‘We should have been bolder’

24 January 2007

Lord Adonis of Camden Town has more reason than most to be passionate about state education. He was, in effect, brought up by the state after being placed in a care home in Camden with his sister at the age of three. His Cypriot father lived in a nearby council house, but was working round the clock and only saw his children at weekends. The council then sent him to board at Kingham High School in the Cotswolds — an education which today costs £12,000 a year. From there, he went to Oxford, the Financial Times, the Observer and No. 10.

It is a path he wants many more to follow. He lobbies for vulnerable children to be sent to boarding schools and has also signed up two private schools to become City Academies: Belvedere School in Liverpool (alma mater of his former No. 10 colleague Baroness Morgan) and William Hulme School in Manchester (which educated Ivan Lewis, the health minister). Lord Adonis could easily use the language of the Left, and say these schools are being nationalised. Instead, he makes no apology for saying that the direct-grant school is back.

‘I see this as the basis for a direct-grant model for the future,’ he says. ‘A lot of independent day schools are looking to see what happens at Belvedere and William Hulme. I think it’s quite possible we could have 20, 30 or 40 of those within a few years.’

We’re halfway into the interview, and I have only asked five questions. I hardly needed to ask any. Lord Adonis speaks with the passion of an evangelist and the speed of a horse-racing commentator; he manages (I timed it later) 255 words per minute. It is as if he is trying to do and say as much as he can before the Brownite guillotine descends. He talks about his plans to write a book on his hero, Roy Jenkins, and perhaps one on his time in government.

‘My critique of the Blair years — and I’ll be writing a book in due course about it — will be that we had all of the right ideas but we could have been constantly bolder with the pace of implementation.’ But he did as much as the Labour party would let him. ‘I think we went to the limits of what was possible at any one time.’ This raises the question: would a Conservative government find it easier to implement?