How Milo can Gove's Spectator go?

Is Michael Gove on some sort of bet about getting the most crackpot far right figure he possibly can into the pages of his Spectator? Because he might just have done it.

Last year, Gove published a chummy interview with the notorious misogynists Andrew and Tristan Tate, in which deputy editor Freddie Gray asked his readers rhetorically of the pair: “Are the Tates really that bad, though?” The Tate brothers are now fighting extradition to Britain on sex charges.

Gove also allowed the return of ageing Greek socialite and journalist Taki Theodoracopulos, convicted of attempted rape only two years prior. But Gove has now alighted on a new talent.

Under the headline “I am a persecuted human rights icon”, Gove has this week published a first-person piece by Milo Yiannopoulos, the British far right conspiracy theorist just deported from the US after being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials.

A one time political aide to rapper Kanye West who liked to dub himself the “most fabulous supervillain on the internet”, Yiannopoulos has long cheered on ICE raids, last year calling for “total legal immunity for ICE agents when they’re on duty”. He wrote on social media in 2025: “We have got to deport millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.”

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Rats in a Sack

Now that he is one of those deported, though, he is having a good old whinge – and Gove’s increasingly wacko Spectator was happy to give him the space.

In the piece – which Rats in a Sack is assured is not a parody – Yiannopoulos writes: “I spent years demanding this agency be let off the leash. And so it is. Yet, I am torn about the fact that I am the only person arrested by ICE in August who has not killed or raped anyone.

“I might be the only person arrested by them at all: In each new jail, I am the only prisoner. Long corridors of empty cells. Gleaming 2026 SUVs in the parking lot. Agents on steroids in virgin tactical gear. They’ve spent the money. But I don’t think they’ve done much deporting.”

He adds: “Like it or not, this makes me a political prisoner, a persecuted human rights icon. I am Mahatma Gandhi. I am Nelson Mandela. I’m not exactly sure who Aung San Suu Kyi is, and can’t be bothered to look it up, but, yes, I am him too.”

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Rats in a Sack

Aung San Suu Kyi is, of course, female. It is unclear whether this obvious mistake is an idiotic gaffe, or an attempt at humour.

Addressing his critics, Yiannopoulos complains: “[US conservative commentator] Ben Shapiro, citing the wrong visa class – because he is stupid – wondered how I ever got into the States, since it has ‘plenty of nut jobs’ already. Ben has written five New York Times bestsellers. I have ghostwritten 17. Let us not punch down.” (There is no evidence Yiannopoulos has ever read, let alone ghostwritten, a New York Times bestseller.)

Now the Kent-born rabble-rouser is thought to be back in Britain, where he will no doubt look to rebuild his business as a far right gobshite-for-hire.

Alas for him, one outlet has already ruled out employing him: GB News, a source at which told the Guardian this week: “We wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole, not in a million years. GBN had a few odd people to start with and we’ve got rid of them.”

Fortunately, there’s one outlet who will employ such fruitloops, no barge pole required: Michael Gove’s Spectator, the home for people too extreme even for GB News!