Guardian Weekly

Friends with benefits

t a “slave auction” at the Oxford Union in 1987 – an “opportunity to buy your favourite union person for the evening” – there was, according to the university newspaper, frenzied bidding for the services of the kilt-wearing 19-year-old Michael Gove. He went for £35 (around $ 110 at today’s conversion rate). Gove was known at the time as one of the three pre-eminent orators in the small world of the university debating

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