Imagine you’re Michael Gove. You’re appointed to a post from which your predecessor was fired as he sought to deliver a manifesto pledge that enraged a mass of your colleagues from heartland constituencies.
The subject of the pledge was one of first-rank economic, political and cultural importance: housing. In short, you are gifted a ruin. What do you do?
Being Gove, you start by stroking and soothing those raging Conservative MPs. You remind them that you sit for a seat that is very like theirs: Surrey Heath.
You compliment, flatter, cajole, wheedle and gracefully compromise, confirming the central concession that they want: the weakening of the main policy target.
But this show has nothing to offer employers who need workers, families who need a home – and a Party whose cause has collapsed among younger voters.
So your next step is to conjure up a plan that is relentlessly political, fabulously imaginative, and immaculately presented. (The briefing operations conducted by Team Gove set a standard that their galumphing colleagues don’t even begin to match.)
There were ten principles to the speech that the Levelling Up Secretary delivered yesterday, but its core proposal was to concentrate building in brownfield rather than greenfield – or rather, the Green Belt.
The most reportable aspect of it is a proposal “to write the next, expansive, chapter in Cambridge’s story of scientific endeavour”. “High-quality design,” the Levelling Up Secretary continued…”human-scale streetscapes”…
“…Key workers…young academics…a sustainable transport network…a new national park…perhaps a natural history museum, or a genuinely world-class concert hall…jobs…labs…growth”.
“Newton, Widdowson, Rutherford, Crick, Watson, Franklin, Venki Ramakrishnan and Richard Henderson.” Reading the speech is like watching some Shakespearean magus conjure up a masque of dancing spirits.
Gove, regretfully, is unlikely to deliver this shimmering vision, if only because the odds are against the Conservatives being in office for much longer, and perhaps him being in post for much longer, either. The Department of Health may beckon.
But being the dexterous fellow he is, the Levelling Up Secretary has delivered an approach not just for government but for opposition, too, if Labour win the next election.
For if Keir Starmer, after his own shameless and unconvincing U-turns on housing, then sticks to his latest plan to build more in the Green Belt – i.e: in Tory constituencies – Gove has given his Party a ripose to deploy.
Where Labour seeks to build in the green, the Conservatives would build on the brown. A fractious and divided Parliamentary Party will unite to oppose whatever it is that Starmer tries to do in their constituencies.
The likes of pro-housing Simon Clarke and constituency-protective Theresa Villiers will embrace. One can only admire the skill with which Gove presses pleasing notes on the organ stops.
By seeking to build beautiful, he butters up Policy Exchange, which has long championed the ideal. By appointing Nick Boys-Smith to head a new Office for Place in Red Wall-y Stoke, he puts flesh on its bones.
Boys-Smith, a regular contributor to this site, has devoted his career to the cause of building new, attractive and numerous homes. The move is a graceful nod to the spirit of Roger Scruton.
But the oodles of politics in this soup aren’t only for Conservatives. Gove’s wider menu is a la carte rather than table d’hote – that’s to say, they’re offered up to biddable-ish Labour councils on a case by case basis.
The means of delivery will vary, assuming it happens. Yesterday, he dangled the prospect of development corporations. And of deploying “the planning and tax levers provided by our new Investment Zones”.
In some cases, the means are even less visible. Simon Case will be off “to Barrow later this week, with an elite civil service team…to scope out the room for significant further expansion and investment”.
The exception to this schmoozing, needless to say, is Ulez and Khan-blighted London. “I also will not hesitate to act in the national interest when Labour politicians fail,” Gove thundered, as he laid into the Mayor’s housing record.
His proposal for the capital are, the mesmeric Cambridge dream aside, their most eye-catching part. “Our ambition in London is a Docklands 2.0 – an eastward extension along the Thames of the original Heseltine vision,” he said.
“Taking in the regeneration of Charlton Riverside and Thamesmead in the south, and the area around Beckton and Silvertown to the north, tens of thousands of new homes can be created.”
As this procession sweeps by, it’s hard to know whether more to mock Gove’s chutzpah, like a man seeing through a conjurer’s trick, or to admire the sweep of his grasp, imagination, and engagement with the issue.
The Levelling Up Secretary began his front-bench career covering housing for David Cameron in Opposition, and little about it evades his searching eye.
He likes to be across the detail and there is much in this speech to get to grips with. For example, he wants to remove subsidies from landlords who don’t keep their stock in good repair.
But where does the balance lie between having homes that are less than perfect and no homes at all, if owners withdraw property from rent?
“18m will be the threshold that we will introduce for new buildings requiring second staircases,” he said. What are the implications for numbers of not setting it higher?
Then there are Gove’s plans for freehold and leasehold, ending what he called “an outdated feudal regime which has been holding [leaseholders] back” (so undertaking what Enoch Powell once called “stealing from Dukes”.)
But rather than get lost in the detail, stand back and look at the picture. Then put the politics aside for a moment and concentrate on the policy – and assume in doing so that, against the odds, Gove has the chance to deliver it.
The key is numbers. He rightly pointed out to his audience that “we have built more homes over our time in office than Labour did under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.”
He isn’t backing off the Government’s target of seeing 300,000 new homes a year built – or rather he is, because he claims that it was always optional.
But as the Centre for Cities points out, “the housing deficit would take at least half a century to fill even if the Government’s current target…is reached”.
“Tackling the problem sooner would require 442,000 homes over the next 25 years or 654,000 per year over the next decade in England alone.”
The consensus among the housing geeks is that the Government’s target can’t be delivered on brownfield in cities and towns alone. Let alone the larger number cited.
And even were it possible to do so, many people want to live not in urban areas but in those parts of England where the suburbs meet the countryside – or further out still: and in family homes with gardens.
So more housing in Conservative-held blue fade constituencies can’t be ducked altogether – at least, if the challenge that Gove and his successors face is to be met.
The housing problem is so knotty that none of the solutions are perfect. But a shorthand memo would cite development corporations for urban areas, which Gove floated yesterday, and new towns elsewhere.
These would pose a formidable logistical challenge, particularly in relation to transport, with big implications for neighbouring areas.
ConservativeHome will have more to say about housing over the coming months as our reducing demand for government project develops.
In the meantime, gasp at Gove’s super-competence. In the play, the magician’s nymphs, goddesses and reapers gesure and cavort, mop and mow. Then “to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish”.