‘Look at what Boris actually wrote,’ says Gove, in sign that former Vote Leave leaders may have partially reconciled

Michael Gove has become the first cabinet minister to lend Boris Johnson some support in the row over his insistence that the UK would take back control of £350m a week from Brussels to spend more on the NHS.

Gove, who led the Vote Leave campaign with Johnson, broke cover on Monday with two tweets tentatively supporting the foreign secretary’s case.

Q&A What was wrong with the claim that the UK sends the EU £350m a week? Show Hide The claim that Britain “sends the EU £350m a week” is wrong because: The rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher is removed before anything is paid ​​to Brussels. In 2014, this meant Britain actually “sent” £276m a week to Brussels; in 2016, the figure was £252m.

Slightly less than half that sum – the money that Britain does send to the EU – either comes back to the UK to be spent mainly on agriculture, regional aid, research and community projects, or gets counted towards ​the country’s international aid target. Regardless of how much the UK “saves” by leaving the EU, the claim that a future government would be able to spend it on the NHS is highly misleading because: It assumes the government would choose to spend on the NHS the money it currently gets back from the EU (£115m a week in 2014), thus cutting f​unding for​ agriculture, regional development and research by that amount.



It assumes​ the UK economy will not be adversely affected by Brexit, which many economists doubt.

“In the debate on EU contributions it’s important people look at what Boris actually wrote in his Telegraph article – not headlines,” he tweeted. “Debate should be forward looking on how to make most of life outside EU – not refighting referendum.”

The headline of the Telegraph article read: “Boris: Yes, we will take £350m back for the NHS.” The article itself was slightly more carefully worded, stopping short of pledging the whole amount to the NHS, in contrast with the Vote Leave campaign which suggested: “We send £350m a week to the EU. Let’s fund our NHS instead.”

Johnson had been left isolated since writing the 4,000-word piece for Saturday’s Telegraph arguing for a more optimistic Brexit, which was interpreted as a direct challenge to the prime minister’s authority.

Amber Rudd, the home secretary, accused him of “backseat driving”, while Sir David Norgrove, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, said reviving Vote Leave’s claims that the UK pays £350m a week to Brussels was a “misuse of official statistics”.

However, Gove’s tweets are a public sign that the Vote Leave leaders are mobilising to defend the principles of their successful campaign. It also suggests the pair have partially reconciled after Gove scuppered Johnson’s chances of succeeding David Cameron by launching a rival bid for the Conservative leadership after the referendum last year.

Dominic Cummings, the former director of the group and ex-aide to Gove, fuelled speculation of a fightback by former Vote Leave campaigners on Monday as he released a string of tweets arguing that David Davis, the Brexit secretary, and Philip Hammond, the chancellor, were steering Brexit in the wrong direction.

He said it was wrong to assume that Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Davis and Johnson have agreed a strategy on what Brexit will look like after the transitional period, which is “why the speech is being fought over”.

Cummings said the point about trying to honour Vote Leave’s commitment to the £350m and the NHS was no longer about the referendum but “whether Tory MPs want to keep their jobs/stop Corbyn”. In an appeal to MPs, he claimed that, from a political perspective, the Gove and Johnson approach “gives you a shot of saving your skins” but by backing Hammond or Davis “your seat/government [is] in dire danger”.

His comments reflect nervousness among hardline Brexit supporters that May will make concessions to Brussels and direct the UK towards a softer exit in an attempt to break the deadlock in EU negotiations when she makes a speech in Florence on Friday.

Johnson is expected to meet May at the UN general assembly in New York this week. Downing Street is playing down the idea that the meeting will be a “showdown” but there is frustration in No 10 that Johnson’s article was not cleared with them before publication.

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There were reports on Sunday that both Gove and Priti Patel, the development secretary, were supportive of Johnson’s move to defend the principles of the winning Vote Leave campaign.

But subsequently “friends of Gove” briefed newspapers that he was unaware of any “suicide pact” between them and differed from Johnson in that he could support paying some money to the EU in the transitional period after Brexit.

A spokesman for Gove said on Sunday: “The first Michael knew about Boris’s article was when it was published on Friday night.”

Apart from Gove, Johnson has been supported publicly by only the most hardline of Brexiters, including Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage.

Farage, the former Ukip leader, said on Monday that reading Johnson’s article had cheered him up because “someone in government is finally being positive about what we voted for”.

Duncan Smith defended the £350m figure for EU contributions and argued Johnson’s article was “positive about the impact of Brexit and I fully think it is high time to be positive”.

A number of Brexit supporters directed their anger at Norgrove for challenging the £350m figure once again, with Nadine Dorries, a Tory MP, calling for the senior official to resign.

On the other side, a number of Conservative MPs made clear their frustration with Johnson’s tactics a week before May is set to give a key speech in Florence setting out her latest thinking on the approach to negotiations.

Tobias Ellwood, a former Foreign Office minister under Johnson, said the party was “not witnessing our finest hour – at a testing time when poise, purpose and unity are called for”.

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George Freeman, a Tory MP and the former chair of May’s policy board, said on BBC Radio 4’s Westminster Hour: “It is just far too early to be able to make wild promises about what exactly is going to be coming out of the Brexit negotiations … It’s not a figure [£350m] I would have repeated, and he’s [Johnson] not the health secretary and it needs to be negotiated.”

Downing Street declined to take a side in the row between Johnson and Norgrove, or even say what May believed about the £350m figure. Seeking to minimise the row, May’s spokeswoman insisted Johnson supported the prime minister’s Brexit plans.

“The foreign secretary’s views are well known,” the spokeswoman said when asked about Johnson’s comments. “He expressed them during the referendum campaign. I think what’s important is that the foreign secretary and cabinet are united behind the government’s plan for Brexit, and Boris Johnson was clear about that.”

Asked what May believed about the £350m figure, May’s spokeswoman said she was “not getting into the ins and outs of the figures”, and suggested people should research the veracity of the sum themselves.

“What I would say more generally, all of the UK’s contributions to the EU budget are published online and you can go and have a look at them,” she said.

Pressed on whether Norgrove or Johnson was right, she said: “I’m not getting into that. The figures are published by the Treasury. They’ve been publishing them every year since the 1980s, a paper called European Finance.”

She then suggested the disagreement between the pair had been resolved: “Since then the foreign secretary has clarified what he was describing, as far as I understand it.”