Why Leave campaign is personal and political for Gove
The personal is political.
As an Aberdonian schoolboy in the 1970s, the man who's now the Lord Chancellor saw his dad's fish merchant business go to the wall.
Over rowies (Aberdeen buttery rolls to the uninitiated) and tea, he and his parents, Christine and Ernie, flicked through family photos - including of Mr Gove's grandfather who had started the business more than a 100 years ago that in the end, went under.
The family blamed the European Common Fisheries policy then, and they blame it now. Mr Gove's father said it just "ruined the Scottish fishing industry, it all went downhill".
For Mr Gove, his early experience, followed then by what he described as "airy-fairy theorising" about Europe at university in the 1980s that had little connection with real lives, was enough to persuade him that the European Union is a flawed institution and we should vote to leave.
As you'd expect, by now, Mr Gove isn't deterred by the economic warnings about Brexit, including the doom-laden ones from his close colleagues.
The accusations that the "outers" just don't have a plan for the economy seemed like water off a duck's back.
He was however, as you would probably also expect, visibly uncomfortable when I asked him what it was like for his close friend David Cameron to accuse him and Boris Johnson of "untruths".
He said, perhaps not entirely convincingly, that he didn't mind that at all and wants the PM to stay in number 10 until 2020, whatever happens.
But Mr Gove seems if not perhaps confident, then resolute, that this vote will change things.
He said on 23 June people will give a "very clear instruction to the establishment that they want a change in direction".
It sounds rather like he expects the outers to take on the rest and win.