Could Brexit – estimated cost to the British economy: £100bn a year – have been avoided had David Cameron simply coughed up an extra £36,000 for Michael Gove? That is the intriguing suggestion in a new memoir from Sarah Vine, Daily Mail columnist and ex-wife of Gove, who reveals the bitterness caused by her former hubby’s demotion from education secretary to chief whip in 2014 and the resulting cut in his salary.
In the book, serialised in the Mail, Vine writes that it “was a clear demotion – and, much more catastrophic, it meant an annual pay cut of more than £36,000” – a pay cut she goes on to mention several times. She recalls how Gove reassured Cameron in late 2015, that he would back Remain in his EU
referendum, and questions whether he would have made the decision to flip to Leave had he not been demoted.
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“I’ve often wondered if things wouldn’t have taken a different turn had Dave not deliberately humiliated Michael so publicly,” she writes, before once more mentioning the pay cut.
Might history have been different had Cameron allowed him to continue receiving the equivalent of one-and-ahalf shepherd’s huts a year?
