“A learner all his life”

After Michael Gove praised Andrew Adonis (pictured) with revolting treacliness as one of his two heroes (the other was Theodore Roosevelt), the former minister and author of Education, Education, Education came to talk to the Mile End Group at Queen Mary, University of London last night.

Adonis delivered a virtuoso lecture on how to be a reformer in government.

One of his lessons was “build coalitions, not tabernacles”, and he said that as schools minister he always met leaders of the teachers’ unions. “It is much easier to demonise people you don’t meet,” he said. He always tried to get the conversation on to the education of their children or of their friends’.

He also said: “I don’t believe you should be an education minister if your children don’t go to state school. There are plenty of other jobs you could do.”

This may have come under the heading of “champion consumers not producers”. Which was also why, as Transport Secretary, he always used public transport, although he hinted that he had difficulty in persuading his junior ministers that they should too.

But he praised one of his junior transport ministers, John Spellar, for pushing through hard-shoulder running on motorways, which could increase their capacity by a third, because he had seen it in operation in the Netherlands. That was a reform that came under the heading of “keep it simple” yet which illustrated the endless ingenuity of bureaucrats in inventing arguments for why nothing should ever change.

He described how he persuaded sceptics to go for academy schools. “You must cast your arguments in as conservative a language as possible,” he said, saying he avoided any argument at all, preferring simply to visit underperforming schools with the local council leader, the director of education and the MP. “The director of education and the leader of the council had usually never been to the school before, which tells you something.” And he would use the power of government over budgets. “Money is a much more important driver of reform than legislation.”

He was asked whether he had been involved as Transport Secretary in the bids for the West Coast main line franchise. He said yes, and that “blaming junior civil servants” for mistakes in the bidding, before an inquiry, was “immoral and really disgraceful”. It was “not the way that ministers should conduct themselves” and it would have “big consequences”.

And he had an interesting view on the expansion of Heathrow, which was, of course, his policy when he was in Gordon Brown’s government. He said that 30 per cent of all residents affected by aircraft noise in the whole of Europe live near Heathrow,* which explains why it is so hard to secure consent for a new runway there.

Asked if he had changed his mind on anything, he quoted Gladstone, who said as he formed his fourth government at the age of 82, “I have been a learner all my life.” He had changed his mind about ethnic monitoring, which was promoted in schools by Ken Livingstone, and which has helped non-white people to see how badly their children are served by the education system. And he has changed his mind about trade unions, he said. They are needed to counter the power of the elite and to press for a more equal distribution of earnings.

As I have said before, buy his book. It is probably the most important political book of the year.

*Update, 2 November: it took me a while to get round to checking his figure, which was “nearly half”: 30 per cent is still an extraordinarily high proportion.

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• james oliver

  he’s learnt nothing

• Pacificweather

  Or prevent revolving doors corruption in the MOD or sack senior (as opposed to junior) civil servants for incompetence or prevent the head of PFI policy at the Treasury from being seconded from one of the firms receiving a PFI contact.

• http://www.facebook.com/tomin.london.3 Tomin London

  Adonis was certainly a learner when it came to understanding the economics of transport planning. His was the painfully ill-informed idea of building HS2, which is now being pursued by the Friends of the Construction Industry (aka “The British Government”).

  Don’t buy Adonis’ worthless book, puffed here by Tony Blair’s PR man the execrable Rentoul. Instead, read (for free) why Adonis is a self-taught inadequate opportunist in all matters of transport planning: just Google for “High Speed 2: the next government project disaster?” and read the report by the Insitute for Economic Affairs.

• creggancowboy

  Or illegal arms sales to Indonesia?

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Deepinder-Cheema/100001432856297 Deepinder Cheema

  Is this a private hobby horse or can anyone jump on?

• SophieMarshall

  This sounds like a worthwhile read, thanks.

• porkfright

  There are far too many books about education and far too few people who have any track-record of success within teaching. That by default includes most ministers of education and nearly all of Ofsted.

• creggancowboy

  Enlist today. Join the 1st Derry (Irregular, very irregular) Cavalry.

• pointingto

  “Three would be interceded on the Day of Reckoning: The Prophets, then the learned, then the Martyrs”
  [sayings of the Prophet Muhammad pbuh]

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