I was adopted at the age of just four months - given the stability, security and love which allowed me to enjoy limitless opportunities.
My experience of adoption has shown me how - whatever your start in life - being brought up by adults who love you, who are now your parents, is transformative.
I won’t deny that an ethnic match between adopters and child can be a bonus. But it is outrageous to deny a child the chance of adoption because of a misguided belief that race is more important than any other factor. And it is simply disgraceful that a black child is three times less likely to be adopted from care than a white child.
If there is a loving family, ready and able to adopt a child, issues of ethnicity must not stand in the way.
I love my Minister of Schools and I will stick with him to the last.
Ping! The lift doors opened and out leapt a creature in a brown tweed suit. Plumpish, he wore Harold Lloyd spectacles and carried a furled umbrella, though the day was hot. His gait was a leggy, almost John Cleese stride.
‘Good morrrrning!’ he cried, his Aberdonian accent accompanied by a PG Wodehouse gleam. Oh gawd, I thought, we’ve got a right one here.
But soon I was warming to the 22-year-old Michael Gove. He brimmed with ideas. He had no airs and graces, and was incredibly bright. He also had a honking, sealion bark of a laugh which cheered up the rest of the office, particularly the women. He could even write.
The hon. Gentleman’s own saintly behaviour while he has been in the House of Commons is an advertisement not only for religious education but for the religious education offered by the Roman Catholic Church, of which he is such a distinguished ornament- [ Laughter. ] He is certainly venerable, and he might be blessed and, one day, perhaps, saintly, but at the moment we will settle for ornamental. He is both ornament and use.
There is, however, one book, and there is one historical character, which help us truly to understand the personality of the Prime Minister. They do so all the more for helping us to understand that he is not a fixed character but the adopter of characters, not so much a prince of peace as the player king, or an emperor in borrowed clothes.
The book is all the more remarkable for having been written by a Hampshire spinster 180 years ago. Mansfield Park is not Jane Austen’s best love novel but in the character of Henry Crawford it helps us to understand Blair better than any contemporary portrait. Crawford is the figure with whom the reader and indeed the novel’s heroine, Fanny Price, is invited to fall in love.
Dashing, cosmopolitan, fluent, Crawford charms the inhabitants of Mansfield Park, itself a metaphor for England, with his easy sophistication. But it is the very smoothness of his manner which betrays him. In the most crucial passage of the novel Fanny notes that, while reading to her, Crawford assumes the personality of each of the characters in his text with quite perfect facility. And she realises that only an individual without any integrity himself can so fully play so many roles. When Crawford subsequently proves himself an amoral deceiver, the shock of others is not shared by Fanny, who saw in the ease with which he donned masks the urgent need to disguise the nullity within.
And so it is with Blair.
Joseph Johnson (Orpington) (Con): There is a strong feeling in Bromley, which is in the vanguard of the academies movement, that the proposed formula for the top-slicing of LACSEG—local authority central spend equivalent grant—unfairly penalises very efficient local authorities. Will the Secretary of State agree to a meeting to discuss this concern?
Michael Gove: Strong feelings in Bromley always weigh with me.
