“He was suddenly surrounded by this angry mob of nutters, screaming about ‘totalitarian lockdowns’, ‘Covid hoax’ and other crazy stuff – they really wild, eyes bulging, faces red, shaking their fists, I was convinced they were going to string him up from a lamppost,” Henry Fripps, who witnessed the recent confrontation between Housing Secretary Michael Gove and a mob of anti-lockdown protestors explained to the Daily Norks. “But then he just stared at them and, incredibly, they all stopped shouting and became passive, before walking away. It was incredible, as they meekly moved off, I even heard some of them mumbling about how they were going to go and get vaccinated and wear masks in shops! It was if he had hypnotised them with his eyes!” The tabloid newspaper subsequently tracked down some of the protestors and confirmed that many had, indeed, now received their first Covid vaccine shots, two were even photographed wearing masks and social distancing in a Westminster branch of Tesco Express. Neither Mr Gove nor his department would comment on the incident, which has sparked much media speculation as to the top Tory’s reputed hypnotic powers. “Their existence have often been rumoured,” notes Daily Norks Parliamentary Correspondent Frank Limp. “many have theorised that those glasses he wears aren’t to correct his vision, but rather to somehow magnify his glowing eyes when they are in full hypno mode.”

According to notorious left wing journalist Nick Swarm, the quelling of the anti-lockdown protestors and their conversion to a belief in the efficacy of anti-Covid vaccines, represents a rare occurrence of Gove using his powers for good. “If that was all that ‘Hypno-Gove’ was using his powers for – taking crazy conspiracy nutters off the street – then I wouldn’t have a problem with him possessing that mesmerising gaze, but the fact is that he usually employs it for evil,” Swarm told an astonished Robert Peston on a recent edition of the latter’s ITV politics show. “Most obviously, he has used it to hynotise the voters of Surrey into electing him as their MP. I mean, why else would anybody vote for such a smarmy, insincere little shit?” Swarm argues that Gove’s use of his powers have become ever more ambitious. “How do you think he manages to keep a place in the cabinet under successive Prime Ministers, despite undermining and back-stabbing their predecessors in pursuit of his own ambitions?” he asks. “Obviously, he’s turning jis hypnotic gaze on them and convincing them that he his totally loyal, efficient and ‘on message’, when the opposite is patently true.”

The biggest fraud Gove has perpetrated through his evil powers, opines the journalist, is surely Brexit. “What other reason could there possibly have been for the ‘Leave’ camp to allow him to front much of their campaign during the referendum?” he contends. “On the face of it, you wouldn’t have thought that there was anyone more likely to repel voters than Gove, yet they won the bloody vote! Obviously because, during his TV appearances, he hypnotised half the nation into voting against their best interests!” But, claims Swarm, who has previously claimed that Gove ‘looked like the sort who might make obscene phone calls to women’, the minister’s abuse of his powers go beyond the political sphere, pointing to a series of recent newspaper claims by women up and down the UK. “I was at home watching the TV, catching a bit of the Tory Annual Conference, when that Michael Gove started making his speech,” forty two year old Vera Crubble from Preston told the Daily Norks last week, for instance. “His voice was so smooth and calming and all I could hear him say, over and over, was ‘look into my eyes’ – they seemed to glowbehind those glasses. I just couldn’t look away. Next thing I knew, I was taking off my clothes!” The housewife’s ordeal only ended when her husband walked into the living room, to find her standing in front of the television, almost naked. “He came in just as I was taking my bra off,” recalls Crubble. “Thankfully, he had the presence of mind to kick the TV screen in – he got Gove right in the face – and the spell was broken. Although I still find myself feeling an urge to vote Tory, even though I know it is wrong!”

Swarm alleges that the terrible experiences of Crubble and other women show that no female is safe from the hypnotic gaze of Gove. “He’s utterly relentless in his pursuit of women. Even more so now that he’s separated from his wife,” he asserts. “Just look at that recent incident where he was filmed raving away in that nightclub – obviously attempting to hypnotise young women for his nefarious purposes!” Indeed, Swarm claims to have heard first hand accounts of some of the appalling things Gove has allegedly forced women to do while under his hypnotic power. “These two girls from Hull told me of how they met Gove in a club and were telling him of the woes of their fisherman fathers since Brexit had disrupted their European sales,” he says. “Next thing they knew, they were back in his flat, naked, slapping each other with fish while he sat on the sofa and laughed. The evil bastard!” Swarm concedes that he has no independent corroboration for the story and the two girls later admitted that they were drunk and that it might not have been Gove they met, but rather a stage hypnotist who had been performing there that night. “But they do remember that he was wearing glasses,” he says. “But damn it, it is clear that Gove has these sorts of powers – he just looks like the sort of creepy little nerd who would hypnotise women into taking off their clothes!”

But just where does Gove derive these alleged powers from? Was he born with them? Or did he learn them from a secret cult in a monastery high in the mountains of Tibet? “The popular consensus is that he was actually taught them by the late magician Paul Daniels,” muses Swarm. “Supposedly it happened after one of Daniels’ stage shows in Henley-on-Thames, which Gove had attended – he was impressed by the diminutive wig-wearing magician’s ability to pull fit younger birds like his assistant, the lovely Debbie McGee, and asked him for the secret.” Despite the fact that he can produce no concrete evidence to back up his claims about Gove’s alleged hypnotic powers, Swarm claims to have had first hand experience of them. “I was interviewing him for a newspaper and under his mesmeric gaze, I found myself wanting to write that he was charming, reasonable and intelligent, rather than describing him as a smarmy, deceitful and pretentious little shit,” he says. “Thankfully, I had the resolve to resist his evil powers – I just kept thinking of Karl Marx.” He adds that the supposed lack of evidence for Gove’s power is further proof that he is using these powers to hypnotise the media into a state of denial about them. “The man’s a menace,” he asserts. “He’s the reason the Tories seem unassailable in the polls, regardless of how venal, corrupt and incompetent they are – he’s hypnotising the nation into believing their lies and that Boris Johnson is fit to be Prime Minister!”