Gargoyle, homunculus, the Gove’s not like the rest of us.

Shining face, pin-sharp eyes, mind as keen as Coke.

But where does he keep his adult appetites? Perhaps pocketed still in the fogey old suits he adopted at school.

Thirty years on, the unlikely prospect of Big Ideas for Grown-Ups framed by the Honourable Member for Manikin – howzat?

Tory leadership contender Michael Gove MP is out and proud to be an intellectual. Also, he seems to credit voters with a maturity that is denied them by many other public figures.

Speaking as he would be spoken to, thinking as he would wish to be thought of, Gove provides a personification of adulthood which poses a direct challenge to the Great Regression – 50 years of treating each other like children; leaving the individual infantilised and often only half-formed.

Ironic, then, that adulthood is being enacted by an apparently eternal schoolboy, aka the ‘pipsqueak’.

Or, to bring us back to the possibility of growing up, maybe it had to be someone who bypassed the adolescent rites of passage which successive generations since the 1960s have somehow made into a life’s work.