Gove's guilty past

While trying to keep a low profile in the opening weeks of his new office, controversial columns he wrote while a journalist - and before he entered politics - may come back to bite him on the proverbial backside.

Writing as a Times columnist in 1998, Gove opined that the death penalty should be reintroduced into the criminal justice system.

He said that Britain was 'wrong to abolish hanging', and further claimed that the banning of the noose had 'led to a corruption of our criminal justice system' and 'the erosion of all our freedoms', rather than 'a great liberal victory', and that as a result the lack of capital punishment made the punishment of the innocent 'more likely'.

Writing in the same publication a year later, he criticised the Law Society for opposing the Justice Act 1999.

'The solicitors' trade union, as the Law Society is careful never to call itself, is leading the fight,' he wrote. 'In an advertising campaign, paid for by all of us through taxes which go on legal aid and the fees accumulated by conveyancing, the Law Society has sought to undermine the Lord Chancellor's reforms. The society protests that Lord Irvine's legislation, by capping the amount spent on legal aid, will deny justice to the deserving.'

Gove went on to argue that the real impediment to justice was 'the high level of legal fees'.

Concluding, he wrote: 'Because legal aid spending has been uncapped, lawyers have taken up all manner of unsuitable cases. Solicitors have known that they have, in the taxpayer, a supporter of actions with bottomless pockets. The untrammelled growth of legal aid, which the Law Society's members have so enjoyed, has been a conspiracy against the public for too long.

'Legal aid has allowed the Law Society's members to wallpaper their offices with taxpayer's money for years. The time has come for a spring clean.'