Michael Gove given peerage in Sunak’s resignation honours list

Veteran Conservative minister Michael Gove is among a slew of ex-cabinet members and special advisors to have received titles in Rishi Sunak’s resignation honours list.

Gove was a fixture in successive Tory governments and since leaving parliament in 2024 has become Editor-in-chief of the right-leaning Spectator magazine.

In his honours’ citations, where the leaving Prime Minister offers reasoning for his choices, Sunak lists Gove’s achievements serving in five government departments over fourteen years. 

The former Prime Minister credits the ex-Education Secretary’s reforms to English schooling as ‘resulting in sustained improvement in performance in literacy, mathematics and science’ and congratulates him for ‘co-ordinating the response of public services to Covid’ as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

He will be joined in the House of Lords by four other ex-ministers from Sunak’s government, including Mark Harper, former Secretary of State for Transport, and Simon Hart, Chief Whip between 2022-2024.

Former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and Ex-Home Secretary James Cleverly are among a group of six former Tory cabinet members to receive knighthoods. 

Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Daisy Cooper, tore into this edition of the honours list, describing it as “an ID parade of political flunkies whose fingerprints of failure are still felt on family finances”.

Quoted in The Guardian, she continued: “They are rewards for the failure of a dreadful Conservative government that was rightly kicked out of office. The fact that Rishi Sunak has dished out honours to his mates after all the damage they did is yet more proof of how out of touch they still are.”

The honours list is a long-standing tradition which allows outgoing Prime Ministers to nominate deserving public servants, often close political allies, for official titles. 

Key figures within Sunak’s No.10 staff have also received honours, including his Director of Communications, Nerissa Chesterfield, former Head of Operations Lisa Lovering and John Bew, Foreign Policy Advisor to four successive Conservative Prime Minister’s, 

In total, sixteen political staff who worked for Sunak during his tenure in Downing Street, in both strategic and administrative capacity, have been rewarded with either peerages, CBs, CMGs, CBEs, OBEs or MBEs. 

Honours were also distributed for achievements away from Westminster. Veteran England and Lancashire cricketer James Anderson and filmmaker Matthew Vaughn received knighthoods for their services to cricket and the creative industries, respectively.