The Conservative peer Sayeeda Warsi has said she is fearful of the idea of Michael Gove becoming prime minister, saying she and other senior members of the party are concerned about his views on British Muslims.

The former Tory chair, who is Muslim, said any party that elected Gove as a leader “has got major problems”.

Some of Gove’s opinions were expressed in Celsius 7/7, a controversial book he wrote in 2006 about Islamism in the UK and elsewhere.



Asked in a Guardian interview what she thought about the idea of Gove succeeding Theresa May, Lady Warsi said: “I just don’t even want to imagine it. I’ve sat in too many meetings, I’ve done everything from rolling my eyes, to thinking, gosh, thank God he’s not prime minister.”



Celsius 7/7 was written shortly after the 2005 London tube and bus bombings, which killed 52 and injured many more, and Gove stated that “a sizeable minority” of Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims held “rejectionist Islamist views”.

To support that argument, Gove cited polling data from the time that showed 46% of British Muslims considered themselves Muslim first and British second, and emphasised that a minority – 12% of those aged 18-24 – said suicide bombing could be justified in the UK.



“These views were not developed in a vacuum. They reflect the influence of organised work by those sympathetic to an Islamist agenda in the UK,” Gove wrote.

Critics of the book, however, pointed out that other polling evidence at the time showed the overwhelming hostility of British Muslims to the 7/7 bombers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Gove says in his book Celsius 7/7: ‘The west faces a challenge to its values, culture and freedom.’ Photograph: AFP/Getty

Gove, the environment secretary, is rapidly emerging as a serious contender to succeed May, who has said she will depart as leader in a few months if she can get her Brexit deal through the Commons.

Despite having damaged his popularity by refusing to back Boris Johnson in 2016, his advocates say that, unlike Johnson, he is a Brexiter who can reach out to both wings of the party.



But speaking to the Guardian’s Owen Jones, Warsi said there were other senior Tories who had concerns about Gove. She said: “I’m not the only one to raise concerns about Michael. Ken Clarke has spoken about it, even his friends close to him. Even David Cameron has spoken about concerns about the way he views the world and the way he views certain communities.”

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Celsius 7/7 argues that the west has been embroiled in a conflict between “liberal values and resurgent totalitarianism” which needs to be tackled “urgently at home” in the UK as well as abroad. Islamism is akin to fascism and communism, he argues.



“The west faces a challenge to its values, culture and freedom as profound in its way as the threat posed by fascism and communism. But the response to that challenge from many in the west is all too often confused, temporising, weak and compromised,” Gove writes.



When Gove was education secretary, he surprised senior police officers by appointing a former national head of counter-terrorism, Peter Clarke, to investigate reports of an alleged conspiracy to Islamise some Birmingham schools in 2014.