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Michael Gove has revealed he's had his grammar corrected by Stephen Fry - in a text message.

The actor and QI presenter teased the Justice Secretary after he sent a 'patronising' memo to civil servants telling them how to write.

The Ministerial Correspondence Preferences warn officials never to use the word “impact” as a verb, to write “does not” instead of “doesn’t”, and to never start a sentence with ”however”.

Now Michael Gove's been corrected on his own writing by the TV and Twitter star.

(Image: Getty)

He told BBC Radio 4's World At One programme: "It's excited quite a lot of comment.

"There was a very funny article that took me to task in The Times today.

"Also I received a text from Stephen Fry correcting me on some of my own errors linguistically."

The guidelines, entitled ministerial correspondence preferences, seem to be an expansion of an email entitled "10 golden rules" that Mr Gove circulated to staff when education secretary.

(Image: Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

The document also advises that "the phrases best-placed and high-quality are joined with a dash, very few others are".

During the radio interview, Mr Gove was played a clip of himself talking about "operationalising" everything that was in the Conservative manifesto

Asked if the word should be put on his banned list, he replied: "Yes, I think I will have to have a word with the keepers of the arc of the English language.

"I think operationalising is a particularly ugly construction unfitted for broadcast."