I've now read Michael Gove's Ditchley lecture. I'm not impressed. It contains nothing we have not heard many times before. Every government in my lifetime has started out with an ambition to "reform" the Civil Service, which usually means reinventing it in its own image.

According to Gove, the Civil Service needs to become "better at reform". No, Mr. Gove, it doesn't. What the Civil Service actually needs to do is become much, much better at delivering public services. Politically-driven demands that it "reform" doesn't help it to do this.

Gove's speech is full of tired old Brexiter mantras about the "somewheres", the "forgotten people," the "52% who voted Leave". Right now, the people who are being forgotten are the 48% who voted Remain, very few of whom are among the "elites" about which Gove complains.

In his discussion of Goodhart's concept of "somewheres" and "anywheres", Gove omits to mention that in his book Goodhart says that these are extremes. The vast majority of people sit somewhere between the two.

It's totally unjust to allocate Remainers to the "anywhere" group and Leavers to the "somewhere" group, then denigrate this much larger group of supposed "anywheres" as out-of-touch elites who have had far too much influence in the past and now deserve to be ignored.

Not once does Gove mention that a large proportion of the 48% that he would like us to believe are out-of-touch elites are young people, who are, and are likely to remain, materially poorer than the older people who are the majority of the 52%.

I also find it disturbing that the only other people Gove cites are Paul Collier, JD Vance and Jonathan Haidt, all of whom have attracted criticism for white nativism and, in Collier's case, thinly-veiled racism

Nowhere is the "deep sense of disenchantment" of which Gove speaks more evident than among our "angry and defrauded young", whose futures have been sacrificed not once but, now, repeatedly to please and protect the old. Are you not scared of their anger, Mr Gove?

And also among the BAME people who are being made to feel as if they don't belong here, because "white British" (to use Paul Collier's phrase) are afraid of losing their privilege. Are you not scared of their anger, Mr Gove?

I'm also concerned by the way Gove twists facts to present an "anti-elite" view that has little basis in reality. This, for example: "The migrant crisis on Europe’s southern shores raised profound issues about just how humane and civilised our elites were."

It was not our "elites" who were inhumane and uncivilised, it was ordinary people, who demanded that governments shut the doors on migrants because they were scared of being "swamped". The way people wanted migrants treated was, and still is, abusive and dehumanising.

But it is not politically correct to say that ordinary people are racist, xenophobic, inhumane and uncivilised, so we've got to blame "elites" - who, remember, Gove has already conflated with the 48% who voted Remain. It is a toxic, divisive narrative.

Then there is this:

"We will throw everything at increasing ventilator capacity, some projects will misfire, some will seem promising but fall at the final hurdle, but along the way we may end up with unexpected gains...."

"....as we have seen in the past few months, a willingness to experiment will help drive up a huge increase in ventilator capacity."

This is not true.

In fact, the Government's determination to "experiment" rather than using tried and tested designs - some of which were even open source - was disastrous. It was only saved by the lockdown, which was so effective that much extra ventilator capacity was not needed.

Rejecting tried and tested designs in favour of experimental ones when extra capacity is urgently needed is foolhardy in the extreme. And the Government's Brexit-driven rejection of anything that came from Europe put people's lives at risk.