Michael Gove has got his wellies on and gone to the Oxford Farming Conference, the annual gathering of Britain’s landowners and food producers. Boldly, he is also visiting the eco-farmers down the road in Oxford Town Hall at the Real Farming Conference, which is a bit like Jeremy Corbyn flitting from the main Labour party conference to chill for a while with Momentum.
Gove is the first environment secretary to visit the Real Farmers, who mainly represent the smaller, organic producers, and it is a piece of studied ambiguity that fits with his attempt to balance himself between the clout of big business and the more homely appeal of the green movement.
Gove’s enthusiasm for new ideas means that he is always an interesting politician, although sometimes not in a good way. Now he’s in charge of a department, traditionally seen as a backwater, that he could turn into the prototype for a post-Brexit world. He will not be unaware of the potential.
Yet there are signs that after more or less tearing up the schools system at the Department for Education and offering a revolution in penal policy during his short stay at the Ministry of Justice, Gove has slowed his approach at Environment. Today’s big speech, more than six months after his appointment, is still only a taster of the post-Brexit world that has to be set out in detail in a white paper in the next month or two.
New admirers speak of Gove’s love of being at the forefront of the intellectual action. It doesn’t feel like it. Perhaps he is finding money speaks even louder than ideas. There is a lot of money in farming – in the value of the land, in the scale of subsidies designed originally to preserve Europe’s rural stability, and also in the tax privileges that farming has traditionally enjoyed.
There is also a huge national romance with the countryside that associates landscape with identity, history and values. And there is a serious concern about the role of farming in producing healthy and nutritious food in a way that is sustainable for the land and the environment. All this makes it tricky territory for a politician trying to line them all up. The farmers almost always win by virtue of knowing more, fighting harder and having the keys to the national larder.
And look what has happened. The unthinkable. Westminster’s most combative politician seems to have decided it is all too difficult. Either that or he thinks his energy would be more gainfully employed preparing for the Treasury.
Behind the eloquent phrasing about the need to embrace change lies a speech that one of Gove’s smarter officials might have drafted: basic payments, the “cash for land” system that is at the heart of the common agricultural policy will continue until at least 2024, perhaps beyond. Upland farming, which radicals believe is unsustainable, must be supported; the detail on environmental schemes that will replace the EU stewardship programmes is scarce, and public access gets the most fleeting of mentions. In a last festive gift to farmers, glyphosate, the herbicide on which most systemic weedkillers are based, which the EU threatened to ban, gets an approving nod.
There is almost nothing in this speech that he didn’t more or less say in his first speech last July. That’s when he called Brexit the “unfrozen moment”, a phrase as full of abundant potential as a bowl of fruit in a Dutch painting. It looks as if, on reflection, he may have decided the greatest potential is for himself.
• Anne Perkins is a Guardian columnist
