Former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Gove has said critics’ attacks of his ex-wife Sarah Vine was “the thing that really hurt most” during his political career.

Gove said Vine was “portrayed as a sort of Lady Macbeth figure” as he weighed up backing Boris Johnson for Tory leader, following the Brexit vote in 2016.

He said the “fact she was attacked in that way at a time of turmoil overall was incredibly hurtful”.

Gove – who stood down as an MP ahead of June’s general election – opens up about his most difficult moments in politics on his new BBC Radio 4 series.

In Surviving Politics with Michael Gove, the former education secretary speaks candidly with politicians from different parties about the strengths and skills needed in tough times.

For one episode, Gove interviewed Labour spin doctor and former cabinet minister Peter Mandelson.

Now editor of the Spectator magazine, Gove asked Mandelson what advice he would give new Labour MPs who have entered Parliament following this year’s general election.

“Be very clear what you believe in, what your convictions are, what your project is and what you want to achieve,” Mandelson said.

He then asked Gove: “All sorts of things have happened to you in the course of your political career. If you had to identify one really personal thing that hurt, what was that?”

Gove recalled how in 2016, Vine accidentally sent a private email – meant to be read by him and his close advisors – to a member of the public, who leaked it to the press.

In the email, Vine had advised her husband to get assurances from Johnson “otherwise you cannot guarantee your support” for his leadership bid.

Two days later, Johnson unexpectedly withdrew, after Gove made a surprise attempt to become leader of the Conservative Party.

Gove said his ex-wife, “whom I still love very much”, was “a strong woman” and disputed the comparison to Lady Macbeth.

Gove said: “It’s always fine if you’re being attacked on ground where you think, yeah, I’m happy to defend myself.

“But when it’s a misunderstanding and a misunderstanding that affects someone close to you, that’s particularly difficult.”

He added: “It’s when people seek to construct a narrative and they draw someone else in and that person is collateral damage in an attack on you. It hurts so much.”

Mandelson said he saw “an echo of that in my own life, with my own partner, now husband, when they went for him and they did”.

In the interview, Mandelson said: “I didn’t even think I could necessarily enter Parliament because I was gay.”

He said he lived openly with his partner and was told by people “you’re going to find it very difficult to be selected.

“And it was a struggle and in the 1987 election, which was the first campaign I directed, I was targeted viciously by the News of the World,” he said.

Mandelson talked about internal Labour divisions and the power struggle between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair as they vied for leadership of the party in the 1990s.

In a conversation about “change-makers” in the current Labour government, Mandelson described Health Secretary Wes Streeting as “courageous”.

Mandelson said: “Courageous and foolhardy? Let’s see I don’t see any point in being in politics unless you’re going to be a minister like that.”

He said “if there are others like Wes Streeting, then I’ll certainly be supporting them”.

You can listen to all episodes of Surviving Politics with Michael Gove from Monday 21 October 2024 on BBC Sounds.

The MP for Newark has made it through to the final two of the Conservative leadership contest along with Essex MP Kemi Badenoch – but do the locals think Robert Jenrick is the right person for the job?

“We need to get it right this time”, Conservative activist Jenni Oliver tells me, as she takes a sip from her cappuccino.

Tory members like Ms Oliver have grown accustomed to choosing prime ministers, but now they’re selecting the leader of the opposition.

“We voted Liz Truss in. That was a big mistake as far as I was concerned. Boris Johnson? No.”

“For me, that’s where the Conservatives lost it.”

The activists I am meeting for a coffee in the Nottinghamshire market town of Newark have real skin in the game this time.

Unsurprisingly, members of Jenrick’s local Conservative association all believe he is the best person to revive the party’s fortunes.

Tony Roberts, the president of the association, argues that the former cabinet minister has “really matured” as a politician.

Seen initially as an ally of David Cameron on the more “moderate” wing of the party when he became an MP in 2014, Jenrick has shifted to the right after quitting as immigration minster last year.

They accept that while his views might have changed over the years, his Conservative “values” are the same.

Tories here have fond memories of knocking on doors for Jenrick when he was first elected in a by-election a decade ago.

Sue Saddington, a local councillor, recalls having his campaign team over to her house for shepherd’s pie.

Now she is salivating again at the prospect of him becoming leader.

The local area “will really wake up to the fact that they have somebody of stature now in Newark,” she said.

“I think Newark will absolutely rejoice to it.”

It is a bold claim in a seat where more than 60% of voters backed other candidates in the July general election.

Jenrick’s majority was slashed from 22,000 to 3,500, with both Labour and Reform UK making huge gains at the election

He is now the only Conservative MP anywhere in Nottinghamshire or neighbouring Derbyshire.

That result is described as a mere “blip” by Mr Roberts.

His more immediate concern is the limited options given to members in the leadership election.

“We’ve got just two, right-wing candidates and I would have liked the membership to have a wider choice,” he said.

“That’s why going down to two was a mistake, it should have been at least three.”

The timetable of the election race is also mistake.

Unless a candidate drops out, the result will be announced after the Budget – meaning Rishi Sunak, not his successor, will respond to Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

And what of the bookies’ favourite to be next Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch?

Both Ms Saddington and and Mr Toberts stress the importance of the party uniting behind whoever wins.

But Ms Oliver is not convinced.

“Personally, I think it’ll be a few months – it could be another Liz Truss,” she said.

The family of Dawn Sturgess, who died six years ago after coming into contact with Novichok, have been calling on Vladimir Putin to speak to the inquiry after her death in the Salisbury poisonings.

I put their request directly to Andrei Kelin, the Russian ambassador to the UK, in as part of a wide-ranging sit-down interview that will be broadcast on Sunday.

“I hardly believe President Putin will go to Britain just to testify something,” he said.

The UK government holds Russia, and two Russian agents, known as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, responsible for the attack.

Andrei Kelin questioned the need for an inquiry. “Why drag this history so long?”

He also rejected suggestions Petrov or Borishov should attend, saying the men had already given answers on TV – referring to a 2018 interview they gave on Russian state TV in which they claimed they had just been visiting Salisbury Cathedral.

That claim was mocked by some in Russia. UK officials called the interview “risible”.

Challenged with the fact that the UK, US, France, Germany, Canada all believe the attack was carried out by Russia with Novichok manufactured in Russia, Kelin said that “too many governments” were involved and dismissed their allegation as “nonsense“.

Pressed to give a response to the Sturgess family, the ambassador appeared to laugh, saying: “I have never met this family … If someone has died, of course we are concerned about that.”

On Ukraine, Kelin accused the UK of “waging war” on Russia by supporting the country with weapons and resources. If Zelensky “won’t negotiate with us, fine”, he said. “He will lose more and more terrain.”

This week, the Ukrainian president published a so-called victory plan to try to bring the conflict to an end next year.

It includes a formal request to join Nato and the lifting of bans on long-range strikes with Western-supplied weapons deep into Russia.

Challenged on Russia’s illegal invasion and stalemate in the war, the ambassador said Zelensky “does not want peace … he continues to ask for more and more; Nato, EU assistance, defence packages.

“Anything, but nothing about negotiations at all.”

Kyiv, backed by its allies, has always rejected any suggestions of negotiation after the Russian invasion. They believe that would mean the permanent loss of Ukrainian territory.

Western governments believe that Putin is under rising pressure at home, with increasing casualties and the huge cost of the war. Even Moscow’s finance ministry has acknowledged the intense strain on the economy.

But Kelin claims Russia is living “absolutely normal life”.

Asked if the suffering on both sides kept him awake at night, he said: “No one likes the war.” He said it could stop if the West stopped supplying arms to Ukraine.

“We are not just going to say, OK, [from] tomorrow we do not shoot each other. We won’t.”

On Friday, Keir Starmer reiterated his support for Ukraine. “We have always said that it is for the Ukrainian people to decide their own future so we’re clear, together with President Zelensky, that the only acceptable outcome is a sovereign Ukraine and a just peace.”

He also said Russia was getting weaker, with the war soaking up 40% of its budget, and the government believing there were more than 600,000 dead or wounded Russians, and another 500,000 casualties predicted by the end of the year.

With reports in recent days that North Korean troops are backing the Kremlin in the conflict, Kelin was challenged on Russia’s reliance on pariah states like North Korea and Iran.

“For us, it’s normal people, we have been friends, and we have a lot of common interests with North Korea and Iran … Anything bad – we do not see it.”

And on the American election, with just weeks to go, the ambassador claimed the winner didn’t make a difference at all. He said there was a “two-party consensus” on Russia – “and this is anti-Russian sentiment”.

The ambassador said that Russia had changed its nuclear doctrine in response to conversations among Western allies about allowing Ukraine to use long-range missiles supplied by them to fire into Russia.

Russia now says it would consider an attack from a non-nuclear state that’s backed by a nuclear-armed one to be a “joint attack”. That has been construed as a threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Jens Stoltenberg, the former Nato boss, said the West had “called Putin’s bluff” over nuclear threats – implying it had crossed many of Putin’s red lines without anything happening.

Kelin said Stoltenberg’s statement itself was “a bluff” – adding Russia would protect itself “with all the means that are in our disposal, and believe me, there are lots of them.”

It is hard to overstate the impact of the Salisbury attacks on the fraught relationship between the UK and Russia.

A senior figure involved in the UK government response told me it was a “huge tipping point.

“It was shocking in the fact that the Russians were trying to kill people on our soil, but also, so blatantly happy for us to know that it was them,” they said, pointing to the use of Novichok, known to be manufactured and used by the Russian state.

Only a year before, then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had gone to Moscow in the hope of a “reset” of the relationship between the two countries.

But another senior source told me: “we simply couldn’t have a normal relationship with them again with that in the background”.

They described the poisonings as worse than anything that had happened in the Cold War. “The competition was pretty brutal then, but this kind of thing was completely unacceptable.”

More than 20 Western allies expelled diplomats and spies from their countries in response after a bout of frantic diplomacy by Theresa May’s government, including pushing former President Trump to act.

One figure recalls, “it was pretty hairy at the time, a lot of Europeans didn’t want to do it. Trump personally didn’t want to do it but was persuaded to do so”.

The UK insisted that the announcement of the expulsions from each country was made at exactly the same time, with only the UK aware of how many Russians each government planned to order to leave.

The fear in Downing Street was that Trump would not be willing to take drastic action if he had known the numbers each European country were planning to expel.

The UK government now believes that Russia is the number one threat to the UK’s security.

Labour said in the election: “the defence of the UK starts in Ukraine,” and ministers believe the same now they are in government.

The UK has been at the forefront of leading the Western backing of Ukraine since the invasion in 2022, and has sent billions of pounds worth of weapons and resources to support the effort.

It’s given staunch political backing to President Zelensky – but don’t expect a decision on his request to use Western long-range missiles for at least a few weeks.

There are concerns in government about Russia increasing its efforts at sabotage on UK soil, with the boss of MI5 warning this week Russia was more and more engaged in “arson, sabotage and more dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness”.

Back in 2018, when the poisonings happened, the UK had no way of predicting how Russia’s aggression would grow into what one source calls an “off-the-charts bigger crisis” – with its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

But as the Salisbury inquiry delves into the impact of the poisoning on one innocent British family, its significance as a moment of the rupture in relations is clear too.

That’s caught in a conversation understood to have taken place between UK national security adviser Mark Sedwill and his Russian counterpart at the time, after Western allies had expelled 300 diplomats.

“You seem to want to take us back to the days of the Cold War,” the Russian said.

“Well, Yuri, at least we all knew the rules then,” Sedwill responded.

You can watch our interview with Russian ambassador Andrei Kelin tomorrow at 09:00 on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC One. We’ll also talk to Health Secretary Wes Streeting.

Top photo credit: Getty Images

BBC InDepth is the new home on the website and app for the best analysis and expertise from our top journalists. Under a distinctive new brand, we’ll bring you fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions, and deep reporting on the biggest issues to help you make sense of a complex world. And we’ll be showcasing thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. We’re starting small but thinking big, and we want to know what you think – you can send us your feedback by clicking on the button below.

The name Shapurji Saklatvala may not be one that leaps out of the history books to most people. But as with any good tale from the past, the son of cotton merchant – who is a member of India’s supremely wealthy Tata clan – has quite a story.

At every turn, it seems that his life was one of constant struggle, defiance and persistence. He shared neither the surname of his affluent cousins, nor their destiny.

Unlike them, he would not go on to run the Tata Group, which is currently one of the world’s biggest business empires and owns iconic British brands like Jaguar Land Rover and Tetley Tea.

He instead became an outspoken and influential politician who lobbied for India’s freedom in the heart of its coloniser’s empire – the British Parliament – and even clashed with Mahatma Gandhi.

But how did Saklatvala, born into a family of businessmen, pursue a path so different from his kin? And how did he blaze a trail to become one Britain’s first Asian MPs? The answer is as complex as Saklatvala’s relationship with the his own family.

Saklatvala was the son of Dorabji, a cotton merchant, and Jerbai, the youngest daughter of Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, who founded the Tata Group. When Saklatvala was 14 years old, his family moved into Esplanade House in Bombay to live with Jerbai’s brother (whose name was also Jamsetji) and his family.

Saklatvala’s parents separated when he was young and so, the younger Jamsetji became the main paternal figure in his life.

“Jamsetji always had been especially fond of Shapurji and saw in him from a very early age the possibilities of great potential; he gave him a lot of attention and had great faith in his abilities, both as a boy and as a man,” Saklatvala’s daughter, Sehri, writes in The Fifth Commandment, a biography of her father.

But Jamsetji’s fondness of Saklatvala made his elder son, Dorab, resent his younger cousin.

“As boys and as men, they were always antagonistic towards each other; the breach was never healed,” Sehri writes.

It would eventually lead to Dorab curtailing Saklatvala’s role in the family businesses, motivating him to pursue a different path.

But apart from family dynamics, Saklatvala was also deeply influenced by the devastation caused by the bubonic plague in Bombay in the late 1890s. He saw how the epidemic disproportionately impacted the poor and working classes, while those in the upper echelons of society, including his family, remained relatively unscathed.

During this time, Saklatvala, who was a college student, worked closely with Waldemar Haffkine, a Russian scientist who had to flee his country because of his revolutionist, anti-tsarist politics. Haffkine developed a vaccine to combat the plague and Saklatvala went door-to-door, convincing people to inoculate themselves.

“Their outlooks had much in common; and no doubt this close association between the idealist older scientist and the young, compassionate student, must have helped to form and to crystallise the convictions of Shapurji,” Sehri writes in the book.

Another important influence was his relationship with Sally Marsh, a waitress he would marry in 1907. Marsh was the fourth of 12 children, who lost their father before becoming adults. Life was tough in the Marsh household as everybody had to work hard to make ends meet.

But the well-heeled Saklatvala was drawn towards Marsh and during their courtship, he was exposed to the hardships of Britain’s working class through her life. Sehri writes that her father was also influenced by the selfless lives of the Jesuit priests and nuns under whom he studied during his school and college years.

So, after Saklatvala travelled to the UK in 1905, he immersed himself in politics with an aim to help the poor and the marginalised. He joined the Labour Party in 1909 and 12 years later, the Communist Party. He cared deeply about the rights of the working class, in India and in Britain, and believed that only socialism – and not any imperialist regime – could eradicate poverty and give people a say in governance.

Saklatvala’s speeches were well received and he soon became a popular face. In 1922, he was elected to parliament and would serve as an MP for close to seven years. During this time, he advocated ferociously for India’s freedom. So staunch were his views that a British-Indian MP from the Conservative Party regarded him as a dangerous “radical communist”.

During his time as an MP, he also made trips to India, where he held speeches to urge the working class and young nationalists to assert themselves and pledge their support for the freedom movement. He also helped organise and build the Communist Party of India in the areas he visited.

His strident views on communism often clashed with Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent approach to defeat their common adversary.

“Dear Comrade Gandhi, we are both erratic enough to permit each other to be rude in order to freely express oneself correctly,” he wrote in one of his letters to Gandhi, and proceeded to mince no words about his discomfort with Gandhi’s non-co-operation movement and him allowing people to call him “Mahatma” (a revered person or sage).

Though the two never reached an agreement, they remained cordial with each other and united in their common goal to overthrow British rule.

Saklatvala’s fiery speeches in India perturbed British officials and he was banned from traveling to his homeland in 1927. In 1929, he lost his seat in parliament, but he continued to fight for India’s independence.

Saklatvala remained an important figure in British politics and the Indian nationalist movement until his death in 1936. He was cremated and his ashes were buried next to those of his parents and Jamsetji Tata in a cemetery in London – uniting him once again with the Tata clan and their legacy.