Dear Radio 4, must we listen to that self-satisfied Tory Michael Gove?

Dear Reader, there were words said in the privacy of my motor vehicle that cannot, should not be repeated in any company.

After 19 years in parliament Gove bailed out before the Tory ship sank in July. Typical. He wouldn’t even give us the pleasure of seeing him get voted out.

Worse than that, he’s giving no impression that he is about to step off the public stage. Rather, he’s been appointed editor of The Spectator and now Radio 4 has given him his own radio show. We’re stuck with him.

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Gove’s programme, Surviving Politics, which has been stripped across the week on Radio 4 from Monday (it’s also online) has already been filleted for news lines. But I was more interested in what it told us about him.

“If politics is showbusiness for ugly people I was made for it,” Gove told us at the start of every episode. Does that qualify as a humblebrag? It’s a good line, albeit a calculated one. But you’d expect nothing else from him.

Out of pure spite I wish I could tell you Surviving Politics was terrible and that Gove shouldn’t be allowed near a microphone again, but that would be untrue. At the same time it was a slightly too cosy set of conversations in which Gove spoke to former and current Labour, SNP and DUP politicians, as well as fellow Tory Amber Rudd. Very insidery, but also now and then a bit dull.

But maybe that’s because I’m not as invested in the minutiae of politics as Gove and his guests inevitably are.

At times I also felt there was a little bit of reputation-washing going on as Gove presented himself as a principled man who, yes, made mistakes and possibly, as he told Peter Mandelson on Tuesday, had “an overfondness for combat”.

That was as close as he got to admitting he was a real-life Francis Urquhart (of House of Cards fame).

But it is quite something to hear Michael Gove of all people saying you’ve got to be straight with the public as he did during Monday’s chat with Margaret Hodge. The brass neck of the man.

Inevitably, his interview with former First Minister Humza Yousaf - to be broadcast on Friday - has been receiving a lot of notice. But I think the more interesting interviews he did were not with Yousaf or Mandelson (a man not unfamiliar with the dark arts himself), but with Hodge and Rudd.

Michael Gove and Humza Yousaf while both were in the political frontline (Image: Brian Lawless) The two of them (Yousaf, too, to be fair) were interested in talking about how politics was the art of the possible. Hodge admitted that when she went into parliament she couldn't imagine ever having Tory friends. But she argued you soon realise you have “more in common than you think when you start in that journey in politics.”

She also took Gove to task for his role in the Brexit debat

e, as did Rudd, though it was the latter’s comments on the vexed issue of immigration that really stood out.

“Politicians are not honest about what can and can’t be done,” the former Home Secretary, who resigned over the Windrush scandal, suggested. “Maybe the honest politician can’t be elected, I don’t know. I do think the business of ‘Stop the Boats’ was foolhardy because you could slow the boats down, you could have a different approach. But you can’t stop the boats.”

The problem is “complicated questions do not have simple answers,” she added. Indeed. But we are living in a moment when that’s what we are being sold. And maybe what we are seeking.

As for Gove, for all his soft-pedalling in this series, maybe he also did us a service in reminding us that at some level, politics is the playground of egotists and operators.

When Rudd resigned, Gove reminded her, “I texted and phoned you that night and said please don’t go … I didn’t think you had to go, but I also was worried that you were setting too high a bar for the rest of us.”

A joke but maybe with more than a hint of truth about it.

An early photo of The Cure (Image: UNKNOWN)

Listen Out For: Radio 2 in Concert

In which The Cure perform at BBC’s Broadcasting House. It’s now been 45 years since the release of their debut album Three Imaginary Boys. Just in case anyone who bought it back then is under the delusion that they are still young.