I disliked the Education Secretary, Michael Gove from the moment I first saw him.
There’s no logical reason. As far as I know Mr Gove is a perfectly nice chap, kind to his kids and disinclined to stamp on puppies.
But he has the same floppy – lipped mouth arrangement as the boy who lived next door when to me I was a lad. A boy I detested so much I used to beat him up as a hobby.
Similarly David Willets, the Universities Minister, reminds me of the tall thin wispy haired being who sat at the back of the class and was so clever even the class bully was at a loss. I didn’t particularly dislike him but I was wary.
He seemed to me to have the sort of cold – logic brain that might one day lead to euthanasia for the less bright and the marshalling of the gnarly-handed into workcamps.
How we make judgements
For this, it seems, is how we judge those who impinge on the outer fringes of our lives. Not knowing anything about them we pick up on some feature we recognise and use it to make our arbitrary judgments.
Thus David Cameron is for me every public school educated man I have met. Well educated, personable, an all round nice chap. But with a great yawning gap where his knowledge of ordinary people living in ordinary houses on ordinary streets and working in ordinary offices, factories or building sites ought to be.
In his case, too, I could be entirely wrong. The point is, I have no way of knowing. So I stick with what I think I know.
Everything can change of course
Just as I finally got past Mick Jagger’s mouth and learned to enjoy his music, in the highly unlikely event that Michael Gove and David Willetts do something useful with our education system, instead of footling about and wasting yet more of our money for no good reason, then they will be transformed into capable heroes.
And if Cameron presides over a period in which our economy revives and grows strong – or at least when some tame statistician can massage the figures to make it appear that way – he will be stood alongside Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill as a saviour of our nation. And I will be among those applauding.
If the economy fails to revive on the other hand, he will be a Neville Chamberlain. And I will irritate everyone around by announcing I knew it all along.
You just had to look at the bloke.
Image: Mongo under CC BY-ND 2.0
