Brexitstential angst: interview with Aberdonian Vote Leave campaigner Michael Gove

None of this, it seems, has had much effect on shoppers in Union Square, the mall that lies between Aberdeen’s railway station and the port from which depart ferries bound for Orkney and Shetland. There is no sign here that a momentous, once-in-a-lifetime decision is about to be made: no posters, no loud-haling campaigners, no badges on lapels, no air of anticipation, no buzz, nothing to suggest that all in our backyard is could be about to change utterly.

Into this humming retail nirvana strides a shirt-sleeved Gove flanked by a brace of special advisers and a representative of the Leave campaign. No-one bats an eye. Not even the manager of the cafe in which we find a table recognises him. In each hand he is carrying a hefty bag and he has the look of man who would die for a hamburger – or who is about to depart for a fortnight in Alicante – rather than someone in the vanguard of one of the bloodiest, internecine political battles we have witnessed. “Blue-on-blue” is how it’s billed. Since the European Union was first mooted it has divided the Tory party and bedevilled its leaders. “From the moment I first crossed the threshold of Number 10,” wrote John Major, who suffered more than most, “I had dreaded the impact of Europe on the Conservative Party.”

A quarter of a century on, this is more true than ever. Among Cabinet members, the most prominent and vociferously eloquent Leave advocate is Gove, the UK justice secretary and MP for Surrey Heath. Described by Ferdinand Mount, one of his erstwhile fellow travellers, as “a gleeful hamster on steroids” who is eager to launch Britain on “a journey to become a Greater Albania”, he has reluctantly – or so we’re led to believe – put himself at loggerheads with David Cameron of whom he was formerly a soulmate. According to Gove’s wife, the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine, it was a decision that caused her husband much mental upheaval: “Michael has been like a cat on a hot tin roof, locked in an internal struggle of agonising proportions,” she wrote. He was caught, she added, between “a rock and a hard place”, between torpedoing his friendship with the PM and betraying his principles. In such a dilemma there could only be one winner, given Gove’s visceral antipathy towards the European Union.

“My husband,” chuntered Mrs G as indiscreetly as a madame revealing the contents of her address book, “has many odd and occasionally irritating obsessions: obscure American presidents; Wagner; second-hand bookshops. He also has an aversion to houseplants and quiche. But few passions trump his dislike of the EU. The profligacy, the back-scratching, the deceit, the endless bureaucracy, the unstoppable march of European federalism – and, above all else, the erosion of British sovereignty.

“It’s been an obsession ever since I’ve known him. Old school friends tell me it goes further back still; to when he was a boy growing up in Aberdeen, nagging his parents for a subscription to the Spectator at an age when most kids would have been reading the Beano.”

And, one is tempted to speculate, wouldn’t we all have been able to rest easier in our beds if he had taken the advice of Minnie the Minx and her chums rather than immersing himself in the ravings of Tory scribes? Gove, who is 48 years old, and looks to me more like Tintin than a hyperactive rodent, needs little encouragement to outline why we should vote to leave the EU. Talking as if he were auditioning for BBC Radio 4's Just A Minute, he invokes the examples of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, none of which feels the need to join a political union. “They survive. They thrive.” Perhaps they do, but with whom, for instance, would Canada want ally itself? Greenland? Alaska? With the possibility of throwing your lot in with the likes of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump? “I just think it is entirely normal,” continues Gove unabashed, “for the United Kingdom to be an independent nation state.”

Fair enough. But wasn’t he a vigorous opponent of Scottish independence? Indeed, did he not once insist that his identity would be “shredded” if his fellow Scots decided to erect a wall, albeit a metaphorical one across the border? Gove smiles the smile of a man who at Oxford was president of the Union. When it comes to debate, he is adept at moving the argument around to suit his position. If wriggling were an Olympic sport he’d be a gold medal contender.

“One of the interesting things is – with the exception of Jim Sillars – almost every Scottish Nationalist is at least publicly in favour of the European Union. This is something I can’t understand. I can understand why, if you were a Scottish Nationalist first and foremost, you would want Scotland to be a separate country. I completely understand that. What I can’t understand is why you want Scotland to be independent yet at the same time then surrender all the sovereignty you’ve won back and more to the European Union.”

But isn’t it the case that if Brexiteers like him get their way Britain will lose at a stroke all influence we have gained while in the EU? Why give that up? Why forfeit what little impact we have? Don’t we aspire to play a bigger part in international affairs than Switzerland or Norway? Won’t leaving the EU be like back-stroking across the Channel and pulling up the drawbridge?

Unlike the EU, Gove argues, the UK is a union that works and that has been seen to do so over time. “It’s been tried and tested. The European Union is palpably not working. So if you look at it from the point of view of either the north-east of Scotland and what’s happened to the fishing industry, or from [the point of view] of south Greece and what’s happened with the single currency ... you can’t say that’s working. And it’s certainly the case that if Britain has influence in the European Union it’s difficult to see how that influence has been exercised.

“We have succeeded beforehand and we will in future. If you are – as I am – initially I was wary about devolution – someone who is convinced about the health and worth of the Scottish Parliament, then leaving the European Union will allow the Scottish Parliament to take control back of agriculture and fishing.”

The reference to fishing is instructive. Recently, Gove revealed that the root of his antipathy towards the EU lies in what happened to the Scottish fishing industry. His adoptive father, Ernest Gove, owned an Aberdeen-based fish merchant business which had 20 employees processing and smoking fish from the North Sea. According to his son, EE Gove was a victim of the European Common Fisheries Policy that offered access to British waters to boats from other countries and which imposed rigid quotas on local fishermen. When grilled on Sky TV by Faisal Islam, Gove responded tartly, saying: “Don’t skate over the misery of those who have lost their jobs as a result of the European Union.” The EU, he added, is “a job-destroying machine” that is run by “sneering elites”.

But isn’t Gove himself part of the elite, if not the sneering tendency? After all, his peers all seem to be Eton-educated Oxonians with more than a bob or two to spare. He comes close to sneering at the notion but the thought of food – a tuna club sandwich with fries for those who like to keep tabs on the calorific intake of MPs – cheers him no end.

“The first thing I would like to say is that I don’t think folk at Westminster – or for that matter at Holyrood – constitute an elite. They are representatives who are elected and who are at the service of voters who can fire them. The one thing of which I am acutely conscious as a constituency MP is that there is a direct line of accountability between what people in my constituency want and what I should do.” In the EU, he argues, this is far from the case, especially with regard to the five presidents. “People don’t know who they are and how they got into that office and how they can get rid of them. It’s a classic example of power being vested in those who are unaccountable and if you have unaccountable power that tends either to complacency or even corruption.”

Complacent? Corrupt? The EU? What about the UK and the expenses scandal of 2009, in which Gove himself was caught up? Among furnishings soft and otherwise he claimed £134.50 for a pair of elephant lamps, a birdcage coffee table for £238.50, as well as Egyptian cotton sheets, a dishwasher, a top of the range cooker, a fridge freezer and a 20-quid toaster. Talk about pots and kettles!

As ever Gove is happy to put himself in the dock and leave his fate to hoi polloi. “People had their chance to vote, and the people who had been criticised to do with their expenses were kicked out,” he says without the slightest hint of contrition. “There is no prospect of any of us being able to kick out any of the presidents of Europe; they operate in a sphere and a realm well away from and out of reach of and out of touch with the people.”

He reaches tentatively for a French fry, as if seeking the OK from the minders, one of whom forbids a photograph to be taken of this historic act. Time now is of the essence and I wonder what the atmosphere is like in Cabinet when he comes to face to face of a morning with David Cameron and George Osborne. Are daggers drawn? Is mud thrown? Has he been sent to Coventry yet? He has after all lambasted his boss for running a “depressing” campaign and attempting to “scare” voters by suggesting that if we leave the EU, jobs will be lost and pensions may drop.

“No, I haven’t noticed it. The thing is I’ve got used to political campaigns and during them and referendums ... people engage with a bit of spirit and brio, and fair enough. I won’t criticise anyone else’s statements and the public will make up their own minds. And if the public think that any side or any individual has strayed too far away from what’s expected of public representatives then they’ll make that judgement.”

The referendum, he adds, is not about any “individual” issue, such as immigration. Rather it’s all about control and who has it. Changing Europe from within, he believes, is no longer an option. “We’ve tried and tried and tried again. Einstein said that the definition of insanity was to say the same thing over and over and over again and expect a different result.”

But what of the immediate future? What if, come June 24, Britain has decided to leave the EU despite the best efforts of the PM? Won’t he have to resign? One well-informed Tory commentator has written that should Britain vote for Brexit then Boris Johnson will be installed in Downing Street this Christmas. And if that were to come to pass who would bet against Gove becoming the flaxen-haired flip-flopper’s Chancellor of the Exchequer?

Gove makes no mention of Johnson, as he has not throughout our chat. Insiders say they are not natural allies. He is adamant, however, that David Cameron will be Prime Minister at Christmas. “And the Christmas after that, and the Christmas after that, right up until 2019. And I don’t think that will change. Because the purpose of a referendum is to give the Prime Minister instructions. If the past is our guide then there is no precedent for that in any other European nation.”

But there surely is a precedent. In 2014, after he lost the referendum on independence, Alex Salmond resigned immediately. “He did,” Gove concedes. “He chose to, but that was unique and specific – to do with him and his politics and the SNP.”

If you put your ear to this page the sound you may hear is that of goalposts shifting. It is Michael Gove’s default position. Like everyone else in this smoke-filled debate, he is a past master in the dark art of deflection.