The keys to No 10 may be the reward if the ‘levelling up’ secretary can deliver on housing and give new hope to the north
The whale is wounded. The sharks smell blood and start to circle. The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is in the lead. The rest thrash about, still disoriented by Covid. That is, except for Michael Gove. Last September, in an unguarded moment, Boris Johnson handed Gove the opportunity of a lifetime: to chart a path out of the ideological chaos of lockdown towards a 21st-century Tory dawn, and, with it, a claim to the succession.
Gove has been asked in effect to recast non-metropolitan Britain. He must revive local democracy and reverse the centralist planning regime of his predecessor, Robert Jenrick – the regime that so enraged Chesham’s Tories in the June byelection. Gove must sort out the intellectual vacuum that is Conservative housing policy, with its casual pledge of 300,000 new homes. He must also reveal what Johnson really meant by “levelling-up” the north. He has even been told to rescue the union with Scotland in his spare time. If he can pull all this off, Gove will be a hard man to beat.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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