Michael Gove forced to disown closest aide after attack on David Cameron

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/16/michael-gove-dominic-cummings-david-cameron

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The education secretary, Michael Gove, was forced to disown his most senior aide after his former special adviser described David Cameron as bumbling, the No 10 chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, as a sycophant presiding over a shambolic court, and the direct of communications, Craig Oliver, as clueless.

Dominic Cummings – widely seen as the intellectual energy behind Gove's school reforms over the past six years – listed the biggest obstacles to change, in order of importance, as a dysfunctional Department for Education, Downing Street and the BBC.

Cummings's chief argument is that No 10 lacks any strategic direction and Cameron has no reforming direction. His disillusionment mirrors that of another former Cameron adviser, Steve Hilton, who left the government frustrated by Cameron's refusal to challenge the civil service or to stick to his modernising credentials.

The shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, said: "This has all the Leninist fervour and ideological zealotry that surrounds Gove. He has forgotten that the way to sustainable change in education is by taking people with you, and focusing on what works, not ideology."

Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said Cummings appeared to have "anger management problems".

The education secretary's current aides said Gove had not known about Cummings's planned attack on No 10 and did not agree with his views. In the Commons, Gove sidestepped questions about whether Cummings had been in the Department for Education last week as Gove prepared his response to the reports from the school inspectorate, Ofsted, on alleged extremism in some Birmingham schools.

Cummings formally left Gove's team some months ago.

Cummings followed up his initial attack on Downing Street by describing the Conservative approach to the EU as "whining, rude, dishonest, unpleasant, childishly belligerent in public while pathetically craven in private, and overall hollow".

He added: "As the black flags of Isis fly and Putin seeks to break Nato, William Hague poses for the cameras with Angelina [Jolie] and Cameron's closest two advisers stick with the only thing they know – a 10-day planning horizon (at best) of feeding the lobby (badly) and changing tack to fit the babbling commentariat (while blaming juniors for their own failings)."

He argued that Whitehall faced a long-term inability to develop political institutions able to think wisely about the biggest problems in order to pre-empt crises or tackle long-term challenges such as autonomous robotics, synthetic biology, the rise of China, or the collision of Islam with modernity.

He insisted his attack on No 10 was nothing to do with any leadership ambitions for Gove, but just an honest attempt to set out the problems facing Whitehall.

No 10 brushed aside the attacks, saying Cameron was not interested in such stories.

Clegg, setting out plans to ringfence education spending from two to 18 as a Liberal Democrat manifesto, promise said: "I don't know this guy. He's obviously got a fair amount of bile and serious anger management problems. I suppose the only good thing you can say about him is he spreads his bile round evenly across both sides of the coalition.

"You get this in politics from time to time. You get people who are not elected to any office, backroom people who start developing slight delusions of grandeur about their own role in things. I just find his views totally irrelevant."