PolemicAlex: Gove

(On the retirement of Michael Gove; who has, since 2010, been Secretary of State for Education.. then Justice… then Environment… then Housing and Local Communities, and who played a key role in selling brexit to British voters. More cosplay outfits than Barbie’s Ken, and a head like a Pez dispenser.)

Gove - click here for spoken word audio

Off goes Gove

That slythy tove

With a self congratulatory smirk

And eulogising his “chance to serve”

Meanwhile in crumbling schools

Students grapple with fronted adverbials

Ed Sec Gove had no time for building renovation

Too busy imposing a pastiche Victorian curriculum

For in fourteen years of government

He’s headed nearly every department

And now, while he retires to rest

They’re left cleaning up all his mess

There’s little hope of justice sought

Justice Sec Gove closed all the courts

Plus privatised probation fails

And no space in overcrowded gaols

Our environment’s in disrepair

DEFRA Sec Gove did not much care

He was issuing new coal licenses

While our rivers flow with filth and faeces

Tenants still fear unfair eviction

Entirely lacking legal protection

Housing Sec Gove failed to legislate for

What he repeatedly promised to outlaw

For a while, too (I’m not making this up)

As the “Minister for Levelling Up”

He pretended to care about regional inequality

Just not enough to address it substantively

Posterity will remember him

Primarily for just one thing

He was fanatical about Brexit

The bonfire of the experts

So off he goes

That slimy Gove

An elder statesman

For a ruined nation

If it were down to me

We’d put retiring tories to sea

Incarcerate them on Bibby Stockholm

And prosecute them for national vandalism