Every Boris needs a Mikey. A minister who is every bit as morally bankrupt and spiritually dead as his boss. Someone untroubled by the past and whose capacity for mendacity and amnesia is almost limitless. So the prime minister is indeed fortunate to have Michael Gove as his deputy.

Not that there haven’t been a few bumps along the way. Once, back in June 2016, Gove did exhibit a hint of conscience, when he declared he couldn’t possibly support Boris Johnson’s bid to become Conservative leader as he was so clearly unfit for office. If you are being picky, you could ask what took Gove so long as he’d just spent the past few months standing next to him as he told lie after lie. But hey, every sucker deserves an even break. Better one sinner that repenteth and all that.

Since then, though, the waters have rather closed over as Gove has rediscovered his special talent for self-deception. Beauty for the de facto deputy prime minister lies entirely in his ability to construct an argument. Whether it’s true or not is entirely immaterial. If it sounds even slightly plausible, Mikey can believe almost anything. Even if it’s only for one day.

Javid gives Cummings a good punching but fades out to sweet dissent Read more

For Gove there really only is one time. The present. The past is not even a foreign country; something to be rewritten and on which to impose import tariffs as required. There genuinely is no past. Every day he wakes up as a tabula rasa and is just as amazed as the rest of us to discover he is Boris’s bag man.

This is how he has come to move so effortlessly through Brexit positions. From being overrun with immigrants to being part of a free trade area to holding all the cards in negotiations with the EU. Only last Christmas he was saying there was no chance of the UK leaving without a trade deal. Now we’re down to about 50/50 at best. There’s a fair chance Gove talked marginally less bollocks when he was out of his head on coke.

All of which made Mikey the only possible person – given Boris’s current refusal to get out of bed for anyone or anything – to present the government’s negotiating position for next week’s trade talks with the EU. No other minister would have been able to do it while keeping a straight face or without breaking into a cold sweat. But for the Govester this was just another day at the office. An opportunity to indulge in casuistry without fears of any comeback. Because by the following day it would never have happened and he’d be free to believe something else.

This was Gove in his element. False humility. Condescension presented as sincerity. Division masquerading as consensus. He began by talking of the new chapter in the nation’s history. When the government had signed up to the political declaration it had always been clear it never really intended to keep its word. That had been obvious to everyone because Boris had implied the exact opposite during the general election campaign by insisting his deal was oven ready.

So here was the deal. We’d be keeping to everything in the political declaration apart from the bits we didn’t fancy. The rest wouldn’t be binned per se. Just ignored. So all that nonsense about alignment would have to go. We were a sovereign country and we could do what the hell we liked. And we certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with the European arrest warrant because otherwise we would deprive ourselves of the chance to become a safe haven for fugitives. A real growth sector for the economy.

Only a handful of Tory backbenchers could be bothered to turn up for the ministerial statement – any level of detail was still well above their pay grade – so it was left to Labour and the SNP to seriously challenge the wisdom of telling the EU to go screw itself and that we were now pretty much a rogue state that couldn’t be trusted to keep its word. Labour’s Paul Blomfield couldn’t see the problem with alignment as Gove was adamant we would never fall below EU standards. Hilary Benn observed that the kind of deal the government was hoping to get in a matter of months usually took a minimum of seven years.

But Mikey was in Mikeyworld. There would be loads of jobs for Scots providing they all chose to work in the fishing industry. There was absolutely no reason for the government to produce an economic impact assessment of its proposals because it would only be written by an expert who wanted to talk down the UK. Just like the people who had compiled the Russia and Jennifer Arcuri reports. They certainly wouldn’t be seeing the light of day.

Most remarkably of all, he also promised to recruit and train another 50,000 customs officers within six months. Principally by retaining almost all the 58,000 officers they already had. Hell, it had worked for nurse numbers so it could work for Border Force. Long before the end, Mikey had even managed to contradict himself on Northern Ireland by insisting there both would and wouldn’t be a border down the Irish Sea.

Gove shrugged and checked his watch. He wasn’t that bothered whether the UK reached a deal with the EU or not so he wasn’t sure why he was wasting his time in the Commons. Besides, by the following day none of this would ever have happened. Lucky, lucky us to have a world with such men in it.