Michael Gove is making a much anticipated speech this morning which is expected to be the intellectual equivalent of a bitch-slap to Gordon Brown. What the kind readers of this blog always say in the comments whenever Guido features Gove is that “he has a face you just want to slap”.

Gove is clearly aware of this and possessing a fair amount of ambition he has made some efforts to ameliorate this reaction. He lost the glasses earlier this year and his clothes have got sharper since his journalist days. He explains in article this morning “thus you have the paradox, which I exemplify, of the individual who is both plain and vain, a man who tries to dress smartly because of an anxiety to minimise the unhappy aesthetic impact of one’s appearance.”

What Michael should understand is that the collective urge to happy-slap him isn’t strictly to do with his looks. It is the sheer swottyness of him, exemplified in the article, that brings out the latent playground bully in us all.

UPDATE : His speech is a measured dissection of the Brownies problems.