Shouldn’t Michael Gove be a bit disappointed with himself?

Michael Gove used to stride around Whitehall like he owned the place. Of all of the Tory Cabinet ministers who took up their posts in 2010, Gove was clearly the one who was most determined to change things. Not in a way that I’d like, admittedly. In my view his treatment of the education as a tool of ideological warfare damaged pupil and teacher alike. But there was no doubt that this was someone on a mission to change Britain.

Which is why I’ve begun to wonder – shouldn’t Michael Gove be a bit disappointed with himself?

A couple of times in the past month I’ve been on the train to major Labour events – the party’s Spring Event in Birmingham and Monday’s Manifesto Launch – and both times I’ve been on the same train as the former Education Secretary. The first time this happened, I assumed it was an amusing coincidence that Gove and a gang of young Tories were on the same train as many journalists and Labour activists. But upon arriving at Labour’s spring conference event, there was Gove and his gang of young Tories, in Salmond masks. Some of them were even eating Soleros (which seemed a big infra-dig, even by the insular standards of British politics).

Gove had gone in just a matter of months from a towering (albeit deeply flawed and divisive) figure, to an end of the pier show – a low-rent photo op outside a Labour conference.

And then it happened again on Monday at Labour’s manifesto launch in Manchester. Another train trip. Another sighting of Gove. Another set of masks. This is what has become of the mighty Michael Gove. Any legacy he may have sought to build crumbles behind the paper masks. Gove is known to like a classical reference, and of late he’s reminiscent of Shelley’s Ozymandias:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Colossal wreck indeed.