The Guardian view on Theresa May v Michael Gove: of spats and spads

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/08/theresa-may-michael-gove

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Stock phrases brush away awkward questions: "market sensitive", "national security", "pending legal proceedings". But on Sunday William Hague tried a new conversation stopper. The discord between Theresa May and Michael Gove was, the foreign secretary told Andrew Marr, "a disciplinary matter", and so, implicitly, not chatshow stuff. Had Mr Hague been a middle manager trying to protect some unfortunate underling, this might have been noble. With the parties involved being cabinet colleagues, and the "discipline" imposed by the prime minister himself, it was bizarre. For top-table politicians well understand that their careers wax and wane in the open, largely on account of public opinion. In this particular row, both the home and the education secretaries made proactive moves to force their mutual animosity out into the media.

To cut a twisty tale short, ahead of Monday's potentially tricky Ofsted reports into 21 Birmingham schools allegedly caught up in a plot to "Islamicise" education, Mr Gove last week complained to the Times about the Home Office's reluctance to grapple with extremism at root. He singled out the security specialist Charles Farr, a Home Office civil servant who is known for being secretive, who would rather be known for nothing at all. Mrs May hit back with a missive asking about the education department's failure to deal with the claimed Birmingham problem earlier, internal correspondence which, uniquely, was published on the Home Office website hours later.

A rattled David Cameron tasked his top mandarin, Sir Jeremy Heywood, with rooting out the extremist behaviour taking root among his team, and on Saturday night rushed to verdict and sentence. Mr Gove had to say sorry, and pen a special apology to Mr Farr. This will not have soothed the official much, since another element of the summary justice was the dismissal of his partner, Fiona Cunningham, Mrs May's special adviser (spad). While the loss of her right-hand woman is a heavy blow, the home secretary herself was not required to apologise at all. Seeing as Mrs May wrote a private letter that appears to have been designed to go public, this seems strange. Advisers are accountable to nobody but their ministers, and can only function effectively (as everybody agrees Ms Cunningham did) by respecting their boss's wishes at all times. Just as with Jeremy Hunt's similarly effective spad Adam Smith, who was caught hugging News International too close, rogue adviser syndrome has proved a convenient diagnosis.

To move on from this farce, Mr Cameron must grasp why it came about. A dash of low politics is part of the story. Mrs May's ambitions have been apparent since her sweeping speech about a different Tory future to a ConservativeHome conference last year. Activist surveys rating her as a formidable leadership candidate seem to have irritated the education secretary, irrespective of whether he is acting, as he mostly does, as a loyal defender of the chancellor's hopes, or whether there is, as some discern, more ambition than that within the Gove household. There is also an element of two departmental heads watching their backs. Amid controversy about fighting extremism, Mr Gove wants to talk about something other than schools, while Mrs May wants to remind us that education is not her patch, and hint that she might run it differently.

There is also a serious argument about the right way to go, with Mrs May, the hard-headed operator, emphasising things she knows how to do, and Mr Gove, a polemicist before he turned to politics, more excited by ideological struggle. The evidence on Birmingham that will emerge in reports on Monday and in the coming weeks may, or may not, be pertinent to the merits of the two approaches. But neither the education nor the home secretary seemed much interested in waiting for the facts. Unless Mr Cameron fancies becoming a regular inspector of his colleagues, a sort of Minsted, then he should ask his colleagues to hold off on knocking lumps out of each other, before they have got to grips with the truth.