Michael Gove is to be recalled by the Commons education select committee to reply to questions on when he was informed of allegations of bullying and intimidation by advisers in his department.
Graham Stuart, the Tory chairman of the committee, confirmed that Gove and his permanent secretary Chris Wormald will be summoned to present evidence early next month.
Stuart told the Guardian that Gove will be asked concerning the answer he gave to Ian Mearns, a Labour member of the committee, in January that he was not conscious about allegations that his special advisers had acted inappropriately to civil servants.
The Observer reported on 9 February, just over two weeks after Gove’s appearance before the committee on 23 January, that a senior civil servant received a payoff of around £25,000 after a grievance procedure involving Gove’s special adviser Dominic Cummings and the department’s former head of communications, James Frayne.
Stuart said: “Ian Mearns asked the secretary of state specifically about whether he was privy to allegations against his own advisers and he said no and followed up with a letter categorically stating it again. The committee wishes to speak about the flaws around disciplinary and grievance matters, once they can be delivered to the secretary of state’s attention, once they will be delivered to his attention and the way issues akin to settlements are sorted out, who authorises them and to what amount.
“The committee just wishes to inspect these issues slightly more carefully. i do not believe anyone is suggesting that Michael Gove was anything as opposed to straightforward with us.”
Stuart said the committee was also more likely to question Gove about allegations first published within the Observer on 2 February that members of his department can be behind the @toryeducation Twitter account, which has launched strong attacks on journalists.
The Observer reported that Cummings and Henry de Zoete, Gove’s other special adviser, were asked in 2011 by the Tories’ then head of press, Henry Macrory, to tone down the partisan nature of the account. De Zoete told the Observer: “i’m not toryeducation.” Cummings said: “After all i am not this Twitter account and not were.”
Stuart said: “It’ll be as much as members [of my committee] to determine which particular lines they need to pursue. There is not any concern there [in regards to the account] provided that that [the denials] is the case. The Observer has run and run and run with this without seemingly with the ability to provide you with any killer facts to confirm its allegations. We’ll see if anything is revealed within the session when the permanent secretary and secretary of state come before us.”
Labour’s Mearns said: “The education secretary clearly has inquiries to answer. He says he was blind to serious allegations of bullying and harassment regarding his close advisers; however, the ministerial code is extremely clear – ‘the responsibility of the management and conduct of special advisers, including discipline, rests with the minister who made the appointment’. Given the allegations against his advisers, the secretary of state should account for his adherence, or loss of it, to the ministerial code.”
