The decision of Lord Adonis to chair the first Conservative National Infrastructure Commission is a political coup for George Osborne even if the politically well-travelled peer is not defecting to the Tory party and is, in truth, implementing a policy he and the then shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, advocated at the last election.
Every governing party loves the imprimatur of an opposition politician, and Adonis is one of the most respected figures on the Labour benches in the Lords.
The Corbynite left will doubtless see his decision to sit as a cross-bencher as the first betrayal by the Blairites since Labour’s summer democratic revolution. As a former chair of Progress, Adonis will be denounced as part of the Blairite virus and his semi-departure will be taken wrongly as a sign that others who share his politics are about to defect.
His decision is certainly a sign of how much some of the most talented minds on the left sense Labour is not going to be anywhere near power in the foreseeable future, but Adonis is very much a one-off.
Unlike many in politics he combines a flair for practical policy-making and a burning desire to cut through Whitehall conservatism to implement those policies, making connections across party lines to do so. He is a doer as well as a thinker, and as such was highly rated not just by Tony Blair, but Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. All three came to see his thinking as indispensable.
At one point he considered whether to run as Labour mayor next year, but sensed he could not beat Dame Tessa Jowell for the Labour nomination and her surprise defeat in the primary may have blocked off his chief route to influence in London where he has been doing much of his recent work both on housing and Crossrail 2.
But his recruitment by Osborne is also a visible symbol of the chancellor’s willingness, jackdaw-like, to grab policies and personnel from the Labour party if he thinks a policy – like the living wage - is worth stealing. A National Infrastructure Commmission was Balls’s policy – indeed it was his chief calling card with business.
It has been less noted but Osborne also managed to recruit Lord Jim O’Neill, the left-leaning economist, to become a Treasury minister and the true brains behind the northern powerhouse. O’Neill had chaired the RSA report on the future of cities, largely expecting the policy to be adopted by Labour, but is now cheerfully negotiating on behalf of Osborne with largely Labour-run northern councils to change the face of the British state.
Adonis has that same pragmatism. A former head of the No 10 policy unit under Blair, and once a Liberal Democrat, Adonis surprised himself as a schools minister in the Blair government, becoming as much an entrepreneur as a theoretician and devoting much of his ministerial time successfully persuading businesses to act as sponsors to academies, Almost from that point, his politics has been marked by a determination to get things done, irrespective of party politics, acting as a catalyst for change, constantly challenging the forces in Whitehall and local government that prefer the quiet life and the deferred decision.
His philosophy is brilliantly summated by himself in the current issue of Prospect, arguing often essential reforms are simple, and too often simple and easy become muddled in public policy. “If simple reforms are controversial and difficult to implement because they radically challenge the status quo then politicians tend to default or waffle, half-measures of complex tweaks of the status quo, achieving little. The inaction or avoiding action, can last decades.”
He is not a half-measures man. Not surprisingly with his record of practical action he has been in high demand – chairing Crossrail 2 and then being appointed to the board of Network Rail.
He may lack his distinguished mane or private wealth, but he is in some respects a younger, more social democratic version of Lord Heseltine, in politics to secure practical change. If that means a bit of state dirigisme, much of it sitting uncomfortably alongside his devolution agenda, so be it.
It has always meant working across party lines such as during his period as transport secretary when he continually argued HS2 would only be built if both sides of the political divide remained committed. It was his influence with Miliband that probably more than anyone prevented Balls from dropping Labour support for HS2 in opposition.
But he also worked closely with Balls to develop the review on infrastructure led by Sir John Armitt that appears to be the model for what Osborne is announcing on Monday.
There will be many that cavil at the way in which a National Infrastructure Commission tramples over democratic rights, or rides roughshod over the long cherished system of planning inquiries. On paper, the commission’s powers to make decisions over transport, energy and housing look daunting. He will be a big advocate of the use of local authority public land to build houses, and will also be on to the government night and day to make a decision over Heathrow.
Much of this will be controversial. Taking the politics out of infrastructure decisions sounds easier in abstract than in reality. But it is going to be a lot harder for Labour to oppose these measures since they advocated them in opposition.
Finally all this does not mean he shares Osborne’s economics. He has repeatedly pointed out that Osborne, for all his rhetoric, was forced in the first parliament to back off from the planned austerity, deferring the deficit timetable because – faced with global recession – it simply was not appropriate. Osborne simply never admitted he had dropped Plan A, Adonis argued. He will be banging at the door of the Treasury to increase capital spending.
Nor is he a Tory. Although he has always been willing to work on a cross-party basis, notably with Heseltine, he has his tribal loyalties. His book Five Days in May, an account of the abortive coalition talks in 2010, demonstrates he worked harder than anyone to form a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition to keep the Tories out.
But with Labour maybe a decade away from power, this is his last best shot to change the face of Britain.
