Gove's regret at stabbing Boris in the back

The end of the year is a time to muse on the past, and Michael Gove is no different in that regard. The former Conservative cabinet member, now editor of the Spectator, has finally decided he regrets knifing pal Boris Johnson in the back in 2016 as he sought the Tory party leadership.

When David Cameron whistled off into the sunset following the Brexit referendum, Gove, then justice secretary, was expected to back his Vote Leave colleague Johnson in the ensuing contest, only to announce he wasn’t up to the job and launch his own short-lived challenge.

Now Gove has been pondering his decision nearly a decade on – and decided that she should not have gone public with his concerns about Johnson’s competence.

The peer told Sky News’s Electoral Dysfunction podcast that he now realises he should have kept his “profound worries” about Johnson’s abilities to himself as the ensuing Theresa May premiership meant the Leave campaign’s presumably brilliant plan for Brexit was never implemented.

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“In the days immediately afterwards, the way in which Boris behaved portrayed to me a fundamental unseriousness about the scale of the task that made me feel that he wasn’t ready to discharge the responsibilities of being prime minister,” Gove says.

“I think on balance, it would have been better all round if I had thought, OK, I may have these profound worries, but it is better that I keep them to myself and that I do everything possible to make things work. I think that would probably have been the right thing, but other people will make their own judgment about whether or not that was.

“I can offer an account of what I did and why, and then people can think afterwards, well that’s fair enough, or you total idiot, or I hate you, or whatever. But what I can’t do is really truly know in those circumstances how things might have worked out.”

As it is, the country was denied the chance to see the inevitably fully formed and eminently deliverable plan for a successful Brexit which Gove and Johnson had sketched out. The irony is, of course, Johnson being completely and utterly unfit to be prime minister is literally the only time Gove has ever been right about anything.