Rupert Murdoch. Photo: Screenshot.

Britain’s political landscape changed last month, media mogul Rupert Murdoch said Monday night, when Prime Minister David Cameron claimed “victory in the negotiations with fellow European leaders on Britain’s right to control its borders.”

However, said Murdoch — founder and CEO of News Corporation, the world’s second-largest media conglomerate, and its successors News Corp and 21st Century Fox  — “For [UK Secretary of State for Justice] Michael Gove, that victory was little more than the paper it was written on, as it failed to deliver the fundamental reforms that had been promised.” Mere hours later, Murdoch went on, “Gove’s skepticism about Europe had crystallized into a brilliant critique, which now stands as a defining manifesto for Britain’s campaign to leave [the European Union].”

Murdoch was addressing a 600-strong, star-studded audience at the third annual Algemeiner “Jewish 100 Gala” in New York, where he introduced Gove, who was presented with the Warrior for Truth Award.

Coming out against Cameron’s decision to remain in the EU was Murdoch’s example of why Gove was deserving of the honor, as it “placed [him] into direct conflict with his personal friends, David Cameron and the chancellor George Osborne, whose political lives depend on Britain’s choosing to remain in Europe.”

In the media business himself, Murdoch first lauded Gove for his original career as a journalist and then his fast rise in politics, marked, he said, by “qualities rare in modern politics: integrity, intellectual rigor and, rarest of all, personal courage.”

Gove’s stand on the EU, said Murdoch, “surprised some fellow Tories, but not those who’ve known him all his political life, especially his wife and newspaper columnist Sarah Vine,” who was also in attendance at the gala.

Murdoch then quoted from a February op-ed by Vine in the Daily Mail: “My husband has many odd and occasionally irritating obsessions… But few passions trump his dislike of the EU. The profligacy, the back-scratching, the deceit, the endless bureaucracy, the unstoppable march of European federalism — and, above all else, the erosion of British sovereignty.”

Wrapping up his tribute, Murdoch said that “much depends on the outcome of the referendum on June 23, just three months before polls,” adding that Gove is now being talked about as a potential prime minister.

Watch Rupert Murdoch’s full address below: