Andrew Adonis, Baron Adonis

The Right Honourable The Lord Adonis PC
Chair of the National Infrastructure Commission
In office 21 April 2017 – 29 December 2017 Interim: 5 October 2015 – 21 April 2017
Appointed by	George Osborne Philip Hammond
Deputy	John Armitt
Preceded by	Office created
Succeeded by	John Armitt
Secretary of State for Transport
In office 5 June 2009 – 11 May 2010
Prime Minister	Gordon Brown
Preceded by	Geoff Hoon
Succeeded by	Philip Hammond
Minister of State for Transport
In office 3 October 2008 – 5 June 2009
Prime Minister	Gordon Brown
Sec. of State	Geoff Hoon
Preceded by	Rosie Winterton
Succeeded by	Sadiq Khan
Minister of State for Education
In office 11 May 2005 – 3 October 2008
Prime Minister	Tony Blair Gordon Brown
Sec. of State	Ruth Kelly Alan Johnson Ed Balls
Preceded by	Stephen Timms
Succeeded by	Jim Knight
Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit
In office 2001–2003
Prime Minister	Tony Blair
Preceded by	David Miliband
Succeeded by	Geoff Mulgan
Member of the House of Lords Lord Temporal
Incumbent
Assumed office 16 May 2005 Life peerage
Personal details
Born	Andreas Adonis (1963-02-22) 22 February 1963 Hampstead, London, England[1]
Nationality	British
Political party	Labour (1995–2015, 2017–present)
Other political affiliations	Social Democratic (1985–1987) Liberal Democrats (1987–1995)
Spouse(s)	Kathryn Davies (m. 1994; div. 2015)
Children	2
Alma mater	Keble College, Oxford Christ Church, Oxford
Profession	Journalist
Website	Official website

Andrew Adonis, Baron Adonis PC (born Andreas Adonis; 22 February 1963)^[2] is a British Labour Party politician, academic and journalist who served in the Labour Government for five years. He served as chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission in 2017, and previously interim chair from 2015 to 2017.

Adonis began his career as an academic at Oxford University, before becoming a journalist at the Financial Times and later The Observer.^[2][3][4] Adonis was appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair to be an advisor at the Number 10 Policy Unit, specialising in constitutional and educational policy, in 1998. He was later promoted to become the Head of the Policy Unit from 2001 until being made a life peer in 2005, when he was appointed to the Government soon after as Minister of State for Education.^[2][3] He remained in that role when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, before becoming Minister of State for Transport in 2008. In 2009, he was promoted to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Transport, a position he held until 2010.^[5]

Adonis has worked for a number of think tanks, is a board member of Policy Network and is the author or co-author of several books, including several studies of the British class system, the rise and fall of the Community Charge, and the Victorian House of Lords. He has also co-edited a collection of essays on Roy Jenkins. He was educated at Kingham Hill School and at Keble College and Nuffield College at Oxford.

Family and education

Adonis's father, Nikos, emigrated from Cyprus as a teenager, becoming a waiter in London, where he met Adonis's English mother.^[6] His mother left the family when he was three and she has had no communication with him since.^[6] Shortly thereafter, Adonis and his sister were placed in care because their father was working long hours and was not able to cope with sole parental responsibilities. Adonis lived in a council children's home until the age of 11, when he was awarded a local education authority grant to attend Kingham Hill School, a boarding school in Oxfordshire.^[7]

Adonis gained admittance to Keble College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern History in 1984.^[8] He continued his education at Oxford and subsequently gained a doctorate with a thesis on the British aristocracy of the late 19th century at Christ Church, before being appointed to a Fellowship in History and Politics at Nuffield College.^[2][7]

From 1991 to 1996, he was an education and industry correspondent at the Financial Times, eventually becoming their public policy editor.^[2] In 1996, he moved to The Observer to work as a political columnist, leader writer and editor.^[2]

Early political career

From 1987 until 1991, Adonis was an Oxford City Councillor for the Social Democratic Party and later the Liberal Democrats, representing the North Ward.^[2] In 1994, he was selected by the Liberal Democrats as their prospective parliamentary candidate for the Westbury constituency, but he resigned after 18 months. In the following year he joined the Labour Party.^[9]

During the mid- to late 1990s he was politically active for Labour in Islington North, the constituency represented by Jeremy Corbyn, and was selected as Labour candidate to contest St George's Ward for Islington London Borough Council in 1998. He withdrew from the process before the election, however, upon being offered a position in the Number 10 Policy Unit as a constitutional and educational policy advisor in 1997. He remained in this role until 2001, when he was promoted to become Head of the Policy Unit.

On 16 May 2005, he was created a life peer as Baron Adonis, of Camden Town in the London Borough of Camden,^[10] this elevation to membership of the House of Lords making possible his appointment as a minister.^[11]

In government

Adonis in Bristol in 2011

Adonis became the Minister of State for Education in the Department for Education and Skills, which was later renamed the Department for Children, Schools and Families. He was closely involved in the London Challenge.^[12]

Having been the architect of the academies policy in the Policy Unit, Adonis was also able to be the driving force in Government behind the programme, which replaced failing and under-performing comprehensive schools with all-ability, independently managed academies, run on a not-for profit basis. By the time he left the Department in October 2008, 133 academies were open and 300 more were in the pipeline. Evidence on the performance of academies compared to local authority schools is mixed, but on the whole suggests there is no substantial difference in performance.^[13]

Adonis also encouraged state schools to adopt practices of the private sector and generally believed in giving individual schools more independence and autonomy from central government and the local education authorities. His criticism of under-performing comprehensives made him unpopular with some trade union members and some on the Labour Party's left-wing. In 2006 Adonis supported the conversion of some independent schools under financial duress into state academies, portrayed at the time as a new style of direct grant grammar schools although not selective.^[14] Adonis was also popular with some opposition politicians, in particular the then Conservative education spokesman Michael Gove, who once declared, "We are on the same page as Andrew Adonis."^[15]

As Tony Blair's head of policy, Adonis was regarded as the architect of Tuition fees in the United Kingdom in 2004 – a policy he criticised and disowned 13 years later.^[16]

Having initially kept his position when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, Adonis was reshuffled to the Department for Transport on 3 October 2008, to become Minister of State. In May 2009, while reviewing potential cycle "super highways" with Kulveer Ranger and London Mayor Boris Johnson, the group had a "near-death" experience when a passing lorry's back door "suddenly flew open, dragged a parked car into the street and smashed into another – just feet from the group".^[17] On 5 June 2009, Adonis was promoted to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Transport and was sworn a member of the Privy Council. In this role, he pioneered the plan for High Speed 2, the proposed high-speed railway line from London to Birmingham and the north of England. The plan was published shortly before the 2010 election, and has since been adopted and taken forward, largely unchanged, by the coalition government.^[5] In July 2015, Adonis was appointed a non-executive director to HS2 Board Ltd.^[18]

Adonis also planned and announced the electrification of the Great Western Main Line from London Paddington to Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea, and the electrification of lines in North West England from Manchester to Liverpool and Manchester to Preston. This electrification programme, except for the Cardiff to Swansea section of the Great Western, was taken forward by the coalition government.

Adonis was a key figure in the aftermath of the 2010 general election, which produced a hung parliament. He was reputed to favour a Lib-Lab deal and, given his SDP background, was a member of Labour's negotiation team that attempted to form a government with the Liberal Democrats. After the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition government with the Conservative Party, Adonis stepped down from frontline politics.^[19]

Adonis later returned to active politics in 2012, as part of Ed Miliband's Shadow Cabinet reshuffle. He worked with Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna on crafting Labour's industrial strategy, and has also taken up roles as Shadow Minister for Infrastructure in the House of Lords, and overseeing the Armitt Review looking at future infrastructure plans for the Labour Party.

Subsequent career

In July 2010, Adonis became the director of the Institute for Government, an independent charity with cross-party support and Whitehall governance working to improve government effectiveness.^[20] Adonis left the Institute for Government in January 2012, to become Chair of Progress, an internal Labour Party organisation.^[21][22] Having already been appointed President of the Independent Academies Association, in 2012 Adonis was also appointed a Liveryman Honoris Causa of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, one of the major charitable promoters of academies.^[23]

He is also a Trustee of Teach First, the charity which recruits graduates to teach in state schools, a Trustee of the vocational education charity Edge, and a Governor of the Baker-Dearing Trust, which supports the establishment of University Technical Colleges, technical schools for 14- to 18-year-olds.^[24][25] He has been a Director of RM Plc since October 2011. His book on education reform – Education, Education, Education – was published by Biteback in September 2012.^[26] In November 2014, he was appointed visiting professor at King's College London.^[27]

Adonis considered standing^[28] to be Labour's candidate for Mayor of London in 2016, but ended his putative campaign in February 2015, endorsing Tessa Jowell.^[29]

In October 2015, he resigned the Labour Party whip in the House of Lords to sit as a non-affiliated Peer and lead a newly created National Infrastructure Commission (NIC). However, he resigned from the NIC in December 2017 because of the Government's approach to Brexit, saying the UK was "hurtling towards the EU's emergency exit with no credible plan for the future of British trade and European co-operation".^[30] Adonis said he planned to oppose "relentlessly" the government's European Union (Withdrawal) Bill in the House of Lords. In his resignation letter, he wrote that, as well as Brexit, the recent decision to end the InterCity East Coast rail franchise three years early, at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds, would also have forced him to quit. He also claimed that "taking us back into Europe will become the mission of our children's generation".^[31]

Responding to Adonis' description of Brexit as a "populist and nationalist spasm", Iain Duncan Smith said the departure of Lord Adonis was "long overdue"; he added: "It's a bit rich for him to pontificate on what he calls populism, but what most would refer to as democracy, when he himself has never been elected by a public vote. [sic] He has instead relied on preferment from others."^[30] On 15 April 2018 Adonis attended the launch event of the People's Vote, a campaign group calling for a public vote on the final Brexit deal between the UK and the European Union.^[32]

Personal life

Adonis was formerly married to Kathryn Davies,^[2] who was once a student of his;^[6] the couple had two children.^[7] Adonis and Davies divorced in 2015.

Styles of address

• 1963–2005: Mr Andrew Adonis
• 2005–2009: The Right Honourable The Lord Adonis
• 2009–: The Right Honourable The Lord Adonis PC

Selected publications

References

External links

• Profile at Parliament of the United Kingdom
• Contributions in Parliament at Hansard 1803–2005
• Current session contributions in Parliament at Hansard
• Voting record at PublicWhip.org
• Record in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou.com
• Profile at Westminster Parliamentary Record
• Profile at BBC News Democracy Live
• "Andrew Adonis, Baron Adonis" at The Peerage
• www.parliament.uk
• Official website