Why have the Tories brought Gove back from the dead? To kill him again | Marina Hyde

We still know what he did last summer, but there is no denying that Michael Gove is once more en vogue. Despite dying a traitor’s political death after knifing Boris Johnson in the post-referendum Tory leadership battle, the old gang are now back together.

Indeed, Boris and Michael were even recently reported to have masterminded a “soft coup” that leaves Theresa May their “Downing Street hostage”. As Oprah would advise, Gove is now wearing the glasses for the job he wants rather than the one he has; and has stepped up to the crisis-interview role vacated by gropery’s Michael Fallon. Yes, Michael Gove is back.

That said, I can never shed the nagging suspicion that the Conservative party has allowed all this simply for the pleasure of killing him again later. Gove might be the Tories’ Kenny, a sort of running gag about their own comedic sociopathy, his every death specifically designed to showcase the terrible beauty of their Fritz Langian revenge machine.

Or he might just be a straight-up arse. Which of us is crazy enough to definitively call political matters these days? Gove was certainly angling for the latter classification this morning, telling the Today programme that people should stop paying attention to the “raw and authentic” voice of fake news and turn to the BBC or Hansard for reliable information instead. To which the only possible response is: OH DEAR. HAVE THE SILLY VOTERS HAD ENOUGH OF EXPERTS?

If your tears failed to liquefy as Michael issued a clarion call for accuracy about political matters, your ducts would have fully calcified by the time the scale of his hypocrisy sunk in. His appearance was apparently sparked by the row over whether Tory MPs voted against the suggestion that animals are sentient (they didn’t). Who better to fume about this misapprehension than the man who fronted a campaign that bombarded social media with the suggestion that Turkey was about to join the EU (it wasn’t)? The animal sentience story was part of an “unhappy trend”, Michael intoned, before saying something about puppies that none of us has the inclination to look up.

Alas, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that we’re watching a Westminster version of Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Except instead of enchanting a broom, Michael Mouse bewitched a big red bus with the figure £350m on its side, which is now preparing to mow him down again, cueing up the immortal catchphrase: OH MY GOD – YOU KILLED MICHAEL! Don’t worry, he’ll be back in the next cabinet as if nothing had happened (though in private he will become increasingly tortured by his inability to politically die).

For now, he and Boris Johnson have buried the hatchet – though only in a shallow grave – united once more by their unshakable belief that they are the smartest guys in the room. Clearly, it’s tempting to think of their relationship in the buddy cop genre, with Michael as Martin Lawrence to Boris’s Will Smith, Nick Nolte to his Eddie Murphy, the Danny Glover to his Mel Gibson.

But in the end, do remember that this is really just a double act of former newspaper journalists – the Woodward and Bernstein of filing any old crap to the exterior panelwork of a rented coach. As discussed before, we can tell Brexit is being run by ex-hacks, because – despite having absolutely years to think about what their finished article might look like – the leavers are dashing things off right on deadline.

Today, then, Theresa May arrived in Brussels to make the EU another offer they can refuse. Think of her as Non Corleone. According to reports, Gove has in effect won the battle over a hard border in Ireland, by persuading the prime minister to reject regulatory harmonisation with the EU.

This makes a hard border inevitable – although, would you believe, the cabinet’s brains still can’t face up to what a “hard border” has to be. A recent paper by their weirdo thinktank crush, the Legatum Institute, suggested the border could be patrolled by drones and zeppelins. “These solutions are subject to a number of limitations,” ran the small print – “not least weather and cost.”

Assuming you have found the right cocktail of neuron-dulling substances that works for you, you’ll be relaxed that one of Britain’s Brexit “solutions” depends on the weather. I mean, what could really go wrong? The idea that a country whose rail network can be halted by leaves is considering trusting border control to a load of gazillion-pound airships that don’t really fancy it if it’s raining is too O’Hindenburg for words.

Is there an international prize for imbecilic fantasy border plans born of jingoistic folly? If so, we just bumped Donald Trump down into second place. I’m now picturing a stadium full of evangelical Brexiters, only instead of chanting, “Build the wall! Build the wall!” they’re shouting: “Launch the blimp! Launch the blimp!” Never has the Colonel Blimp tag seemed more perfectly prophetic.

The US president may somehow be able to convince his base that the wall was only ever just a metaphor. But May and co will have no such luck with the EU. It’s starting to feel as though the government’s bigger problem will be convincing people that many things aren’t a metaphor. Zeppelins, sentient cabinet ministers, the boy who cried expert … are these really signposts to the sunlit uplands? Inquiring minds want to know.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist