Michael Gove has said he does not yet know if everything he did during his controversial four year period as education secretary was right.

The former education secretary was speaking during an hour-long profile on the Fern Britton Meets… programme on BBC1 this morning.

It comes two weeks after he admitted making “many” mistakes in government.

Asked why he thought he was sacked as education secretary in 2014, he said: “I think ultimately I got involved in too many arguments. As to whether or not everything I did was right, it’s still, for me, too soon to make that judgement.

“I’m really heartened by the fact that there are people who are, I think, objective about it who think that education improved over those four years.”

His wife, journalist Sarah Vine, told the programme about her anger after David Cameron demoted him to chief whip.

Following the cabinet reshuffle, Ms Vine tweeted a link to an article by Sir Max Hastings in the Daily Mail saying “it was a shoddy day’s work that David Cameron would live to regret”.

She told the BBC: “I get Italian about these things. I was really cross with them.

“Michael worked his absolute heart out, and the teachers hated it and the unions hated it, and he took all that opprobrium and all those people saying all those horrible things.

“I think just suddenly having the rug pulled out from underneath you like that was just bad form.”

Ms Britton challenged Mr Gove on the scale of his reforms, which she said turned the education system “upside down”.

In response, he said change was necessary because young people were getting qualifications that employers did not trust, and bright students were arriving at university without skills in spelling, punctuation and grammar, or essay writing.

Told that children now had “tremendous anxiety” because of the amount of homework they are set, he said the amount his children received was “demanding” but not “excessive”.

He said his priorities as a benchbench MP included campaigning to help children who are abused or neglected.

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