MICHAEL Gove doesn’t look or sound like a saviour. This, after all, is the man who was filmed raving in an Aberdeen nightclub in the wee hours and reportedly tried to avoid paying the £5 entrance fee by boasting to bouncers that he was the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He’s no less convincing as the saviour of the north – or what the journalist and writer Matthew Engel once memorably referred to as Fourth Division England.

Engel coined the term in a series of newspaper articles in 1988, the year Gove graduated from Oxford and around the time he was turned down for a job at Tory HQ for the sin of being “insufficiently Conservative”.

Engel was writing about the economic destruction wrought in a swathe of northern towns such as Hartlepool and Workington, towns once emblematic of Labour’s apparently impregnable Red Wall but today held by the Tories. In other words exactly the sorts of places whose economies and prospects Gove’s great levelling up project is intended to boost.

Sure, there are areas of the West Midlands and south Wales which count as deprived, maybe even the odd street in the places Tory ministers holiday, such as Cornwall and Norfolk. And sure, there is money for Scotland in the plan, intended in part for a Silicon Valley-style ‘innovation accelerator’ in Glasgow.

But make no mistake: this talk about ‘London-style’ powers, forgotten communities, shifts in ‘focus’ and improved transport links is all about the north of England. About pleasing it, if possible. About consoling it, if not. About keeping it blue.

So yes, an unlikely saviour. Then again, because he was small and polite and had a funny droopy moustache, people always under-estimated Asterix the Gaul. But see after a few swigs of that magic potion? Dynamite.

Nobody you would rather have beside you in a dust-up or when there’s a not-fit-for-purpose bus network needs fixing. So perhaps the Honourable Member for Surrey Heath, for all his dad-dancing, Games Of Thrones-quoting, man bag-carrying weirdness, is a little like Asterix, and the Levelling Up White Paper his magic potion, provided for him in the form of several billion pounds of public funds by Rishi Sunak and his Gringotts Bank treasury goblins. (It’s tempting here to stretch the Asterix analogy and see the Chancellor as a sort of tight-suited Getafix. I’ll resist it because inevitably you’ll then conjure up images of Priti Patel as Dogmatix, Liz Truss as Impedimenta and Jacob Rees-Mogg as Cacofonix, and you don’t want that horror-show in your head for any length of time. In fact, try to forget I mentioned it).

Cynics see the timing of the announcement as an attempt to dig Obelix – sorry, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka the Prime Minister – out of the enormous hole he has dug for himself courtesy of various Abba-thons, BYOB shindigs in the Downing Street garden and that now-notorious cake-related “ambuscade” (Rees-Mogg’s word, not mine). And it’s true that Gove has been Secretary of State for Levelling Up for less time than people have been partying in No 10 (it was only added to his Housing and Communities portfolio in September).

Critics, meanwhile, point to the woolly time frame (the phrase “by 2030” appears on rather a lot of the promises) and say there’s no new money. Gove faced down that second allegation in typically Govean fashion on Wednesday morning while being grilled on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme. Dipping into the if-in-doubt-quote-someone-you-think-is-cool playbook, he turned to the work of a cricket-loving millionaire with homes in Florida, Mustique and Los Angeles plus as a chateau in France.

No, it wasn’t Lewis Capaldi.

“In the words of Mick Jagger, you might not get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need,” he told interviewer Nick Robinson, quoting (fairly accurately) from the Rolling Stones’ 1969 track You Can’t Always Get What You Want (“a doomy ballad about drugs in Chelsea,” according to Mick Jagger, which seems more appropriate to the times, though it’s also the song Donald Trump liked to blast out at his election rallies until Mick and Keef asked him to stop. Which he didn’t).

In fairness (if I must) levelling up has been a Tory manifesto commitment since 2019 and Gove is undoubtedly on board with its aims, seeing it as integral to a post-Brexit settlement which promised to spread the love beyond London and the south-east. How do we know? Because he has said so.

He has also said: “Those who are born poor are more likely to stay poor, and those who inherit privilege are more likely to pass on privilege. For those of us who believe in social justice, this stratification and segregation are morally indefensible.”

People change – that speech was a decade ago – but assuming it was heartfelt, it’s difficult to argue with the sentiment. It’s also difficult to argue that in a Tory cabinet which makes the line-up of The Apprentice look talented, astute and tack-sharp, Gove is one of the few genuine talents.

But does he have what it takes to really, actually, truly level up British society? To bring to the peoples of the county’s northern half the same sort of prosperity and life opportunities afforded those in the south? Or, to stick with the Rolling Stones, is he just a man on TV telling us how white our shirts could be?