Lord adonis

The Guardian has published a piece by Andrew Adonis urging Oxford and Cambridge to set up ‘access colleges’ which would only admit applicants from comprehensives. I’ve long been a fan of Adonis. He did more to drive up standards in state schools as a Labour education minister than most Conservatives do as education secretaries. Unlike his partisan colleagues, he has also been wholly supportive of the free schools programme and gave me some much needed words of encouragement when I was trying to set one up. So I was disappointed to see him resurrect this old idea. The last time it was run up the flagpole, five years ago, I

Since leaving government, Lord Adonis has busied himself as a chief cheerleader for the campaign to stop Brexit. The Remain champion is on a mission to overturn the EU referendum result – criticising Brexit figures such as Nigel Farage for  kickstarting a ‘deeply xenophobic and misogynistic’ movement. However, this doesn’t mean Adonis thinks everyone should be welcomed to the UK with open arms. Speaking at Cambridge University, the Labour grandee hit out at Cambridge vice-chancellor Stephen Toope over his £365,000 salary. In an interview with Varsity, the former transport secretary suggests Toope came to the UK ‘because somehow he was going to be paid more than for a Canadian university’. He goes

Oh dear. Lord Adonis brought Theresa May’s Christmas holiday to an abrupt end yesterday with the news that he is resigning as the government’s infrastructure tsar, citing the Prime Minister’s Brexit direction and the government bail-out the Stagecoach/Virgin East Coast rail franchise. Not one to go quietly, Adonis penned a rather eccentric resignation letter – or several depending which account you believe – claiming Brexit is causing a nervous breakdown across Whitehall that resembles Suez. Government sources are keen to play down Adonis’s departure as a case of walking before he was pushed – saying that this is a man who wants to stop Brexit. While Mr S will leave readers

Andrew Adonis, the former Labour Transport Secretary and newly non-affiliated peer, has quit as the government’s infrastructure tsar, slamming the Prime Minister’s Brexit direction in the process. Here’s the full text: Dear Prime Minister, The hardest thing in politics is to bring about lasting change for the better, and I believe in co-operation across parties to achieve it. In this spirit I was glad to accept reappointment last year as Chair of the independent National Infrastructure Commission, when you also reaffirmed your support for HS2, which will help overcome England’s north-south divide when it opens in just eight years time. I would like to thank you for your courtesy in

Last Wednesday, following what National Grid casually referred to as ‘multiple plant breakdowns’ of a number of power stations – desperate attempts had to be made to find back-up power supplies to keep the lights on throughout the evening. It was a clear demonstration of the dangers of the UK’s outmoded power network and successive failures of policy. And before anyone starts bleating about the government’s slashing of wind and solar subsidies, the wind wasn’t blowing and the sun wasn’t shining, so they were unable to help out at a time of crisis. As a result, there was little spare power to cover the gap. This meant that at one

A key theme of this Tory conference will be the party running its tanks all over Labour’s lawn while the party indulges in splendid in-fighting. And George Osborne’s speech tomorrow will contain another big tank rumbling over another part of the party’s lawn. He has persuaded Lord Adonis to resign the party whip in order to become a cross bench peer and chair an independent National Infrastructure Commission. Adonis has issued this statement: ‘Without big improvements to its transport and energy systems, Britain will grind to a halt. I am pleased to accept the Chancellor’s invitation to establish the National Infrastructure Commission as an independent body able to advise Government

The Tories are very keen to sabotage Ed Miliband’s big speech about rebalancing the British economy, which is probably a compliment to the Labour leader as it suggests that they think he might be onto something. Both parties are certainly engaged in a localism arms race at the moment, arguing that they’re the party that really trusts voters and wants to give them back the power over their own lives. But Miliband appears to have made a bit of a statistical error which is allowing his opponents to create a bit of a sideshow to distract from the launch of Lord Adonis’ final report on growth. In his speech, the

Ed Miliband has been singing the praises of New Towns in tonight’s Standard, saying a Labour government would use these developments to help solve London’s housing crisis. He writes: ‘A key plank will be creating new towns in sustainable locations where people want to live, just like earlier generations did in places such as Stevenage and Milton Keynes. Labour will kick-start the next generation of new towns and garden cities around the capital to ease the pressure on London.’ Although he doesn’t say it, it’s a reasonably safe bet that the Labour leader is thinking of Ebbsfleet when he talks about a sustainable location where people want to live. That’s

Newcastle upon Tyne Andrew Adonis is not your conventional ‘retired’ politician. The sprightly 50-year-old shadow infrastructure minister remains more influential than his current job title suggests. After running Tony Blair’s policy unit at No. 10, Adonis kick-started the academies programme and paved the way for Michael Gove’s education revolution. Under Gordon Brown he rose to Secretary of State for Transport, where he renationalised the East Coast railway and conceived High Speed 2. Adonis took a central role in Labour’s failed coalition negotiations with the Lib Dems (a party he was once a candidate for) before quitting frontline politics. Today, Adonis is more instrumental to Labour than ever, leading Ed Miliband’s

For years, words ‘skills’ and ‘crisis’ have been joined in British political discourse. It’s a problem that no one seems able to crack and on May 2nd, The Spectator is holding a conference to get to the bottom of it. Labour excelled at explaining the problem. When Gordon Brown went through his phase of ennobling bankers and asking them to decide government policy, he asked Lloyds’ Sandy Leitch to conduct the Skills Review which found that Britain does well at educating its elite, but not well with others. Germany, by contrast, has 60pc of youngsters in upper secondary education in vocational training. Half of all German pupils in vocational training spend more