The old saying about throwing stones in glass houses seems to have escaped Michael Gove, the perennial Tory plotter and Brexit architect who is now editor of right wing magazine The Spectator.
On November 25, veteran BBC news man John Simpson wrote on X: “According to a new study from a respected US think tank, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Britain’s decision to leave the EU has meant that its GDP is between 6 per cent and 8 per cent smaller than it would have been.”
Never one to pass up an opportunity to show off his own cleverness, Gove replied, “I think people in this country have had enough of organisations with acronyms that have consistently got things wrong in the past”. That was, of course, the exact phrase the then Vote Leave co-leader used in an interview with Sky News’s Faisal Islam on June 3, 2016, as he dismissed economics specialists who claimed Brexit would turn out to be a disaster.
Some might have thought twice about reheating such an ill-advised quote – even Gerald Ratner quickly learned to avoid calling his own products crap.
But that doesn’t seem to have occurred to Gove – despite being widely condemned for the remark at the time, despite later admitting he should have clarified it (blaming nervousness for failing to do so) and, most importantly, despite the fact that Brexit has turned out to be a disaster by any economic measure.
Having falsely claimed during the referendum campaign that Britain sent £350m to Brussels each week (out by a mere £100m) and that Turkey was about to join the EU (he later admitted that Vote Leave were wrong to exploit fears of Turkish immigration and that the campaign should have had a “slightly different feel”), Michael Gove’s credibility on Brexit is zero. That he should try to call out others for supposed Brexit misinformation is either supremely foolish or supremely arrogant.