OUR political system is stuffed with odd conventions. Many, like the much-abused pairing system of excusing MPs from votes — which this week forced Labour’s Tulip Siddiq to postpone a Caesarean section — deserve to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

One that should survive, though, is the practice that closing speeches in votes of confidence are given not by party leaders, but by their seconds in command.

It allows us to see normally overshadowed figures as if they were the centrepiece, with a dash of hope or warning.

When the Labour government fell in 1979, Michael Foot, then deputy Labour leader and Lord President of the Council, delivered one of the finest orations in British parliamentary history.

His verdict on then SNP Westminster leader Donald Stewart was particularly cutting. “However misguided [Stewart] may be … [MPs] must acknowledge the remarkable allegiance which [Stewart] commands from his followers on that bench,” Foot said.

“It’s one of the wonders of the world. There has been nothing quite like it since the armies of ancient Rome used to march into battle. It’s only now that we see the right honourable gentleman in his full imperial guise. Hail Caesar, those about to die salute thee!”

Foot was equally eviscerating of David Steel’s Liberals, who had supported James Callaghan’s minority Labour government under the “Lib-Lab pact” until shortly before.

Foot said that himself and Thatcher had “always shared a common interest in the development of this young man,” before chiding: “I should very much like to know, as I am sure would everybody else, what exactly happened last Thursday night.

“I do not want to misconstrue anything, but did she send for him or did he send for her — or did they just do it by billet-doux?”

The Fifer Steel, Foot added later, had “passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever.”

And so Margaret Thatcher was able to “lead her troops into battle snugly concealed behind a Scottish nationalist shield, with the boy David holding her hand,” as Foot put it in perhaps his best quip of all.

But this week it was the turn of Michael Gove to conclude for the government. The jokes were at best, not to my taste, and at worst, rather dated.

“The Liberal Democrat policy on referendums is not the policy of Gladstone or Lloyd George,” he said, in a justified barb at their EU-flip-flopping. “It’s the policy of Vicky Pollard: no but yeah but no but yeah.”

The speech will in fact be best remembered not for what he said, but for what he didn’t. In a lengthy diatribe against Jeremy Corbyn, the Environment Secretary blasted: “This country should never allow that man to be Prime Minister.”

Only it came out on the BBC News Channel subtitles as: “This country should never allow Batman to be Prime Minister.” Well, I too am suspicious of super-rich trustafarian sociopaths dabbling in politics.

Still, the Spectator described Gove’s contribution as “one of the best speeches of his parliamentary career,” and I’d put good money on him having listened to Foot’s barnstormer the night before.

Gove is perhaps the most loathsome member of the current Cabinet — and that’s a high bar indeed. But his smug awkwardness sits alongside a charm which resonates, in my experience, with some unlikely suspects.

One of my first contributions to the Morning Star, well before I was on the staff, was a critique of the then education secretary’s willingness to “abandon evidence-based policy-making on a personal whim.”

I stand by my view in 2013 that this man is one of the strongest ideologues of the current crop of Tories. But in the years since, it’s become more and more apparent that zealous cunning is an even stronger trait in Gove.

He knows what he believes in, but he’s equally prepared to put that aside for the sake of personal convenience. It’s hard to know whether he underwent a Damascene conversion at all between his time as NUJ militant — manning the pickets at Aberdeen’s Press and Journal newspaper — and branding unions “enemies of promise” and “the blob” as education secretary.

When he cosied up to Donald Trump in a newspaper interview just after the US president’s election, you had to wonder if Gove wouldn’t mind carving out a similar role for himself in the British political scene. Gove is Establishment through and through, in spite of his unconventional background — but that never stopped his fellow Aberdonian “The Donald.”

I once witnessed Gove praise Momentum and acknowledge that Bernie Sanders would have won against Donald Trump, at an intimate talk he gave in London. Driven by shrewdness, I’d say, rather than sincerity.

Intrigue gave way to farce as Damon Albarn began heckling Gove from the audience about Brexit.

“I’m familiar with his tactics,” Albarn told me after. “I like him, he’s very personable, he’s funny. But when I start talking about issues I’m getting really pissed off, because I don’t fucking agree with him.
“He’s excused everything, in a very nice way, and some of it is inexcusable really.”

It was hardly oratory worthy of Foot, but all I could think was: “Amen.”