Why did a clever man like Michael Gove ignore the planning inspector?

So, the High Court has quashed DLUHC secretary of state Michael Gove’s decision to ignore the advice of the planning inspector on M&S’s application to demolish its Marble Arch store, which both Westminster Council and Sadiq Khan had approved, as had the inspector.

The company had always said the decision to demolish the building and replace it with a 10-storey tower that would accommodate a smaller store plus offices and a gym was consistent with its ESG obligations. The existing store was seriously inefficient in terms of energy use, it pointed out, and the replacement building would be so much more efficient that within 11 years, the energy saving would offset any detriment in terms of embedded carbon generated by the demolition. The building would also have a BREEAM outstanding rating and be among the top 1% of buildings in London in terms of its energy efficiency.

This argument was sufficiently convincing to persuade Westminster and the GLA to approve on the basis that while refurbishment should be considered, there might well be stronger arguments in favour of demolition. I confess I always found that reasoning perfectly sensible. Raising refurbishment to the status of holy writ was always a mistake. Each case needs to be considered on its own merits.

So why did a clever man like Michael Gove decide not only to ignore the advice of his inspector but to concoct an argument around embodied and embedded carbon and the presumption of refurbishment that has been described not only by the judge but by lay experts as simply wrong? What is Mr Gove smoking these days? This is the same politician once known as the safest pair of hands in Whitehall. Yet, since he has taken on the DLUHC challenge, he has taken the view abandoning the mandatory duty on local planning authorities to provide an approved five-year land supply will deliver more homes, not fewer, and that sticking rigidly to the green belt will not reduce potential development.

Could this all simply be about politics? We can assume Mr Gove believes every Tory voter is a Telegraph reader. Westminster Council has been Labour controlled since the last local elections and mayor Khan has been deliberately winding up Tory ministers from the day he was elected, so sticking his finger in their eye might have appealed. However, what he has actually done is made enemies of those developers who have traditionally supported the Tories and in the process ensured not only that Tory coffers will be lighter come the election but guaranteed that many of them will be much more wary of supporting the party in the future. Redrow’s Steve Morgan, who has previously been a strong supporter and donor, has said unequivocally that the Barratt merger only happened because of the lack of developable sites, for which by implication Michael Gove is seen as being responsible.

The one lesson the secretary of state does not seem to have learned is that making decisions because you think they play to your own audience is not only bad politics but also counterproductive. If you doubt me, just ask why London’s Hammersmith Bridge is still closed to traffic and has been since 2019. Hammersmith council leader Stephen Cowan, whose responsibility the bridge is, says he doesn’t have the money because the Tory government has starved his borough of resources.

Mayor Khan just likes winding up Tory ministers, so he’s about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike and those ministers rise too easily to the bait. The resulting stalemate suits Labour because most of the traffic is from the Richmond side to access the tubes on the Hammersmith side, so it’s potential Tory voters who are the angriest.

Childish? You could say that. There are times when that old maxim about being too clever by half fits the bill perfectly.