Education, transport, industrial policy, Michael Heseltine … post your questions for the Labour peer
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Lord Adonis is a shadow infrastructure minister in the Lords. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
As well as being the architect of the New Labour academies programme, Andrew Adonis has been head of Tony Blair's policy unit, an education minister, transport secretary and director of the Institute for Government. He's now a shadow infrastructure minister in the Lords as well as the person reviewing industrial policy for Ed Miliband. I'm interviewing him this week. What do you want me to ask?
Adonis is not doing an education job at the moment, but he's recently published a book about the academies programme, Education, Education, Education: Reforming England's Schools, that I'll want to raise. It's an excellent book, not so much because of the vigour with which Adonis defends his policies but because it's one of the few ministerial memoirs that fully gets to grips with how and why significant change does (and doesn't happen) in Whitehall. "In my experience, charisma, persuasion, and money, not legislation and regulation, are the great drivers of reform," says Adonis. Deservedly it's had rave write-ups (for example, here and here).
Now Adonis is shadowing Paul Deighton, who starts work as the Treasury's new infrastructure minister in the new year. "This is an unusual, if not unprecedented, case of the shadow materialising three months before the substance," Adonis said last month in his new role in a speech in the Lords on the infrastructure bill. I will, of course, ask about industrial policy. There are more clues to what Adonis thinks in this speech he gave in the Lords.
But do suggest questions on other topics. Adonis seems to have clear views on most things and he has got a particularly good website where his articles and speeches are easy to find. The articles on Michael Heseltine and on Nick Clegg are especially good.
I won't be able to use all the questions you suggest, but it is helpful to get ideas from others and it is useful to know what topics you find particularly interesting.