Gove's ‘identitarian’ speech shows how toxic he has become

I have always thought that the best thing ever to happen to Michael Gove was Boris Johnson. The latter’s obvious incompetence, buffoonery and inability barely to utter a complete sentence without betraying casual racism or starting a diplomatic crisis has diverted attention from an altogether more mendacious character. One part ideologue and two parts opportunist, Gove seems to get away with populist posturing and careerist slithers that are more worthy of the column inches dedicated to Johnson. But he is marginally slicker (which is not saying a lot), and less enamoured of himself (also not saying a lot) than Johnson.

Speaking in Westminster on Monday morning, the Brexit campaigner criticised those who “divide society into contending groups” as he spoke in defence of the United Kingdom. Gove said more people in the western world were looking at political questions through “the prism of identity”. And that “the identitarians want to move away from liberal principles of equal treatment for all, colour-blindness and respect for individual rights. Instead, they embrace a politics which … demands that people define themselves by their group membership rather than as autonomous individuals.”

This, from someone who fronted a Brexit campaign that fixated on immigration and exploited fears of Turkey joining the EU, was summarised rather kindly by someone in the audience, as having a “brass neck”. It is worse. It is gaslighting. Is this the next stage in the warping of political culture by Brexit? Playing on people’s fears of the other and then blaming the other for pointing this out using the cheap shorthand of identity politics.

It is classic Gove. Things have no meaning beyond absolving himself and his party of the turmoil sown by Brexit, and advancing a worldview in which grievances brought against either are based on an exceptionalist victimhood. I know it’s not fashionable to say this, but sometimes there are victims. Sometimes, hate-crime figures rise and people get hurt. Sometimes, people vote against their interests on the basis of the trust they put in their leaders. Sometimes, words mean something.

Which brings us to his sloppy use of the word “identitarian”, which perhaps he thought he was coining. Unfortunately, it has been around for some time and describes a European and North American far-right movement which originated in France. Not that it matters in itself, but it is a demonstration of his breezy sauntering into the terrain of identity without bothering to check the terminology.

His pejorative invoking of “identity politics” is not only lazy, it is seemingly oblivious that if any party has played bad identity politics, it has been the Tories. Before the referendum and after, Theresa May’s party has encouraged a pugnacious nationalistic identity, defined in terms of enemies without and saboteurs within. Criticising “both sides” is a vintage tactic. It is both the right and the left, you see. They both engage in identity politics. The only problem with that is that one is a regressive return to majoritarian hierarchy, and the other is the process by which marginalised groups seek to secure equity among institutions and societies that seek to exclude them.

It is an unoriginal false equivalence that is so sophomoric that it wouldn’t be out of place in the pub rant of a university student. You know, the one who thinks the left is shutting down free speech by not asking Katie Hopkins to speak at the debating society, and who has no patience for identity politics because his parents came from Ireland with nothing, you know, but he doesn’t want to play that card because he has agency.

But it doesn’t matter to Gove what words mean, only what they promote, and hang the consequences. And they won’t happen to him anyway (unless he puts a foot wrong, and is booted out of the cabinet again). He can stand in front of a nation that witnessed immigration become the second most important issue to voters, in the very headwinds of the Windrush scandal, and say that Brexit has made the UK more welcoming to immigrants. Après moi le déluge. In his speech, which was a laughable appeal to unite the UK, he demanded that the SNP and others who played identity politics must stop prosecuting their agendas via the prism of their actual interests. You could summarise his message as: we broke it, but you have to fix it.

But one group is immune from Gove’s address of course. Brexit voters: “They are not all identitarians.” Does this not reek of bandwagoning? He has borrowed from the US right’s ideological shimmy, where it discounts, legitimises and makes benign the actions of Trump voters as resulting from distress, and minority resistance to that behaviour as shrill, sharp, over-indulgent paranoid victimhood.

The galling thing about Gove is that it’s hard to shake the feeling that he knows better. Brexit and the manoeuvrings of power within a Tory party have degraded him. Long gone is the man who made an appeal for same-sex marriage in the Daily Mail. There is only so much time one can spend assuming toxic positions for political expediency before the mask eats the face. He does not know better. He is no better. And if this is the direction the party is headed towards, it will get no better. The first thing that struck me when hearing his speech was how passe it was, how naff it was for him to appeal to all these well-worn tropes. But when you are out of ideas, the only way forward is to borrow from those who have gone before.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist