Just on the Gove point: I have no private information, and perhaps I should have hedged more (the verb ‘seems’ was an attempt to communicate uncertainty, but reading my comment back I wasn’t clear enough); but just going on Gove’s patterns of behaviour, I have quite low confidence that he’s still particularly enamoured with Street Votes, albeit with large error bars on that number. Perhaps I am inferring too much from an absence of evidence, but Gove definitely has a pattern in basically all the portfolios he’s held: he appears to value novelty in policy for its own sake, and jumps at a lot of proposed reforms that are radical and ‘clever’; but, precisely because of this, is very fast-moving and goes through policy proposals very quickly, leaving a lot on the table that he seemed to be a big fan of. I make no judgment on the value of this approach, but I think it’s relatively clear that it is Gove’s approach. This is partly explained by the time he spent with Cummings as his SpAd, but only partly—I think it’s more generally just part of his political ‘style’, that maybe he learned from Cummings but has retained since then. The endorsement of Street Votes seemed to me to fit this pattern; and because he’s since become relatively silent on housing policy, my confidence that he still cares much about Street Votes is low. But I’ve got large error bars because (a) I’m inferring from Gove not saying something, which is always a risky way of figuring out what someone thinks (b) my reasoning is based on trying to identify patterns of behaviour in someone I don’t actually know or have any particular insight into, and (c) a lot of the evidence could be explained by the alternative hypothesis of ‘Gove genuinely believes in the policy, but hasn’t said much more because the government has just been putting out fires for the last few months’. My prior for ‘Gove says he likes a policy just because it’s novel and clever, but has no real commitment to it’ is thus doing much of the work here, and you can very reasonably make a different judgment.
I don’t have much to say about the rest of your comment except that, yes, I think your considerations are totally reasonable; I think there are some legitimate differences of judgment here.
Just on the Gove point: I have no private information, and perhaps I should have hedged more (the verb ‘seems’ was an attempt to communicate uncertainty, but reading my comment back I wasn’t clear enough); but just going on Gove’s patterns of behaviour, I have quite low confidence that he’s still particularly enamoured with Street Votes, albeit with large error bars on that number.
Perhaps I am inferring too much from an absence of evidence, but Gove definitely has a pattern in basically all the portfolios he’s held: he appears to value novelty in policy for its own sake, and jumps at a lot of proposed reforms that are radical and ‘clever’; but, precisely because of this, is very fast-moving and goes through policy proposals very quickly, leaving a lot on the table that he seemed to be a big fan of. I make no judgment on the value of this approach, but I think it’s relatively clear that it is Gove’s approach. This is partly explained by the time he spent with Cummings as his SpAd, but only partly—I think it’s more generally just part of his political ‘style’, that maybe he learned from Cummings but has retained since then.
The endorsement of Street Votes seemed to me to fit this pattern; and because he’s since become relatively silent on housing policy, my confidence that he still cares much about Street Votes is low. But I’ve got large error bars because (a) I’m inferring from Gove not saying something, which is always a risky way of figuring out what someone thinks (b) my reasoning is based on trying to identify patterns of behaviour in someone I don’t actually know or have any particular insight into, and (c) a lot of the evidence could be explained by the alternative hypothesis of ‘Gove genuinely believes in the policy, but hasn’t said much more because the government has just been putting out fires for the last few months’. My prior for ‘Gove says he likes a policy just because it’s novel and clever, but has no real commitment to it’ is thus doing much of the work here, and you can very reasonably make a different judgment.
I don’t have much to say about the rest of your comment except that, yes, I think your considerations are totally reasonable; I think there are some legitimate differences of judgment here.