Split personality | 2 May 2019

The news over Easter that Lord Adonis, the counterweight to nominative determinism, was standing as a Labour Remain MEP was greeted with a fair degree of scepticism. Many commented that it would be a novelty for him to stand for anything — in his early twenties he became an SDP councillor in Oxford, but that’s the last time he was elected to anything. His career has been based entirely on patronage, mainly from Tony Blair, who plucked him from journalism (he worked for the Financial Times and then the Observer) to run his policy unit, and then made him a peer so that he could become minister for education. (Adonis is still good friends with Blair, and says: ‘He’s unchanged. He is God’s gift to charisma and dynamism.’) He stayed on as transport minister under Gordon Brown but assumed his political career was over when Labour was defeated in 2010. But then — ta da! — Brexit came along and he threw himself into campaigning against it. So far, his weapons have been tweets and speeches, but now he is actually standing for election for the south-west and Gibraltar, and it will be interesting to see how he fares. He spent the Easter weekend travelling all over the south-west, from Plymouth to Penzance, tweeting photo-graphs of railway stations along the way. I hope he doesn’t forget Gibraltar.

We met just before he set off, at the House of Lords HQ at 1 Millbank. He was tail-waggingly eager, and immediately gave me a signed copy of his latest book, Saving Britain (written with Will Hutton), and showed me round his office. It is dominated by a huge blown-up photograph of Gladstone (‘My hero — he comes with me everywhere’) and a lot of photographs of himself in academic dress collecting various honorary degrees (his original degree was an Oxford first, in history) and one of him launching Crossrail with Boris.