Could Michael Gove, adopted son of an Aberdeen fish merchant, ever be PM?
By Alan Taylor

THESE days truffles are easier to find in Scotland than Tories. Like the yeti or the Loch Ness monster, it is getting to the point where it is hard to believe they ever existed. At parliamentary by-elections, they come a distant third, "leapfrogging" the LibDems, or have the indignity to lose their deposits. At Holyrood, Annabel Goldie, the Scottish Tory leader, endeavours valiantly to hold Alex Salmond to account but it is like watching a primary school head telling Don Corleone to stay back and write 100 lines. In the meantime, David Cameron breezes north on a day trip to reacquaint himself with the smell of deprivation and, sensing a nose bleed coming on, hightails it back to Westminster, all the while professing that he is the defender of the union and wittering on about rocky marriages being better than none.

Times have rarely been grimmer for the tartan Tories. It is a view that even Michael Gove finds hard to counter. Gove, raised in Aberdeen and now shadow secretary for children, is one of life's glass-half-full brigade, a man who is even willing to praise his enemies, and is always eager to take a detour to pay a compliment. In the not so distant past, he would have been seen as a shoo-in for Scottish secretary and the man designed to lead the Tories out of the electoral wilderness. He is as right wing, say, as Michael Forsyth, but with a much less abrasive personality. He has Malcolm Rifkind's intelligence but does not sound as if he was taught to speak by a recruiting sergeant. Had he opted to go to Holyrood, pundits would be clamouring for him to replace Goldie and inject some much needed dynamism and intellectual rigour into the cause of Conservatism north of the Border.

As it is, Gove, who is 42, is entrenched in the deep south, with a safe seat in Surrey and a place among the Notting Hill set. Media friendly - he writes a column for The Times, appears regularly on television and is a panellist on Radio Four's The Moral Maze - he is beloved by the blue rinse set and book festival goers. Recently, at a meeting of the Conservative Women's Association, the mere mention of his name produced a chorus of cooing. As Fraser Nelson remarked in The Spectator, one of the most reliable ways of putting bums on seats at any Tory gathering is to have Gove on the platform. "His fusion of almost comic politeness and intellectual ruthlessness," wrote Nelson, "has given him quite a following."

At first glance Gove, with whom I rendezvous at Portcullis House in London, a stone's throw from the Palace of Westminster, is an unlikely darling of the ladies-who-lunch. He is no Portillo (whose biography he wrote), let alone a Heseltine. Soberly suited if not courtesy of Savile Row, he could in certain lights be taken for Mr Bean. He talks urgently, his accent Aberdonian but his vocabulary untainted by references to loons and quines. He says "yes" a lot as one frames a question then answers it instantly, like the one boy in the class who always sticks his hand up. Teachers at his alma mater, Robert Gordon's, must have thought him a godsend. But if that makes him sound like a sook, it is unfair. Behind the amiable persona, one suspects lies a strong character who knows his own mind and carries his convictions sincerely.

Why, I ask, do the Tories in Scotland currently fare so badly? You can't answer that question, Gove suggests, without looking at history. Nor, he adds, can you isolate Scotland from parts of England, such as the northeast, where the Cameron effect is still negligible. Indeed, similarities can be drawn between Clydeside, Tyneside and Merseyside, all of which suffered during the boom and bust years. Moreover, during the 1980s, "many of the people who spoke for Scotland - culturally not politically - Jim Kelman, William McIlvanney - had a particular vision of the people who stood up for Scotland and they were the traditional, west coast industrialised working class ... When the person who was presiding over what happened, Margaret Thatcher, wasn't someone who came across sympathetically to that constituency then you've got a problem."

Of course, Gove has no intention of dissing Thatcher. Give him half a chance and he'd argue that the popular view of her in Scotland is unjust. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that once a view has become the "settled will" there is little point in trying to overturn it. "Mrs Thatcher and Scotland never quite found each other's wavelength." On top of which, he says, the left did their damnedest to portray any policies the Tories suggested as anti-Scottish. For example, when Michael Forsyth proposed changes in education it was opposed as "the Englishing of the Scottish education system". The same, argues Gove, pertained in other areas of policy.

"Therefore the Tories were defined as a party of colonial governor-generals and that was reinforced by some of the people who represented the Scottish Tory Party. Because over 20 or 30 years Scotland's small business class has diminished, the number of industries that were run by Scots diminished, therefore the folk who spoke up for the Scottish Conservative Party seemed either to be idealogues or the wealthy. We got ourselves into a sort of diminishing circle. We had fewer and fewer links with Scottish civil society."

How they get out of that circle is the $64,000 question. "The scale of the problem," sighs Gove, "is so big, the length of time it takes to recover is proportionately longer." What he does not suggest is rule from outwith Scotland. Unlike the Labour Party at Holyrood, which still seems to look to Downing Street before sneaking a crisp from a packet, Cameron and his cohorts, insists Gove, cannot be seen to be imposing their writ on the tartan Tories. "There's a limit to what can be done from outside. Forbearance is as important as polemic from those of us who believe in the union and the Conservative Party but who aren't living in Scotland at the moment."

Such answers are typical of Gove, who is courteous and complimentary to a fault. In the course of our conversation he manages not only to name-check colleagues such as Cameron, Osborne and Goldie, but also to praise Alex Salmond's "brilliance in argument", of which he ruefully recalls he has been on the receiving end. He even refers to Gordon Brown with warmth as a "genuine sports fan". It is no surprise, therefore, that Gove's popularity is cross-party. But that should not be allowed to obscure the fact that his views are several degrees to the right of centre and that he keenly supported the war in Iraq. Reviewing Gove's book, Celsius 7/7, about the growth of radical Islam, fellow Scot, the author William Dalrymple, described Gove as "a pundit who has spoon-fed neocon mythologies to the British public". Gove, however, resisting the temptation to reply in kind, first compared Dalrymple to Wilfred Thesiger and Richard Burton, the great Arabist writers, before elegantly skewering his argument.

It is an indication that beneath the diplomatic veneer, Gove is a smart and steely operator whose rise through the Tory ranks was not so much meteoric as inevitable. He has only been an MP for three years but already he feels part of the furniture. His portfolio as shadow secretary for children includes education and he bubbles with enthusiasm when talking about Sweden and a system which allows any parent dissatisfied with their child's education to remove them to another school, in the process taking however much the government spends on educating them with them. In the Nordic nirvana, apparently, 10% of children have been removed by their parents and installed in new schools. Gove's argument is that the competitiveness of the new schools will force old state schools to get their acts together. The policy, he insists, like a born-again Marxist, is not about saving money and resources, but about redistribution and better use.

Such U-thinking is an indication of how far the Tories have been prepared philosophically to travel in order to make them electable. When we met - as financial turmoil was raging, the Glenrothes by-election was imminent and Obama and McCain were still slogging it out - the so-called "Cameron bounce" was beginning to look as deflated as the economy and the Tories' long-held lead in the polls over Labour was evaporating. Yet again events had proved the predictions of pundits and politicians to be wildly inaccurate. How things would develop in the next week, let alone next year, was anyone's guess. "But I do think," he says, "one of the early casualties has been the case for independence. I think history tells us that the case for most nationalisms - and certainly the case for Scottish separatism - has always been stronger when economic tides were beneficial."

It is the type of view that is common among many London Scots, especially those who have been privately educated in schools where it is received wisdom that Scotland is second rate and needs the crutch of the UK to survive. Not so at Robert Gordon's, says Gove, which was "brilliant" and on which he looks back with affection. Where at other Scottish private schools the best students are put on the conveyor belt to Oxford and Cambridge, at Gordon's they are pointed in the direction of the medical faculties at one or otther of the ancient universities. Gove himself, however, went to Oxford where he read English and was president of the union.

He was born in Edinburgh and was adopted at four months and removed to Aberdeen. His adoptive father was a fish merchant and still works in the fishing industry. His mother is employed at Aberdeen University. He has a profoundly deaf sister who was also adopted. Now that he is a father of two children himself, one might think he would be anxious to know the identity of his birth mother. But he has no intention of going in search of her.

"It's odd," he says. "I'm not sure whether everyone will understand or it's just me. I'm fascinated and I'm curious by profession and inclination but I know that the woman who brought me up is my mother. And I also know that to try and find things out would be to say to her, There's something missing. I didn't have a complete childhood.' And I couldn't do that. Different folk will react in a different way and that's just me and the particular dynamics with which I've grown up."

After university he returned to Aberdeen where he was employed as a journalist at the Press And Journal. That, though, came to an abrupt end when he joined a strike and was sacked. We have a mutual friend noted for his intemperate habits. Gove and he shared a flat. "I can't reveal everything that went on there at that time," he says, revealing nothing. From there he went to STV's On The Record programme. By 1996, he was at The Times, where he met his wife, Sarah Vine, and where he was variously a leader writer, comment editor, news editor and Saturday editor. Had he stuck around he would surely have been a contender for the editorial hot seat. So what would he prefer, to run The Times or the country?

Neither, is the short answer. If we are to believe him, he has reached his glass ceiling. He switched from journalism to politics, he says, because he felt he was losing objectivity and was slipping not into "partisanship but attachments". Look around a newsroom, he suggests, and you will see people who are good at what they do, but you wouldn't want them editing the paper. He was one of them, he says. The same goes for politics. "There are additional qualities that you need to lead a party that I know I don't have. It can be a relief sometimes knowing you shouldn't be doing X or Y. Mercifully, no-one's yet suggested the idea to me."

Such modesty becomes him. But no-one knows better than him that history has a way of thrusting those who like to lurk in the shadows into the limelight. His time may not be now, but only a fool would discount his chances completely. And whatever else Michael Gove may be, he is not a fool.