The episode and its headline claim

The Guardian podcast Radical Thinking with Aditya Chakrabortty put out an episode on 17 October 2026 asking how Michael Gove justifies his politics. Michael Gove austerity sits at the centre of it: the episode's headline framing has Gove presenting austerity as unavoidably painful.

Gove's political roots in print

The episode points back to an essay Gove wrote in a 1998 collection, The Moderniser's Dilemma: Radical Politics in the Age of Blair, tied to his association with the Marxism Today group.

What to read on the Conservatives

The episode names several works on the Tory Party and its record in government:

• •The Demented Dalek, historian Richard J Evans's piece on Gove's years in power, in the London Review of Books
• •Phil Burton-Cartledge's book The Party's Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak, on the Conservative Party's decline
• •Burton-Cartledge's blog on British politics, including a post about Kemi Badenoch
• •Geoffrey Wheatcroft's short narrative Bloody Panico!: or, Whatever Happened to The Tory Party
• •A paper on the economics of the Cameron years, examining how the Tories failed to move the UK from being a country of renters towards a country of makers

Coming up and related reading

Two authors of the paper on the Cameron years are due to join the podcast later in the series. Another paper, based on Bank of England data, suggests Brexit may have cost the UK 8% of GDP. Nesrine Malik has also written a recent Guardian column asking why the Spectator, Britain's oldest political magazine, has become a cheerleader for Islamophobia.