Mystery over Michael Gove’s cash resolved

Among the many fascinating revelations spotted by The First Post’s Westminster Mole in the latest MPs’ register of interests was that Tory Michael Gove, a leading light in David Cameron’s Notting Hill set, had received a donation to the expense of running his Surrey Heath constituency office from the owners of Annabel’s, the Berkeley Square nightclub.

The bushy-tailed shadow minister for children and schools has a lot of friends in high places – he had the largest number of office donors of any Tory frontbencher on the list with a total of 14 – but surely even he could not have persuaded the nightclub’s owner, Sir Richard Caring, a well-known Labour donor, to support him? Only recently, Caring, a ragtrade multi-millionaire who owns several London haunts including The Ivy and Scott’s, did the struggling party a favour by extending indefinitely the payback time on a £2m loan, agreeing to give 180 days notice if and when he wants it repaid. Why would he be helping Gove?

The answer, it turns out, is he isn’t: the donation dates back to before June 2007 when Annabel’s was still run by its founder Mark Birley, with whom Gove was friendly