 with most TV punditry and interviews now taking place on Skype by video call. Many people on Twitter are obsessing about the bookshelves that people have in their backgrounds. Now, often I don't think this is a particularly organic event. So I think people place the books behind them or beside them to display or present a particular image of themselves. But tweeting a picture of a bookshelf backfired for Sarah Vine yesterday. So Vine is a columnist at the Daily Mail and married to government minister Michael Gove. She tweeted this picture of Gove on a TV screen below a bookshelf. She says surreal. I mean, I thought it was quite strange that she thought it was surreal to see her husband on the telly because I mean, as a government minister, he's been on telly regularly for the last decade. But whatever, that's not the real story we're going to talk about. It was followed up by this other picture of her bookshelf. She says, as a very special treat for my trolls and Alastair Campbell, here is another bookshelf. There are about 20 more in joy. So here the controversy arose because amid the biographies of establishment politicians and iron rand tomes, there were two which in particular raised eyebrows. So one of them was by the notorious Holocaust denier, David Irving, the war path. We might be able to get a zoom in on that now. And also the bell curve by Charles Murray, sort of the modern day classic of pseudo scientific racism. So it argues that black people do less well in school and economically because they're genetically less intelligent than white people. Obviously, completely scientifically discredited, but a bit of a Bible of the new, I mean, they call themselves race realist. And they obviously that's them being kind to themselves because this is nonsense. But the debate raging all day on Twitter has been whether or not it's a problem for politicians to have racist books. The debate hasn't so much been whether or not Charles Murray or David Irving are correct, even though probably some of the people participating might have controversial views about that. But more as to whether or not it is OK for a government minister to even have the books in response to this criticism. Sarah Vine said, to defeat prejudice, you have to understand it. I think some people were rightly incredulous with the idea that Sarah Vine and Michael Gove only have racist books to make them better at arguing against racism. Ash, what have you thought about this controversy today? Why do you think Michael Gove has these books? Should we be worried that a government minister has explicitly racist and Holocaust denying books on his bookshelf? Look, I think that the group of people on the left who are saying that having these books on your shelf. Immediately means that you subscribe to the views contained within. That's something that I disagree with in terms of my side hustle, which is I'm a lecturer, so I often have to teach materials which are awful. I've had to teach on fascism. I've had to teach on terrorism. And if you're going to do a good job at teaching those materials, you have to look at terrorist propaganda. You have to look at fascist texts and you have to teach them in a context. So I'm sure if you not here because I'm not at my house, I've maybe done my partner for lockdown. If you looked at my bookshelf from home, you'd see all sorts of things. You'd go, what the hell is that doing that? So that's an area where I disagree with many people on the left in terms of making this inference about a bookshelf and someone's political disposition. In fact, you can tell a lot about Michael Gove and his politics and his attitude to race and to nationalism by reading his book, Salsia 77, which was kind of a less exciting and a little bit more clunky version of Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. So if you're going to go for the real civilizational clash, Islam is the enemy of Western liberalism. Go for the original. Go for Samuel Huntington. Don't go for this, you know, diet Pepsi version of it. Go for the real deal. So for me, it's clear enough to where you align Michael Gove's politics. What I cannot stand and I cannot stand this from Michael Gove and I cannot stand this from Sarah Vine is the intellectual freedom defence, which is, well, you cannot prescribe ideas. You cannot place the reading of books under suspicion. How dare you, Owen Jones, with your tweets, censor me in this regard? You know who else burnt books, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Michael Gove has even within the Conservative Party been a hard liner when it comes to the Muslim diaspora in this country. You can see many of these ideas in the book, Salsia 77. Baroness Varsie talked about him in terms of being, you know, kind of an extremist zealot, someone who she would be very worried about becoming Prime Minister and, you know, in the heady days of the David Cameron administration, him and Theresa May were sometimes at loggerheads when she was Home Secretary about what to do in terms of counter extremism strategy. He wanted something which was much more aggressive, much more interventionist and which placed educational spaces under particular suspicion. Now, we know that prevent has overreached itself in many places, but one of the reasons why Muslim students in universities in particular feel so strongly about prevent is because they've come under suspicion because of the books that they have been reading. One example was a gentleman at, I think, Salford University. He was doing a master's in terrorism, crime and global security. So he was reading an academic textbook in the library on terrorism studies. He was then reported via prevent and questioned on his views about ISIS on homophobia and all sorts of things. You've had other occasions where school children have been reported to prevent. So I don't think that there is a direct correlation between someone's reading habits and their political ideology. The thing is, is that Michael Gove doesn't agree with me. He has been one of the chief proponents of a government policy, which has placed people under suspicion. So the crocodile tears of Sarah Vine, who is, of course, Michael Gove's wife. There are now people on Twitter saying it's sexist to refer to her as Michael Gove's wife because she is a times columnist. Yes, that's true. Her Twitter handle is also Westminster Wag, a wife and girlfriend. So, you know, you didn't want to be known as wife. You could have just been Ms. Vine. I don't know. It's galling to me. It's completely and utterly galling. It stinks of hypocrisy and exceptionalism. Why shouldn't you be treated the same way you treat others through government policy? Give me one good reason. Yeah, I mean, I absolutely agree with all of that. The one thing, yeah, sometimes when I see this outrage, the thing I worry about is because people think that this worked against the left, this sort of crying outrage just because someone has a book or likes a book that has a problematic section. Think about that Hobson, Hobson book about imperialism. They sort of say that that should tarnish your whole politics. We've seen that many of the people who were defending Michael Gove now were some of the most vociferous people who were, you know, I think it was quite McCarthy, I in a way, some of the opposition they were they were making to Jeremy Corbyn. People who only recently were saying that Bell, Bell, Roberto, Addy and Diane Abbott should be suspended from the Labour Party because they happened to be in a Zoom call with some people who have objectionable views now saying, oh, but, you know, we have we need to have freedom of speech and freedom of association. I think the hypocrisy on show here is phenomenal, but also at the same time, I'm not too keen to do the whole. I do think anyone should be able to have whatever book they want. Aaron, any thoughts on this story? The freedom of expression arguments are remarkable when you think about it. This is a government which has got Julian Assange locked up. Michael Gove has been one of the key architects of a of a general political environment, which does, I think, denigrate Muslims in the public sphere and to say that, oh, well, you know, he should be able to read whatever book he likes. I think he's it's a bit of a piss take. And then I think that the main thing for me, Michael, I think you're overcompensating a bit here. It's just hypocrisy. You know, it's just basic hypocrisy. It's a basic double standard. If this had been Jeremy Corbyn with a copy of David Irving, Holocaust and I, by the way, who was commissioned to translate Hitler's Diaries and The Sunday Times by Andrew Neil, and they turned out to be fake. That's right. Andrew Neil, who's been so keen to call Jeremy Corbyn anti-Semite, paid Holocaust and I to translate Hitler's Diaries, which weren't even real. But let's just park that for a moment. The BBC's big anchorman, big interviewer. You can see something very, very odd is happening. If that had been Jeremy Corbyn, we would have heard the story rumble on for weeks that would have been caused for him to resign. It was only six months ago, five months ago, that him pronouncing the name of a Hollywood pedophile incorrectly meant that he was a racist towards Jewish people. And yet Michael Gove, having a book by Holocaust and I is no biggie. It's absurd. And the Hobson book, which I think is an important analog, really, the Hobson book was a major work on imperialism. Hobson was a anti-Semite. Hobson was also, however, cited by politicians such as Nick Clegg and Tony Blair. Nobody ever mentioned Hobson's abject views on these things until Jeremy Corbyn wrote a forwarder and introduction to a book before he became leader of the Labour Party. So I think even the sort of the analog between Hobson, who's a century-old thinker and a living Holocaust and higher, wholly different. And I think it's just, it's very revealing. And I think I sort of disagree with you, Michael, on the hypocrisy front. I think it really reveals the kinds of people we were dealing with. And they really don't give a shit about racism. It really was about political point scoring, not for all of them, but for 90, 95% of them. And I think this episode has revealed that with greater clarity than anything we've seen up until now. So for that, I'm grateful for Sir Irvine's injudicious tweeting.