Michael Gove is the political horror show that chills my soul

There are worse politicians. But no one else inspires such existential dread

What, aesthetically speaking, is the genre of Michael Gove? I started thinking about this earlier this week when the Conservative politician posted a truly terrible tweet. It was so terrible, this tweet, that when I read it, it had a physical effect on me.

In a moment, I will try to describe this physical effect; but first, I am sorry to say, I must tell you what the tweet was. It was a response to another tweet by Labour’s Angela Rayner, who was defending the rapper Stormzy against Gove’s mockery of his vocal support for Labour. Gove’s rejoinder – which is maybe the single worst thing I have ever seen on Twitter, a website exclusively dedicated to the dissemination of terrible things – was this: “I set trends dem man copy.”

Gove, presumably on the suggestion of some ruddy-cheeked recent PPE graduate, was quoting a line from Stormzy’s Shut Up, a banger so irrefutable that its power remains undiminished even by Gove posting bits of it on Twitter. The general online reaction to this was a collective cringe widespread and forceful enough to cause a significant uplift in the neck brace market. It was a disgraceful attempt to ridicule not only a prominent young black entertainer for his political engagement, but the language of an entire community. It was very bad, the tweet. Very embarrassing and very bad.

But I think people are misunderstanding its badness, and the badness of Gove in general. The consensus seems to be that he belongs to the genre of cringe comedy: a David Brent or Alan Partridge sort of deal, whereby the viewer is almost too mortified to laugh, and yet laughs regardless. That he is merely, on and off the timeline, posting cringe.

But I think this is a grave misclassification of Gove. It is true that there is currently no politician anywhere in the world who emanates such a potent miasma of visceral embarrassment. But there’s nothing funny about that embarrassment. Read again the words he tweeted: “I set trends dem man copy.” Imagine him tweeting them. Are you laughing? No, you are not laughing. Because the genre of Michael Gove is not cringe comedy, nor any kind of comedy at all.

When I saw the very bad tweet, my body reacted before my mind had proper opportunity to process what I had read. I felt a wave of pure revulsion ripple over my scalp, felt it trickle down my neck in thin, hot rivulets. There was actual, honest-to-god tingling involved. The word, I believe, is horripilation.

This is an effect no other politician is capable of evoking in me. There are political figures who you might reasonably argue are worse, in a material sense, than Gove – your Trumps, your Putins, your Erdoğans. But none of these terrible men go to work on the central nervous system with anything like the visceral efficiency of a Michael Gove.

Possibly you have seen that viral video of him clapping weirdly. The hands flailing about, rapidly cycling through different styles of clapping, each more bizarrely incorrect than the last. The wet lips pursing and unpursing in mysterious supplication. He seems just terribly, irreducibly wrong in himself. If I had to describe him visually, I would go for something like “ghost of identical twin killed and eaten in utero by Rick Moranis”. Which is to say that in trying to encapsulate the Goveness of Gove, I find myself instinctively reaching for a register of the uncanny, the supernatural.

And then there was his latest terrible manifestation, the whole business this week of him storming Channel Four with his own film crew – ostensibly to try to get himself into the leaders’ debate on climate, but clearly actually as a stunt to distract from his boss’s refusal to take part. There he was, accompanied by Stanley Johnson, his boss’s dad, being politely but firmly told that though he was a leader, he wasn’t the leader, and so couldn’t be a part of the leaders’ debate. Watching this footage clarified something for me about Gove. He is entirely pathetic, but in a way that evokes no actual pathos. Like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, there is something uncanny and sinister in his weakness. It is his very softness that is truly terrible.

Now, clearly neither you nor I – Guardian reader and writer respectively – constitute any kind of target audience for either Gove’s terribly wrong tweet or his terribly wrong self. But then who is the target audience? I don’t know who they are, other than that they are out there, and that they are Tories. But that knowledge itself is part of the creeping unease of Gove. That there are people out there looking at him, seeing him tweet the words “I set trends dem man copy”, and feeling not annihilating shame and dread, but indulgent amusement.

When I say that Gove emanates a miasma of shame, what I mean is not that he himself is feeling shame – there is little evidence that he’s even capable of it – but that he is a source of it, that he excites in the viewer a terrible inner core of embarrassment. Beneath the remains of Chernobyl’s reactor No 4, there is a gigantic accumulation of radioactive material known as the “elephant’s foot”. It is the most toxic object on the face of the planet. The elephant’s foot is not itself sick, is not itself dying, but if you spend more than a couple of minutes in its presence, you yourself will become sick and die.

And this is how I feel about Gove, about the profane embarrassment and dread that he emanates. No, the genre of Michael Gove is not comedy. The genre of Michael Gove is existential horror.

• Mark O’Connell is a writer based in Dublin and author of To Be a Machine