Left Wanting: Michael "The Brain" Gove & The Need for Expertise

“I think the people in this country have had enough of experts... from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.” — Michael Gove, Sky News, 3 June 2016

As we commemorate the tenth anniversary of the referendum that secured our independence from our most important trading partners, I am reminded of Michael "The Brain" Gove's now legendary contribution to the debate: that we've had enough of experts. While his defence has long been that the routinely omitted second half of the quotation makes clear he was criticising particular institutions rather than expertise itself, his reputation for having given the debate an anti-intellectual spin remains. Rather than assessing the truth of his claim, however, I find myself pondering whether Gove even had the credibility to make it in the first place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8D8AoC-5i8

Gove's reputation among his peers has, somewhat ironically, always been that of one of the more competent and intellectually serious politicians of his generation, something of an expert you might be tempted to say, although admittedly both his judgement and trustworthiness would come under serious scrutiny during the Brexit campaign and its drawn-out aftermath. Critically, however, for our present purposes, he seemingly has never had any particular reputation for accurately reading public opinion or evaluating economic evidence. He therefore falls somewhat short on this, the first criterion of credibility under consideration.

As a senior figure in the Leave campaign, canvassing across the country and engaging in public debate, Gove undoubtedly had the ability to observe prevailing public opinion, contemporary polling data and expert economic analysis. Independent fact-checking at the time suggested, however, that despite a broader anti-establishment mood, public trust in most experts remained high, whilst the economic models used by the acronymic organisations, though not perfect, were generally regarded as relatively robust. Whether Gove had access to compelling contradictory evidence or was simply operating on pure vibes remains unclear. His performance on this second criterion is therefore also weak.

The lack of clear evidential support for Gove's claim leaves a whiff of suspicion that it may have been motivated by little more than vested interest. His position as one of the principal architects of the Leave campaign certainly came at considerable reputational cost, being viewed by longtime friend and ally David Cameron as a “mendacious” betrayal. He had invested a great deal of political capital in the cause and, according to his then wife Sarah Vine, required a strong Leave vote, seemingly regardless of the economic consequences experts were warning of, if he was to rebuild relationships and advance his career. This third criterion proves the most damaging to his credibility thus far.

The delicious irony here is that, by failing to provide any evidential support for his claim, Gove was effectively asking it to be accepted purely on the basis of his own perceived expertise. Whilst his time in senior ministerial office, background in journalism and 2:1 in English from Oxford undoubtedly lent him some degree of authority here, he was far from an expert in the fields of psephology, sociology or economics whose practitioners he so readily overrode. Indeed, it had previously been noted that he “continually ignored the expertise and wisdom” of others due to a “blinkered, almost messianic, self-belief”. On this fourth criterion, Gove's claim to expertise appears decidedly weak.

Neutrality, of course, was never going to be Gove's strong suit; as one of the most prominent public faces of the Leave campaign, he was not merely commenting on the debate but actively prosecuting one side of it. This is, after all, what he had been schooled to do in the British parliamentary proving grounds of private school and the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, where oratorical skill has long trumped evidence. Such an education allowed Gove to switch from Labour to Conservative and from Remain to Leave, without missing a rhetorical beat. On this final criterion, he thus appears constitutionally compromised.

So, it seems that one of the most famous criticisms of experts in modern British politics fares rather poorly when its source is assessed against even the most basic of credibility criteria. Thus, the true tragedy of the Brexit debate, and indeed of our wider media and political ecosystem, is revealed to be that rather than foregrounding a search for truth informed by genuine expertise, we are instead continually subjected to the point-scoring of ego-driven Oxbridge schoolboys and alternative-media debate-me bros. Perhaps what Gove was vibing off here was not a distrust of experts per se, but a backlash against the endless parade of self-appointed pseudo-experts such as himself, whose barely credible opinions are somehow expected to be treated as authoritative.