount to nothing.
You can just imagine Gove running to tell tales to the teacher. In fact at one point during his speech today I imagined him in the sort of 1950s traditional school uniform of shorts, blazer and cap. Except he was less Just William and more Violet Elizabeth Bott, who would "thcream and thcream 'till I'm thick".
Is there some dark secret the electorate should know about? Was Gove picked on, laughed at, made to look foolish and generally run down in his own schooldays? Does the man that could be our education secretary have a massive chip on his shoulder ready to take his revenge?
I believed him when he said he wanted to deal with "the vicious violent minority" that dominated the playground and the streets, his voice cracking with barely contained relish at the prospect.
In my mind's eye all I could see was the little boy in the shorts and cap jumping up and down and screaming with rage at the unfairness of it all.
I actually thought he was going to start crying at one point as the memories of past injustices – all those wedgies, the stolen clothes in the changing rooms, the flushings down a toilet - must have come flooding back.
And when he said he was going into this with his "eyes open" and that he realised the scale of the ambition you could just see his eyes light up momentarily. It was an involuntary reaction. But it gave away the scale of his ambition.
Little Michael Gove was going to have his revenge. All the nasty little bullies and rule breakers were going to get theirs. Failing management teams in schools were going to be replaced wholesale regardless of the lack of support they were getting from government. Those nasty little tykes that should be working with their hands were going to do vocational courses and be kept away from the nice little upper middle class kids who just wanted to learn in peace and quiet and then go to Cambridge and accept their inheritance to run the country.
And just to make sure, little Michael's bright idea is to get a bunch of ex-soldiers in to teach the little terrors. That'll restore discipline. What we really need is a bunch of ex-marines with anger management problems teaching a bunch of rowdy 14-year-olds. It's foolproof!
Who knows, maybe Michael would even like a return of corporal punishment?
After all, a good flogging never did little him any harm.
Oh no I forgot, that never happened to him. He was far, far too much of a goody two shoes.