How to process the sight of Michael Gove clubbing

Psychologists will tell you that ‘cognitive dissonance’ is the gear grinding your brain does when confronted with two seemingly contradictory things.

It’s a sense of ‘does not compute’ that makes us feel deeply uncomfortable, that uneasy feeling that something’s gone seriously awry with the regular fabric of reality.

If you’ve ever watched any Adam Curtis documentaries you’ll know this feeling well. Indeed, his 2016 film HyperNormalisation was all about how humans will happily and knowingly accept mistruths if they fit within our sense of the ‘normal’.

Which brings us neatly on to the sight of a fully suited Michael Gove dancing in an Aberdeen nightclub.

As much as you may have tried to censor this from your Twitter feed this morning, it definitely happened.

The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was out until the early hours at the Pipe club night in the Granite City, seemingly on his own.

Predictably, when faced with such a seemingly irrational sight, people are having a hard time processing it...

‘Nothing to see here’

There are his defenders, the ones who question what all the fuss is about. This is a newly single man who just wants to have some fun on a trip back to his hometown, after all.

‘What did I just watch?’

Many tried to encapsulate the Gove dance in words. It wasn’t easy.

‘God I feel old’

It’s hard to believe, but Gove’s late night dancing even made some people feel a sense of age-induced inadequacy, that their days of hitting the dancefloor are long behind them.

‘It didn’t happen, it couldn’t happen’

For some people, the scene was simply too harrowing to process. And like the most trauma-inducing events, they couldn’t accept it as part of their reality.

‘It’s another clever distraction tactic’

There were those who saw it not as an innocent spot of bar-hopping, but a cynical attempt to distract us from other issues.

‘He’ll be the next PM’

Others pondered whether this is Gove’s attempt to humanise himself as a potential future prime minister.

‘Kanye was involved, somehow’

Finally, could it have been part of Kanye West’s guerrilla marketing campaign for his new album?

Whether Gove swaps the Cabinet for the Ministry of Sound on a more regular basis remains to be seen.

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