Michael Gove

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Michael Andrew Gove (born Graeme Andrew Logan; 26 August 1967) is a British Conservative politician who has been Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster since July 2019.

He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Surrey Heath since 2005.

He was appointed to the Shadow Cabinet by David Cameron in 2007 as Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families.

Gove served in the Cameron governments as Secretary of State for Education from 2010 to 2014 and Secretary of State for Justice from 2015 to 2016, and in the second May government as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

He has twice run to become Leader of the Conservative Party, in 2016 and 2019, finishing in third place on both occasions.He began a career as an author and journalist, in particular writing for The Times.The National Association of Head Teachers Association of Teachers and Lecturers, National Union of Teachers and NASUWT passed motions of no confidence in his policies at their conferences in 2013.

In a 2014 Cabinet reshuffle, Gove was moved to the post of Chief Whip.

Following the 2015 election, Gove was promoted to the office of Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor. In 2016, Gove played a major role in the UK's referendum on EU membership as the co-convenor of Vote Leave.

Along with fellow Conservative MP Boris Johnson, Gove was seen as one of the most prominent figures of the Vote Leave campaign.On 30 June 2016, Gove, who was campaign manager for Boris Johnson's leadership bid to become Prime Minister, withdrew his support on the morning that Johnson was due to declare, and announced his own candidacy in the leadership election.

Following her appointment as Prime Minister, May sacked him from the position of Justice Secretary on 14 July 2016; however, he returned to the Cabinet following the 2017 general election as Environment Secretary.

Upon the appointment of Johnson as Prime Minister, Gove was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with responsibilities including preparations for a no-deal Brexit.

Early life

Gove was born as Graeme Andrew Logan on 26 August 1967. His biological mother, whom he originally believed to have been an unmarried Edinburgh student, was in fact a 23-year-old cookery demonstrator. Gove regarded his birthplace as Edinburgh until it was revealed in a biography in 2019 that he was born in a maternity hospital in Fonthill Road, Aberdeen. Logan was put into care soon after he was born. At the age of four months he was adopted by a Labour-supporting couple in Aberdeen, Ernest and Christine Gove, by whom he was brought up. After he joined the Gove family, Logan's name was changed to Michael Andrew Gove. His father, Ernest, ran a fish processing business and his mother, Christine, was a lab assistant at the University of Aberdeen, before working at the Aberdeen School for the Deaf.

Gove, his parents, and his sister Angela lived in a small property in the Kittybrewster area of Aberdeen, before relocating to Rosehill Drive. He was educated at two state schools (Sunnybank Primary School and Kittybrewster Primary School), and later, on the recommendation of his primary school teacher, he sat and passed the entrance exam for the independent Robert Gordon's College. In October 2012, he wrote an apology letter to his former French teacher for misbehaving in class. Gove joined the Labour Party in 1983 and campaigned on behalf of the party for the 1983 general election. Outside of school, he spent time as a Sunday school teacher at Causewayend Church. As he entered sixth year he had to apply for a scholarship as his family fell on difficult economic circumstances. He passed the scholarship exam and served as a school prefect in his final two years.

From 1985 to 1988 he read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, during which time he joined the Conservative Party. He became a member of the Oxford University Conservative Association and was secretary of Aberdeen South Young Conservatives. He helped to write speeches for Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet ministers, including Peter Lilley and Michael Howard. During his first year, he met future Prime Minister Boris Johnson and ran his campaign to be President of the Oxford Union. In an interview with Andrew Gimson, Gove remarked that at Oxford, Johnson was "quite the most brilliant extempore speaker of his generation". Gove was elected as Oxford Union President a year after Johnson. He graduated with an upper second.

After university, when applying for a job at the Conservative Research Department, he was told he was "insufficiently political" and "insufficiently Conservative", so he turned to journalism.

Personal life

Gove met the journalist Sarah Vine in 1998, when he was comment editor and she was arts editor at The Times. They married in October 2001 and have two children—a daughter born in 2003 and a son born in 2004. Gove has lived in Earl's Court, Notting Hill, North Kensington and Mayfair. In July 2021, a joint statement on behalf of Gove and Vine said that they had agreed to separate and were in the process of finalising their divorce. Following the separation, Gove lived in an official ministerial residence on Carlton Gardens, St James's.

Gove contracted H1N1 swine flu during the 2009 influenza pandemic.

Gove is a supporter of Queens Park Rangers Football Club.

In August 2021, Gove was filmed dancing "merrily" in an Aberdeen nightclub. He had allegedly tried to avoid a £5 entrance fee by stating he was the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Friends of Gove denied he had attempted to avoid paying.

On 10 January 2022, Gove became trapped in a lift in Broadcasting House for about 30 minutes, when preparing to appear on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

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Journalistic career

After passing an interview with Max Hastings, Gove first began working on The Daily Telegraph's Peterborough column. Despite struggling to keep his London career, he returned to Aberdeen and became a trainee reporter for The Press and Journal, where he spent several months on strike in the 1989-1990 crisis over union recognition and representation. He worked as a reporter for Scottish Television from 1990 to 1991, with a brief stint at Grampian Television in Aberdeen.

Gove served on the BBC's On the Record and Channel 4's Current Affairs show A Stab in the Dark alongside David Baddiel and Tracey MacLeod after going back to national television in 1991. In 1994, he began working for the BBC's Today programme. He was first identified by The Guardian in 1995 as part of a group of "a new breed of 21st-century Conservatives." He denied the results of the 1995 Conservative Party's leadership race thanks to his links with the party's top ranks.

In 1996, he began as a leader writer and took over as the newspaper's comment editor, news editor, and assistant editor. He has also written a weekly column on politics and current affairs for the newspaper and contributed to The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect magazine, and The Spectator. He is on good terms with Rupert Murdoch, whom the governor described in evidence before the Leveson Inquiry as "one of the most outstanding and important figures of the last 50 years." Michael Portillo's compassionate biography and a highly critical analysis of the Northern Ireland peace process (The Price of Peace), where he compared the Good Friday Agreement to the Nazis' appeasement in the 1930s.

On BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze and Newsnight Review, he was a regular panelist.

Political career

Gove was the founding chairman of the Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank that was established in 2002. He was instrumental in the creation of Standpoint, a right-leaning magazine to which he occasionally contributed.

After the local Conservative Party's deposing of sitting MP Nick Hawkins, Gove assumed the Conservative Party's nomination of Surrey Heath on July 5, 2004, the local Conservative Association rejected him. After being first elected in the 2005 general election, he first appeared in the House of Commons. In 2005, he was named Shadow Minister for Housing and Planning. On June 7, 2005, he made his first speech, focusing on national defense. Governor David Cameron, the Conservative leader, Ed Vayya, Nick Boles, and Rachel Whetstone were among the Notting Hill Set, which included Conservative leader David Cameron, George Osborne, the Exchequer's future Chancellor, and future Prime Minister George Osborne.

Gove owed more than £7,000 on a house purchased with his wife Sarah Vine in 2002 over a five-month period from December 2005 to April 2006. Around a third of the money was invested at OKA, an upmarket interior design firm established by Viscountess Astor, Cameron's mother-in-law, on a budget. He was reportedly "flipped" his designated second home, a property for which he said he was paid around £13,000 to cover stamp duty, shortly thereafter. Despite children's articles being outlawed under new Commons legislation, the governor also requested a cot mattress. The governor said he would compensate the cot mattress, but that his other allegations were "below the acceptable threshold for furniture" and that moving house was necessary to properly carry out my legislative duties." When he was shifting between homes, he stayed at the Pennyhill Park Hotel and Spa in Bagshot, Surrey, on one occasion, after a constituency function charged the taxpayer more than £500 per night.

Governor George was elevated to Shadow Cabinet in July 2007 as Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools, and Families (a newly formed department set up by Gordon Brown) shadowing Ed Balls. He advocated for the introduction of a Swedish-style education voucher scheme, whereby parents can choose where their children will be educated and the state will cover what they would have paid for in a public school. He also advocated for free schools in Sweden, which could be operated by parents and funded by the state, with the possibility that such schools could be run on a for-profit basis. The bulk of Gove's Commons debates, which include children, schools, and families, education, local government, Council Tax, foreign affairs, and the environment, were concerned prior to the 2010 general election.

Following the 2010 general election, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government was formed. Gove became Secretary of State for Education following the hung parliament. His first moves included reorganizing his department, announcing plans to encourage schools rated as Outstanding by Ofsted to become academies, and reducing the previous government's school-building program. He regretted, but the list of ended school-building projects he had issued was found to be inaccurate; the list was reannounced several times before it was finally published.

Despite spending billions of pounds, the governor of July 2010 said Labour had failed in their efforts to break the link between social class and school achievement, citing study that showed that children of lower income from wealthy households were still out-performing brighter students from poorer backgrounds by the age of six years. "In effect, rich thick kids do better than poor intelligent children as they enter school [and] the situation as they go goes gets worse," the speaker said at a House of Commons Education Select Committee.

The governor's second home was not in his constituency but in Elstead, in the South West Surrey constituency. The governor resigned and began to commute to his constituency.

The primary and secondary-school national curricula for England will be restructured, and author research on authors such as Byron, Keats, Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thomas Hardy will be reinstated in English lessons as part of a campaign to increase children's understanding of English literature and language, according to the governor. Academies were not required to follow the national curriculum, and so were not impacted by the changes. In the new examinations, students who struggled to write coherently and grammatically, or who were poor at spelling were fined. Mathematics and science were also improved.

Gove was chastised for failing to comprehend the significance of school architecture and accused of mispresenting the price in March 2011. He had told Parliament that one individual had made £1,000,000 in one year, when the actual figure was £700,000 for five advisers at various times over a four-year period.

Gove was the object of repeated criticism during his tenure as Prime Minister of Cameron-Clegg's minister for reportedly avoiding the Freedom of Information Act's provisions. The criticism surrounded Gove's use of various private email addresses to send emails that were suspected of his departmental duties. According to the allegations, the governor and his advisors believed they could not disclose their correspondence as a result of freedom of information requests because their private email addresses were not covered by the Freedom of Information Act. Gove had used an undisclosed personal email account, coded "Mrs Blurt," to address government affairs with consultants in September 2011. The Information Commissioner ruled in March 2012 that emails submitted by the Financial Times indicated that they might be the subject of a freedom of information request and ordered that the newspaper's records be released. The Financial Times has also stated that the governor and his advisors had deleted email correspondence in order to prevent information leaks from being released. The allegation was dismissed by the governor's office, which maintained that deleting email was simply part of good computer housekeeping.

Michael Portillo backed Gove as a front-runner in a Democratic primary race in June 2012, but Gove had said in an interview a few months before that "I'm constitutionally incompetent of it." You need a special extra quality that is indefinable, and I know you don't have it. There's an equanimity, an impermeability, and a sense of courage that you need. For those things in life, you will know it's better not to try."

Teachers unions chastised the governor for his attempts to reform English education. A motion of no-confidence in Gove was accepted at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers Annual Conference in March 2013. At their annual conference next month, the National Union of Teachers held a vote of no confidence in Gove and called for his resignation. At their conferences this year, the National Association of Head Teachers and NASUWT received motions of no confidence.

Gove's four-year tenure as Minister of Education came to an end on July 15, 2014, after he was fired as Secretary of State for Education and replaced by former Treasury Minister Nicky Morgan in a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle. Gove was promoted to the post of government whip, which was portrayed as a dismissal by his detractors; Prime Minister Cameron denied this. According to BBC News, the governor had mixed emotions about starting the new role, saying it was a privilege to serve as Chief Whip but that leaving the Department of Education was "a wrench."

Gove was "more than a conventional Chief Whip would be" on television and radio after a £30,000 salary cut, as well as a specific media position. He failed to vote in the first House of Commons in his new role, as Shadow Commons Leader Angela Eagle says; "Gove not only lost his first vote but got stuck in the toilet in the wrong lobby." Governor John Kerry remained in the position of chief whip until May 2015, when Mark Harper took over the role.

After the 2015 general election, Cameron installed Gove as Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor in his newly formed cabinet. In December 2015, he was praised for scrapping the court fee levied by his predecessor, Chris Grayling. The fee had been criticized for, among other things, causing innocent people to plead guilty out of financial difficulties. Grayling's 12-book limit on prison books was removed, arguing that books increased literacy and numeracy, which are essential for making prisoners a "potential asset to society." The change, which goes into operation in September 2015, was made by Frances Cook of the Howard League for Penal Reform. Gove was also praised for his leading role in securing a British bid for a Saudi prison deal.

The Criminal Bar Association (CBA) voted to stop accepting new positions in protest against Gove's insistence that they work for lower compensation within three months of his appointment. In reversing the original cuts, the CBA lauded his "courage" in delaying the scheduled cuts. Gove was sacked from the post of justice secretary by Theresa May, the new prime minister.

Gove was a leading figure in the campaign for Britain to abandon the EU in the 2016 referendum, describing his decision to leave the EU as "the most difficult decision of my political life." Cameron and his family spent Christmas with the Camerons in Chequers, where, according to Craig Oliver, Cameron was under the impression that the government would favour remaining in the EU. Despite this, the governor opted to support the Leave campaign. He was named co-convenor of Vote Leave, together with Labour MP Gisela Stuart, and given charge of chairing the campaign committee at the start of March 2016.

For leaving, he predicted that Britain would be "freer, fairer, and better off," and that "[t]he day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards, and we can choose the path we want." When it was said in an interview that there was no expert opinion to support this, Gove said that "the people of this country have had enough experts from businesses with acronyms to say they know what is best and getting it wrong." However, interviewer Faisal Islam interrupted the government after the word "experts," prompting several outlets to state that he had made a general argument that "the people... have had enough experts." Louise Richardson, the vice chancellor of Oxford, was "embarrassed" that Gove was an alumnus because of her remarks.

Cameron's book "mendacious" described Governore during the war, adding, "One quality shone through disloyalty." Disloyalty to me and, later, disloyalty to Boris [Johnson]" is a misunderstanding.

After Cameron declared his intention to resign as Prime Minister, his replacement is expected to take power by September 2016, not a candidate, having stated in the past that he had no intention in becoming Prime Minister. Rather, he was seen as a tenacious and influential promoter of Johnson for the role. Gove Donald Trump rallied his support for Johnson on June 30, 2016, just hours before the deadline, with no previous notice to Johnson and announcing his candidacy in the leadership race. Johnson eventually decided not to run.

Gove's actions in undermining Johnson's leadership aspirations, according to the Telegraph, were "the most dramatic political assassination in a lifetime," although the Guardian described it as a "Machiavellian step."

"I wanted to help build a team behind Boris Johnson so that a politician who voted for leaving the European Union might lead us to a happier future." I have come to the conclusion that Boris will not be able to provide the leadership or build the team for the forthcoming project. I have, therefore, chosen my name for the leadership. I want the country to debate in a democratic and optimistic manner. I will respect it whatever the result of the vote. I will lay out my proposal for the United Kingdom in the next few days, hoping to bring unity and change."

Gove was in third place in the leadership race by 5 July 2016, behind May and Andrea Leadsom; the former had received Johnson's endorsement. Any political analysts expected that if Gove were unable to defeat Leadsom in the first round of voting, he might have dropped the race. Later that day, it was revealed that May had won the first round of voting, with support from 165 MPs, while Andrea Leadsom received 66 votes and Gove trailed 48. After receiving 46 votes in the second round, Governor George was voted out of office, compared to 199 for May and 84 for Leadsom. He later told the world that he was "naturally distraught" and referred to his two rivals as "formidable politicians" while still embracing the fact that the next Prime Minister would be female. He also encouraged a "civilized, inclusive, hopeful, and hopeful discourse."

Theresa May, the prime minister, dismissed Governor of South Carolina on July 14, 2016. In a two-minute meeting with May, Gove was advised to "go and find out about loyalty on the backbenches," according to Sky News' Jon Craig.

Gove was accused by Nick Clegg of being the source of a Sky News assertion that Queen Elizabeth II made remarks in favour of Brexit in a private lunch at Windsor Castle, the United Kingdom's capital. Gove "obviously announced it," Clegg told a BBC documentary, "I know he did." The queen's words were not revealed by the governor, who declined to deny leaked the Queen's words. The Sun said it had "multiple sources" and was positive that its report was accurate.

Gove was elected to the Exiting Committee of the European Union in October 2016. He was hired by The Times as a weekly columnist and book reviewer last month. Gove was sent to the United States to cover campaign rallies in the forthcoming presidential election, as well as attending meetings of the newspaper's political staff.

In December 2016, Gov. Theresa May said that if Britain left the EU, an additional £350 million a week could have been invested on the NHS. The figure, according to the governor, was robust, and it was up to the government to determine how to invest it.

Gove and Kai Diekmann from Bild gave Donald Trump their first British post-election interview in January 2017, making him the second British politician to visit Trump as President-elect of the United States after Nigel Farage. Despite preferring Hillary Clinton to Trump as President of the United States, some people were taken to applaud the President-elect unconstitutional remarks.

Following the 2017 general election, Gove was promoted to Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs by May during a reshuffle. After being asked to join the cabinet in May, Governor May said he was "very surprised" to learn he had been asked to serve. She became Prime Minister in 2016.

Following his inauguration, Gov. George declared that a microbead ban would be implemented by the end of 2017. The ban was implemented in early 2018. Manufacturers could no longer produce the tiny beads used in cosmetics and care products, which was unfortunate. In June 2018, the beads were banned from being sold in stores. The intention behind the ban was to prevent the beads from harming marine life.

Due to air pollution, Gov. George Bush declared in July 2017 that a fuel combustion vehicle ban would be implemented. According to him, the ban will go into operation by 2040 and put an end to the selling of new fuel combustion vehicles, trucks, vans, and buses in the United Kingdom that have petrol and diesel engines. Plug-in hybrid cars are not included in the ban.

The government has placed a ban on bee-harming pesticides such as neonicotinoids. Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven praised him for his strong stand on topics including bee-harming pesticides, single-use plastic bottles, and the future of the internal combustion engine, according to "Gov has defied many people's expectations on the planet."

Gove released an apology in October 2017 for a joke that likened tough Today show talks to a sexual encounter with Harvey Weinstein. Political opponents who believed that sexual harassment charges were not appropriate for jokes were dismissive.

Government plans had been released by the government in December 2017 that CCTV would be used in all slaughterhouses and beavers would be reintroduced into the UK.

As Goldsmith had previously contributed to Gove's Surrey Heath constituency, he was chastised for Ben Goldsmith's appointment as the non-executive director at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Sir Ian Cheshire, chairman of Goldsmith's investment company, Menhaden Capital Management, was also concerned about the recruitment process.

The enactment of animal welfare legislation was a key component of Gove's tenure. Maximum prison sentences for animal cruelty have increased, as did animal rights provided by government agencies, such as police dogs and horses. In 2018, one of the world's toughest prohibitions on ivory trade was also introduced.

Following Dominic Raab's departure from the Brexit withdrawal agreement in November 2018, May gave Governore the post of secretary of state for leaving the European Union. After May told him that there was "no chance" of trying to renegotiate the deal, Gove dismissed it.

May's government saw a vote of no confidence in her government in January 2019 after governor Jeremy Corbyn's "barnstorm" speech directed at Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn's foreign policy record was smuggish, with Washington Examiner Tom Rogan referring to it as "a tour de force." It was angry but not fanatical, passionate but not somber, and academic, but not somber, but not somber."

"We didn't vote to leave without a contract," Gove John Kerry said in March 2019. That wasn't the campaign I helped with. We recommended that we should do a deal with the EU and become part of the European Union's network of free trade agreements that covers all Europe, from Iceland to Turkey during the campaign.

Following a meeting with Extinction Rebellion, the governor agreed with the activists that climate change must be greater understood by the public, but he refused to declare a climate emergency in the United Kingdom. Despite the Gove's position, Parliament has passed a motion to declare a climate emergency.

Gove introduced the Wild Animals in Circuses Bill in May 2019, banning the use of wild animals in touring circuses in England.

Following May's resignation, Gov. George declared himself on May 26th, becoming the eighth candidate to run in the election. If elected, he promised to remove the charge for UK citizenship applications from EU nationals and replace VAT with a "simpler sales tax." He also intends to cancel the High Speed 2 rail scheme and raise school funding by £1 billion.

Johnson, with Gove second favorite and closely followed by Jeremy Hunt, was the frontrunner with the bookmakers by 5 June 2019. Gove took cocaine as a journalist in his twenties, according to news in June. Gove said he regretted doing so and thought it had been a mistake. Gove had argued against the legalization of drugs in a column for The Times in December 1999, and had chastised middleclass citizens for their hypocrisy in doing so. This was a deciding factor in his quest to become leader. Craig Oliver said it would have a negative effect on his career, but Dominic Raab, a fellow candidate for leadership, said it "adminds [Gove's] honesty."

Following the first election, the governor moved forward, receiving 37 percent. He received 41 votes in the second round, and he gained 51 MPs in the third round, with 51 MPs supporting him. He gained 61 votes in the fourth round, putting him in second place. He had 75 votes in the last election and was voted out – only two votes to Hunt, the eventual runner-up.

Following Johnson's election as Prime Minister, Governor George of Lancaster was named Chancellor of Lancaster by the Crown's constitutionally representing the King as Duke of Lancaster. His other non-portfolio duties included responsibility for no-deal Brexit preparations, monitoring constitutional affairs, safeguarding the Union's integrity, and monitoring all Cabinet Office policy. As Johnson sought to a shrinking of Cabinet operations, Gove was barred from a seat on the National Security Council committee. He was a central figure in the execution of Operation Yellowhammer, the civil contingency contingency strategy for the event of a no-deal Brexit.

Gove wrote in The Sunday Times on July 28, 2019. Gove said a no-deal Brexit was "a very real prospect" and that the government was "working on the assumption of." In August, he said that it was "wrong and sad" that the EU was "refusing to negotiate" over a new withdrawal agreement. A leaked Cabinet Yellowhammer paper last month leaked, predicting that a no-deal Brexit would result in food, medicine, and petrol shortages. The leaked dossier, according to the governor, outlined a "worst-case scenario." Gove declined to comment whether the government would abide by laws that would prevent a no-deal Brexit when being interviewed in September 2019.

During the 2019 Speaker of the House of Commons nomination, Gove Nominated Labour MP Chris Bryant to replace John Bercow.

Gove used to prepare Johnson for the 2019 general election debate by playing the role of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. During a Channel 4 debate on environmental topics, he proposed to stand in for Johnson, but Channel 4 News' editor announced that the discussion was only open to party leaders.

In Johnson's first big reshuffle of his government, the Governor took on new responsibilities as Minister of the Cabinet Office on February 13, 2020.

On the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, the governor caused confusion after saying on ITV's Good Morning Britain that children with separated parents were not allowed to move between their parents' homes. He later apologized and confirmed that what he said was not the case. After being tested positive for COVID-19, Johnson briefly stayed in for Johnson at the daily briefings of the pandemic until Gove desolated himself after a family member reported COVID-19 symptoms.

Gove was chastised in May 2020 after his wife Sarah Vine posted a bookcase portrait "as a very special treat for my trolls" that included a book by Holocaust denier David Irving and a copy of The Bell Curve, which controversially claims that intelligence is highly hereditable and that median IQ differs among races. Douglas Murray's book The Strange Death of Europe cites Enoch Powell and calls for shielding white Christian Europe from "outsiders," according to The Guardian.

Following Johnson's statement that trade talks with the EU ended in October 2020, the door was "still ajar" if the EU made changes over topics such as fishing access, and "We hope the EU will change their position and we are certainly not saying we can't talk to them."

The governor was a member of a commission of Cabinet ministers, which included Johnson, Rishi Sunak, and Matt Hancock, who made the COVID-19 pandemic. He was chair of the COVID-19 operations subcommittee. He agreed, alongside the heads of the UK's devolved governments, to a set of rules governing social mixing for the entire region over the holiday period. After the discovery of a mutant COVID-19 strain in Britain, it allowed for up to three households to form a "bubble" from 23 to 27 December, but London and South East England were postponed, while the rest of England was limited to a single day.

Pubs were only permitted to serve alcoholic beverages with a substantial meal under England's all-tier COVID-19 guidelines in December 2020. On several occasions, governor John Kerry said that this did not include Scotch eggs, which he described as a "starter" (although he later said that it would count as a "substantial meal if table service was provided); however, he later returned to say, "I do admit that it is a substantial dish."

Gove co-chaired the EU-UK Partnership Council with European Commission vice President Maroefevivo. After ten months of talks with efovia, he helped find an agreement that included post-Brexit arrangements for the Irish border on December 8, 2020. As a result, the government decided to abandon portions of the Internal Market Bill that might have resulted in the United Kingdom breaking international law. On March 1, 2021, David Frost succeeded Gove as the UK chair of the Partnership Council.

Following his visit to Porto in 2021, Gove and his son attended the 2021 Champions League Final, supporting Chelsea; following his stay, he was notified by the NHS Test and Trace system that he could have contracted the disease and that he would need to self-isolate. Rather than isolating for the normal ten-day cycle, governor Joe was able to enroll in a pilot program designed to look at the efficiency of testing, but it did require him to self-isolate for a week and perform testing every day for a week.

Gove was found to have violated his authority when the government gave a COVID-19 contract without a tender to a polling firm that was then Johnson's chief advisor, first in a lawsuit brought to the High Court of Justice by the Good Law Initiative in June 2021.

Gove worked part-time in Glasgow in July 2021 as part of the government's effort to boost the Union.

Gove was appointed Secretary of State for Housing, Communities, and Local Government in a cabinet reshuffle on September 15, 2021. He was given responsibility for the government's levelling up program, the Union, and elections, the last two of which he retained from his previous posts. Within days, his service was renamed the Department for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities, and his position was changed to Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. He was given the additional name of Minister for Intergovernmental Relations.

Gove was approached by COVID-19 anti-lockdown demonstrators on Horseferry Road in Westminster in October 2021. As the demonstrators attempted to surround him, he was shielded by police officers and led to a nearby building.

Gove was one of a trio of Cabinet ministers who were self-isolated after meeting Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, who was later diagnosed with COVID-19.

On February 2, 2022, the governor released a white paper on leveling. The paper contained proposals to increase public investment in the UK and extend devolution in England. Parts of it had been copied from Wikipedia, according to the article.

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the prime minister declared that he would write proposals to admit Ukrainian refugees to be housed in Russian oligarchs' homes in the United Kingdom. He then introduced the Homes for Ukraine scheme, which would encourage British households to take in Ukrainian refugees.

Gov. George Washington, D.C., attended the 2022 Bilderberg meeting in Washington, D.C.

Matthew Lynn of the Telegraph slammed Gove's record in office, describing him as the "driving power behind a string of troubling policy blunders." Lynn cited Gove's reluctance to new skyscrapers in London, his amendments to the legislation concerning the letting of landlords make it more difficult for landlords to evict tenants, as well as his opposition to a fracking trial as jeopardizing the UK's economic growth prospects.

During the July 2022 government crisis, Gove was dismissed by Johnson for suspected disloyalty after visiting Downing Street to tell him not to resign. Following the dismissal, a Downing Street source characterized him as a "snake."

In the Conservative Party's leadership race in July–September 2022, Gov. John Kerry declined to run in the 2022 and September 2022 elections. He endorsed Kemi Badenoch's leadership bid and declared his love for Rishi Sunak after she was defeated. Following Liz Truss' re-election, the prime minister of Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng's turbulent tax reforms were both backed and criticised. Governor George Brown did not run for re-election in the October 2022 Conservative Party leadership race. He endorsed Sunak's leadership bid.

Following Rishi Sunak's ascension to the prime ministership, Gove was restored to his previous positions as Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations on October 25. The appointment was announced as a surprise, as Gov. Obama had previously stated that he did not intend to serve in government again.

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