The National:

MATT Hancock is not a popular Tory.

After news broke of an affair he was having with an aide he’d hired on taxpayer cash, the calls for his resignation became deafening. He had no choice but to step down.

Previously, Dominic Cummings allegedly revealed that the now former health secretary had been called “totally f***ing hopeless” and “useless” by his own Prime Minister.

And now, the former Cabinet Secretary has had another top colleague, Michael Gove, “like” a tweet pointing to his “cruelty and greed”.

The National: Michael Gove called any notion of another referendum before 2024 "foolish"

Gove (above), the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Cabinet Office minister, was apparently reading the replies to a tweet from Guardian columnist Marina Hyde when he “liked” the post in question.

Hyde had shared an article from Gove’s wife Sarah Vine, in which she praised former prime minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha for their ability to keep family life high on their priority list despite having high-powered jobs.

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Given Vine’s marriage to Gove, Hyde said there was “quite a lot going on here” as she shared the post on Twitter.

One user of the social media platform wrote in reply: “Sarah Vine & Gove admire Camerons so much they stabbed them in the back?

“Hancock & his side chick knew each other for 20 yrs as they went to the same Oxford Uni & deemed out of his league but now resolved by few millions of NHS contract to her brother? Hancock = cruelty & greed.”

Reports have said that Gina Coladangelo, the former university friend for whom Hancock has now left his wife, has a brother who is an executive director of a firm which has won NHS contracts.

However the firm, Partnering Health Limited (PHL Group), has denied any wrongdoing and said the contracts it has won were properly awarded.

The post which made the allegations was “liked” by Gove, but the interaction has since been removed.

Hyde noticed that Gove had liked the post, and shared another tweet showing it. She accompanied it with a still from the movie Dangerous Liaisons.

Lionel Barber, the former editor of the Financial Times, commented: “Civil war does not even begin to describe what is going on inside the Conservative party in 2021.

“Beats Blair-Brown psychodrama any day....”

The reply to Hyde’s post was, temporarily, one of just 98 tweets which Michael Gove has ever “liked”. Now there are just 97.

Of these, a fair few are tweets Gove wrote himself.

One recent one is from SNP MP John Nicolson. It says that Tory Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden “should worry less about statues and more about the Brexit visa mess”.

Another odd "like" from Gove is one in which a social media user attacks his "idiocy".

And yet another in which he is labelled "pathetic".