Lord Adonis served as Secretary of State for Transport from 2009 to 2010, and as Chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission from 2015 to 2017.
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34 Facts About Lord Adonis
2.
Lord Adonis is Chairman of the European Movement, having previously served as Vice-Chairman from 2019 to 2021.
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3.
Lord Adonis began his career as an academic at Oxford University, before becoming a journalist at the Financial Times and later The Observer.
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4.
Lord 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.
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5.
Lord Adonis remained in that role when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, before becoming Minister of State for Transport in 2008.
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7.
Lord Adonis's 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.
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8.
Lord Adonis is a strong supporter and advocate of the European Union and a vocal opponent of Brexit.
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9.
Lord Adonis's mother left the family when he was three, and she has had no communication with him since.
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10.
Lord 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.
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12.
From 1991 to 1996, Lord Adonis was an education and industry correspondent at the Financial Times, eventually becoming their public policy editor.
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13.
From 1987 until 1991, Lord Adonis served as an Oxford City Councillor for the Social Democratic Party and later the Liberal Democrats, representing the North Ward.
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14.
Lord Adonis withdrew from the process before the election upon being offered a position in the Number 10 Policy Unit as a constitutional and educational policy advisor in 1997.
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16.
Lord Adonis 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.
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17.
In 2006 Lord 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.
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18.
On 5 June 2009, Lord Adonis was promoted to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Transport and was sworn a member of the Privy Council.
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19.
In July 2015, Lord Adonis was appointed a non-executive director to HS2 Board Ltd.
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20.
Lord Adonis 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.
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21.
Lord Adonis was a key figure in the aftermath of the 2010 general election, which produced a hung parliament.
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22.
Lord Adonis was reputed to favour a Lib–Lab deal and, given his SDP background, was a member of Labour's negotiating team that attempted to form an administration with the Liberal Democrats.
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23.
Lord Adonis later returned to active politics in 2012, as part of Ed Miliband's Shadow Cabinet reshuffle.
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24.
Lord Adonis 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, and overseeing the Armitt Review looking at future infrastructure plans for the Labour Party.
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25.
In July 2010, Lord Adonis became the director of the Institute for Government, an independent charity with cross-party support and Whitehall governance working to improve government effectiveness.
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26.
Lord Adonis left the Institute for Government in January 2012, to become Chair of Progress, an internal Labour Party organisation.
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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.
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28.
Lord Adonis considered standing to be Labour's candidate for Mayor of London in 2016, but ended his putative campaign in February 2015, endorsing Tessa Jowell.
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29.
Lord Adonis claimed that "taking us back into Europe will become the mission of our children's generation".
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30.
On 15 April 2018 Lord 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.
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31.
In 2018, Lord Adonis became a weekly columnist for The New European, a newly created newspaper which campaigned against Brexit and supported the People's Vote campaign.
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32.
Lord Adonis was a participant at the 30 May - 2 June 2019 Bilderberg Meeting at Montreux, Switzerland.
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33.
Lord Adonis advocated a rapid reopening of UK schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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34.
Lord Adonis was formerly married to Kathryn Davies, who had been a student of his; the couple had two children.
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