If you think of being governed by the party of power as a relationship, this one has gone on well past the seven-year itch into something unpleasantly yeasty. So it’s hard to look back at the faded political wedding pictures and remember how it all began, what we saw in each other; when the Conservatives, to misquote a young David Cameron, “were the future once”. But I’d like to, because I am grateful for something in particular.
We went to the altar with the Tories back in 2010, with Michael Gove as Cameron’s shiny-eyed best man in revolutionary mode as education secretary. Gove changed one little thing about the way children learn to read. They would each do a five-minute “phonics check” at the age
