I have been commissioned to write a libretto about Tarzan by an American minimalist composer who wishes to remain anonymous, and who, I suspect, will have little difficulty in doing so. My new patron initially thought the apeman story a worthy operatic subject, having noticed the inherent musicality of Tarzan’s famous cry: “Ooh-ee-oh-ee-oh-ee-oh-ee-oh-ee-ooh”. Our Tarzan must be a tenor, who looks good in a loincloth, and has the ability to sing and swing on a vine at the same time. In the world of opera, this significantly narrows the field. At first, I wondered if the raising of a human child by apes was an appropriate story for an opera, but as I began my research at the British Library this month, it suddenly seemed more relevant than ever.

Last weekend, Michael Gove maintained that Ukip members should be allowed to foster or adopt children, irrespective of their politics. Gove is ideally placed to comment as he is an adopted man and thus a huge asset for the Conservative party. Unlike his colleagues, Gove wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and by the time his friends from the Bullingdon Club had offered him theirs to lick he had moved on to knives and forks anyway, which I have often witnessed him deploy with forensic accuracy and dispassionate precision upon any morsel of food foolish enough to fall into his dish.

But do the politics of an adoptee’s parents, or of anyone’s parents, affect their children? Gove’s adoptive family were Labour voters. He is a Conservative. Were Gove’s biological parents Conservatives, and if so, is Conservatism something that is passed on genetically, like eczema? Was there nothing Gove’s adoptive family could do to nurture his nature, just as Gregory Peck in The Omen could not change the fact that his adopted son Damien was the offspring of Satan and a goat? And is Gove’s view on the Ukip parents an honest one, born of heartfelt personal experience, or is it, given Ukip’s growing power, politically expedient to confirm to their supporters that they could make fit parents?

Deep in a British Library vault, I found a set of late-1880s letters exchanged between the then prime minister, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, and the explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley is famous for his catchphrase “Dr Livingstone, I presume”, which finally rang true after decades of irrelevance when, quite by chance, he encountered a physician of that name at Lake Tanganyika in 1871. The letters shed some light on both the possible inspiration for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic 1912 novel, Tarzan of the Apes, and on the current Ukip fostering controversy.

Exploring the Belgian Congo in 1889, Stanley was made aware of the existence of an abandoned boy, whom he presumed four years old, being raised by presumably friendly apes. In a derelict treehouse, documents and personal effects led Stanley to presume the child a British aristocrat. Stanley presumed to write to the prime minister, himself an aristocrat, asking if he should presume to take the noble child from the ape family that were raising him, quite successfully, irrespective of their simian ways. I began to search the archives for Cecil’s reply. In the meantime, I instant-messaged Michael Gove to ask him what he would have done had he been in Cecil’s position.

I have known Michael Gove personally for over half my life. We first met in 1985 at the launch party for a prestigious book, compiling poetry by and about privileged teenagers, called “Independent Voices III”, in which we both featured. My poem, though of no value, was better than Gove’s, which was a twisted and impotent declaration of moral superiority to the sort of bedpost-notching yahoo rugby boys whose interests he now serves. Seven years later, “Govey” remembered me and asked me to be a joke writer for the struggling comedy triple act he had formed with David Baddiel and the restaurant critic Tracey MacLeod. We still exchange Christmas cards.

“Hi. Nice 2 hear from U!” Gove texted back. “Glad the comedy is going well 4 U. In answer to your question, I think it would have been wrong in 1889, as it is now, to say that a child should be taken from a loving home when parents have been successfully looking after him or her for years, simply because they were apes and ate roots and grubs and lived in trees. Then, as now, we need less ideology when it comes to making sure children are in loving homes. Anyone who decided that being an ape, on what was by then a mainstream branch of the primate family tree, disbarred an individual from looking after children was sending a dreadful signal. C U @ Baddiel’s @ NYEve! Lol! Govey.”

Unlike Michael Gove’s honest and straightforward reply, the then prime minister’s response to Stanley’s letters, when I finally uncovered it, was a familiar exercise in political pragmatism. In the three decades since the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, many learned men had come to accept the shared ancestry of apes and humans, and the Women’s Liberal Federation were uniting disparate suffrage organisations. Cecil’s recommendations reflected match-fit political survival instincts that Darwinists would have recognised immediately.

“Should women get the vote,” Cecil wrote to Stanley, “it seems inevitable to me that apes, who, if anything, seem to have more in common with men than women do, will soon be able to vote too. I see no reason to offend millions of potential supporters in British colonies by categorising them as unfit parents at such an early stage in ape-human relations. Despite my declared and well-documented hostility to apes, the boy must remain where he is.”

Thankfully, today’s politicians are noble enough to ignore Ukip’s potentially vital role in deciding the future of government and make pronouncements based only on what is best for children. Gove’s distant precursor, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, put politics before the welfare of the young. And yet, within a century, the great apes were all but extinct. Cecil’s fear of primates wielding political influence turned out to be a delusion as ludicrous as the idea that the Liberal Democrats might one day do the same.

Oddly, interior scenes for the 1984 Tarzan film Greystoke were shot at Hatfield House, the historic family home to Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, on whose orders a little lord’s life was betrayed, perhaps providing the raw material for Burroughs’s Tarzan. Was the production’s location finder, I wonder, self-indulgently abusing their professional position to enjoy a personal private joke that only they, and they alone, could appreciate?

Stewart Lee’s Carpet Remnant World DVD is out now.