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 VictorianHouse of Lords. He has also co-edited a collection of essays on Roy Jenkins. Like Jenkins, Adonis speaks with rhotacism. His latest book, Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill, is a biography of the Labour politician Ernest Bevin whom, alongside Tony Blair, Adonis regards as a source of inspiration for the modern Labour Party.
Adonis's Greek father, Nikos, emigrated from Cyprus as a teenager, becoming a waiter in London, where he met Adonis's English mother.[9] His mother left the family when he was three, and she has had no communication with him since.[9] 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.[10]
Adonis studied at Keble College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern History in 1984.[11] He pursued further studies at Oxford receiving a doctorate with a thesis entitled, The political role of the British peerage in the Third Reform Act system, c. 1885–1914 at Christ Church, before being elected a fellow in History and Politics at Nuffield College.[3][10]
From 1991 to 1996, Adonis was an education and industry correspondent at the Financial Times, eventually becoming their public policy editor.[3] In 1996, he moved to The Observer to work as a political columnist, leader writer and editor.[3]
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.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed]
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. Research[by whom?] suggests that performance at these early "sponsored" academies increased more quickly than in similar schools in the mainstream sector.[16] Policies on academies by Adonis were praised by some opposition politicians, including the then Conservative education spokesman Michael Gove, who in 2008 said, "We are on the same page as Andrew Adonis."[17]
He 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, although he voted against schools having more independent authority in the houses of parliament in 2006. 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.[18]
As Tony Blair's head of policy, Adonis was regarded as the architect of tuition fees in 2004 – a policy he criticised and disowned 13 years later.[19]
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 then-London Mayor Boris Johnson, the group had a narrow escape 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".[20]
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 by subsequent governments, with some changes to the proposed route. In July 2015, Adonis was appointed a non-executive director to HS2 Board Ltd.[21]
Adonis later returned to active politics in 2012, as part of Ed Miliband's Shadow Cabinet reshuffle. He worked with former Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna on crafting Labour's industrial strategy, and previously took up the role of Shadow Minister for Infrastructure in the House of Lords,[23] and overseeing the Armitt Review looking at future infrastructure plans for the Labour Party.[24]
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.[23] Adonis left the Institute for Government in January 2012, to become Chair of Progress, an internal Labour Party organisation.[25][26] Having been appointed President of the Independent Academies Association, in 2012, Adonis was also admitted as a LiverymanHonoris Causa of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, one of the major charitable promoters of academies.[27]
Lord Adonis is a Trustee of Teach First, the charity which recruits graduates to teach in state schools, as well as 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.[28][29] 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.[30] In November 2014, he was appointed visiting professor at King's College London.[31]
Adonis considered standing[32] to be Labour's candidate for Mayor of London in 2016, but ended his putative campaign in February 2015, endorsing Tessa Jowell.[33]
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 HM 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".[34] 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 Coastrail 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".[35] 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.[36]
In 2018, Adonis also became a weekly columnist for The New European, a newly created newspaper which campaigned against Brexit and supported the People's Vote campaign.
In May 2021, Adonis called for Tony Blair to return to frontline politics in the wake of a poll being released showing Labour 15% behind the Conservatives.[40]
Personal life
Adonis was formerly married to Kathryn Davies,[3] who had been a student of his;[9] the couple had two children.[10] Adonis and Davies divorced in 2015. In a profile in the Evening Standard from May 2019, the journalist Julian Glover reported that Adonis was gay.[41] Adonis would indeed come out as gay in an exclusive interview with the i newspaper later that year in October 2019.[42]
Will Hutton, Andrew Adonis (2018). Saving Britain: How We Must Change To Prosper In Europe. Abacus: Little, Brown Book Group, London. ISBN978-1408711224.
Andrew Adonis, ed. (2018). Half In Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe. Biteback Publishing. ISBN978-1785904349.
Andrew Adonis (2020). Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill. Biteback Publishing. ISBN978-1785905988.
Articles
Our progressives only look dead (prospects for a revival of progressivism in the United Kingdom), 1996, Andrew Adonis
Book reviews
Year
Review article
Work(s) reviewed
2014
Adonis, Andrew (21 November 2014). "Boney's bungles". New Statesman. 143 (5237): 45.
Roberts, Andrew (2014). Napoleon the Great. London: Allen Lane.
Ben PimlottThe Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth II – book review, 1996, Andrew Adonis
Christopher Booker and Richard NorthThe Castle of Lies: Why Britain Must Get Out of Europe – book review, 1996, Andrew Adonis
Anthony BarnettThis Time: Our Constitutional Revolution – book review, 1996, Andrew Adonis
Shirley WilliamsClimbing the Bookshelves: the Autobiography – book review, 2009, Andrew Adonis
Roy HattersleyDavid Lloyd George: the Great Outsider – book review, 2010, Andrew Adonis
David Laws22 Days in May: The Birth of the Lib Dem-Conservative Coalition – book review, 2010, Andrew Adonis
Chris Bowers Nick Clegg: the Biography – book review, 2011, Andrew Adonis
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