In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is able to translate the grunting of Mark Ruffalo’s incoherent Hulk into meaningful dialogue. Last Monday the Times newspaper invited us to believe that the resentful foundling Michael Gove could do the same with the contradictory snarling of Donald Trump.

As a fellow adoptee I recognise Gove’s irreparably damaged personality. Indeed, both of us were once published in the same vanity-pressed anthology of neurotic, self-justifying teenage poetry. And as a member of the Gove-loathing metropolitan liberal elite, I thought we had seen the last of the self-serving nest-cuckoo and his hand-wringing wife. Six months ago, it looked as if a stateless Gove and Sarah Vine were reinventing themselves as the amusing celebrity political couple for young millennials so jaded they no longer found Neil and Christine Hamilton quite sickening enough. Michael Gove and Sarah Vine – a Neil and Christine Hamilton for the Two Girls, One Cup generation.

It had been Gove who, with David Cameron and Boris Johnson, sabotaged our children’s futures in a doomed peeing war of competitive posh men. As a student, David Cameron is rumoured to have put his penis into a dead pig. To outdo him as an adult, in an act even more bizarre and obscene, Michael Gove put his penis into a Daily Mail journalist. And to render both his rivals irrelevant, to do something even more disgusting and demented, Boris Johnson allowed himself to be put into the role of foreign secretary, a punishment-beating for the world.

But, in a plot twist worthy of an HBO box set, it is actually Johnson’s old ally and enemy Gove who has made the first plausible contact with the new president of America. This journalistic coup goes some way to restoring the wounded pride of Gove, an adopted misfit masking his low self-esteem, afraid that his standing is an accident of administrative paperwork in infancy, desperate to assert his role in a world of entitlement to which he suspects he is not really entitled.

Encounters with Trump that appear calm usually suggest the school bus driver in the film Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), interacting as politely as possible with Andy Robinson’s vividly unhinged psychopath, in the hope that he won’t massacre the kidnapped preteens on board. When Robinson forces the weeping children to sing Old MacDonald, the scene conveys the same air of forced jollity evident among Democrats at Trump’s inauguration. But Gove’s dealings with Trump were reported as relaxed, admittedly by Gove, in an interview he wrote, in a paper he works for owned by an arse.

Everything you need to know about Gove’s feelings for Trump, and for his previous paramour Boris Johnson, is contained in Nietzsche’s 1887 book of essays On the Genealogy of Morality. If you haven’t read it, download Apple’s Ask a Nietzsche app, and question a tiny avatar of the dead philosopher, voiced by the German comedian and TalkSport regular Henning Wehn. I first heard about the book on a radio show hosted by someone called Melvyn Bragg, who I was surprised to find was real, rather than a Siri-like app with a broken pitch control.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

Now, I personally know nothing about psychiatry, philosophy, moral philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, psychological profiling, cultural history, politics, linguistics, or the science of personality, but to me Gove would appear to exhibit all the characteristic traits of what Nietzsche calls “slave mentality”, the resentful jealousy of the “ill-born, meek” man, imagining that one day the world will see that he was right all along.

Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, however, fulfil the criteria of what Nietzsche names, in the same essay, “blond beasts”. Not only are they both blond and beastly, but they are “beyond good and evil”, observing no law other than their own power. The Gove-slave needs to believe in deferred justice as he is physically incapable of defeating the blond beasts on their own terms. Nietzsche sees this as the root of Christian morality.

Or alternatively, it would appear, the slave can canoodle with the beast, and if one blond beast doesn’t take the bait, there’s always another one over the Atlantic to cuddle up with instead. But one doesn’t need Nietzsche to understand Gove’s relationship with Trump. Presumably you remember it from the playground, where Gove-like figures peeped over bullies’ shoulders, urging them to violence from a position of cowardly safety, the Richard Hammond/Jeremy Clarkson dynamic, an eternal archetype, replayed in Trump’s golden office, framed Playboy covers reflected in the smeared lenses of Gove’s steamed-up spectacles. Is it just me or is it hot in here?

Gove may be a slave but he is not an idiot. He knows there is no point setting any store by anything Trump says. Trump’s comments do not add up to any coherent worldview. Each emerges in the moment, suitable for that second and that second alone. In his Gove interview Trump said he hoped to scale down his nuclear arsenal. But as recently as the 22 December, in his famous Let It Be an Arms Race series of 140-character treatises, Trump declared “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability.”

Trump’s inaccurate pronouncements about Nato member states’ financial contributions and the “illegal” status of refugees in Germany were accepted and transcribed unchallenged by Gove. Jokes about farts that I perform on comedy DVDs are held to higher legal standards than Gove’s Times piece on the then president-elect, but are not as funny.

After the interview’s publication, Gove was deferred to uncritically on Radio 4’s Today programme, a show currently so spineless in its questioning of government that it resembles not so much a news source, as a stack of jellyfish piled up on top of one another and wrapped in an unbuttoned shirt and a Robert Redford wig, in the hope that someone will mistake it for Bob Woodward.

Gove is a desperate, disappointed man, staring into the murky dew pond of Trump’s inarticulate pronouncements, looking for something that validates him. Hearing that Trump will do a trade deal with the UK “absolutely, very quickly”, Gove the emasculated Brexiteer makes this the focus of a Times interview so uncritical as to be as dangerous and dishonest as anything emerging from a Macedonian fake news factory. This is not a game. Lives are at stake. You all need to do better. See me.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is now touring; see stewartlee.co.uk for details