Michael Gove proposes a ‘Medici model’ for levelling up — and why not?

Somewhere in the heart of Westminster, a Cabinet minister is working quietly to recreate the glories of Renaissance Europe in the North of England. Michael Gove, who now rejoices in the omnibus title of Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing, Communities and Intergovernmental Relations, has somehow contrived to survive in office for more than eleven years without being sucked into the vortex of the political maelstrom. Equally remarkable, though, has been his ability to bring his formidable intelligence and erudition to bear on old problems that have hitherto defeated all comers.

In an interview with James Forsyth of The Spectator, Gove brings a sense of proportion and of humour to the hysteria that has reduced party politics to the politics of partying. He is unmoved when it is suggested that perhaps he has abandoned his old liberal instincts in favour of Covid restrictions, quoting Churchill’s view of the wartime measures he was obliged to enact as “in the highest degree odious”. Gove comes across not as authoritarian but as authoritative: a man who knows his own mind, who has found his mission and knows exactly how to go about it. If only all ministers were as sure of their ground.

Gove’s vision of levelling up is firmly based on philosophical foundations. He defines the principle, about which other ministers can seem a little vague, with admirable concision: “Making opportunity more equal.” Unlike some Tories, who embrace the free market but shy away from its consequences, Gove is not squeamish about the duty to intervene when necessary: “There is a fundamental obligation for people in public life to address inequality,” he says. “It is part of the civilising nature of government to temper the way in which the market can sometimes, for all its efficiency, generate inequality and leave people behind.”

He sees himself as a “Tory Radical”, in the tradition of Benjamin Disraeli and Richard Oastler, the reformer known as the “Factory King” after his campaign for the ten-hour day. In his new role, Gove’s lodestar is the “core Conservative principle” that power “should be exercised as close as possible to the people who are influenced by it”. He quotes John Morley, the 19th-century author of The Rise of the Dutch Republic: “Local self-government is the lifeblood of liberty.”

Though he wears his learning lightly, Gove really does like nothing better than “another damned, thick, square book”, as the Duke of Gloucester, George III’s dimmer younger brother, described Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when the author presented him with his latest volume. And so it is entirely in character for the minister charged with enacting the Government’s central manifesto promise to look for inspiration to the last great era of the city state: the Renaissance.

Gove’s long-awaited White Paper, his blueprint for levelling up, has been circulating in Whitehall under the sobriquet “the Medici Model”. His big idea is to take the combination of economic, technological and cultural strengths that have turned the South-East of England into a “Golden Triangle” and transplant them to the less prosperous regions of England. The Medici dynasty were bankers before they became princes. Their transformation of Florence can, he believes, be replicated by harnessing a whole range of factors, from making streets safer to taking pride in local universities.

Presumably our latter-day Lorenzo the Magnificent does not intend to deploy some of the harsher methods recommended to the Medici by Machiavelli in The Prince. The greatest of all Florentine artists, Michelangelo, let it not be forgotten, fled to Rome from the Medici, preferring papal to princely absolutism. Gove is also doubtless familiar with the brutal suppression of the populist movement led by Savonarola, the charismatic friar who persuaded the Florentines to expel their worldly prince and establish a religious republic, but whose grisly fate was to be tortured, then hanged as a schismatic while being simultaneously burned as a heretic.

I can imagine one or two Tory colleagues whom Downing Street would dearly like to consign to the flames, but Gove is a gentle soul and besides concerned with more mundane matters. He looks to East Germany, Pittsburgh and the Basque Country as examples of the Medici model in action. They are open to objection. It is true that the Basques have far fewer unemployed than most parts of Spain and Bilbao has become a magnet for art and architecture.

But reviving such regions comes at a high price. Reunified Germany had to pour trillions into the former Communist lands before once-great centres such as Leipzig, Dresden and Potsdam could flourish again. As for Pittsburgh: it has indeed fared better than other rust-belt cities in attracting new businesses, but as an urban space it still has a desolate appearance. Britain can learn from all these examples, past and present, but there is no point in pretending that levelling up will be easy. What is required is something more than George Osborne’s rebranding exercise: not merely a “Northern Powerhouse” but a genuine Northern Renaissance.

Gove hopes to unveil his master-plan before Parliament returns in the New Year. If it lives up to expectations, the Medici model will be a breath of fresh air in the fetid, claustrophobic and internecine atmosphere of Westminster. Mired in the politics of pandemic, the nation could do with a glimpse of new vistas — just so long as ministers don’t forget that it was the failure of broad-brush regional industrial policies that forced them to focus on the injustice of unequal opportunities in the first place.

There is no danger of such selective amnesia in Gove’s case. He effortlessly illuminates the issue with a literary reference, this time from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All successful economic regions are very similar. They all have universities and cultural institutions of prestige. But all regions which are unhappy are unhappy in different ways, whether they’re coastal, post-industrial or rural. We need to make sure that levelling up is space-specific.”

We must all hope that this post-industrial revolution — like past Northern renaissances, from the Amsterdam of Rembrandt and Spinoza to the Manchester of Elizabeth Gaskell and L.S. Lowry — will be more than a flash in the pan. A copious supply of cash and a generous measure of devolution are necessary but not sufficient: look at the failings of the heavily subsidised devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

But as Gove points out, one incompetent metropolitan mayor does not invalidate the model. Creating US-style Governors in the shires as well as the cities appeals not just to the radical but to the romantic in Michael Gove. He deserves to be given a chance to show what enlightened patronage can achieve. Macaulay called 18th-century Edinburgh “the Athens of the North”. Let Gove turn the Red Wall into a glittering string of urban pearls from Birmingham to Newcastle, each one an English Florence to compare with anything.

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