The departure of Andrew Adonis (pictured) from a quango that few people will have heard of elicits one very obvious question. Why in heaven’s name did it take so long? Writes Stephen Glover
The departure of Andrew Adonis from a quango that few people will have heard of elicits one very obvious question. Why in heaven’s name did it take so long?
For while he has been working on behalf of the Government as chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, Lord Adonis – a former Blairite Cabinet minister – has been inveighing against Brexit in an increasingly hysterical way.
In fact, he almost makes Tory grandee Michael Heseltine, who earlier this week said that he would prefer a hard-Left Corbyn government to Brexit, look like a mild and reasonable person.
Twitter is often Adonis’s favoured route for anti-Brexit invective and abuse.
More than once he has suggested that Brexit could be as bad as appeasement of Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s – which is about as offensive a remark about Brexiteers as one could imagine. He has also claimed that the country is having ‘a nervous breakdown’, and that Brexit is an act of ‘self-mutilation’.
Two months ago, Adonis travelled to Brussels with arch-Remainers Nick Clegg and Kenneth Clarke to hold a secret meeting with EU negotiator Michel Barnier. Talk about sleeping with the enemy!
In one characteristically over-heated tweet in October, the apparently cerebral – but in fact over-emotional – Lord Adonis wrote: ‘About to speak in Lords on Brexit ‘no deal’ magical thinking, which would mean planes grounded, nuclear power unsafe, trucks queuing to London.’
For while he has been working on behalf of the Government as chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, Lord Adonis (pictured) – a former Blairite Cabinet minister – has been inveighing against Brexit in an increasingly hysterical way
All his wild lack of proportion is evident in his self-serving letter of resignation to Theresa May, in which he asserts that ‘Brexit is a dangerous populist and nationalist spasm worthy of Donald Trump’.
Adonis is effectively saying that the 17.4million people who voted Leave are misguided or deluded.
For him to assert in his often rambling and sometimes unhinged missive that our pragmatic and level-headed Prime Minister is the ‘voice of Ukip and the extreme nationalist Right wing of your party’ verges on the lunatic.
Lord Adonis is often alleged to be very clever, but his comparison of Mrs May to the late 19th-century Tory prime minister Lord Salisbury is pretty stupid on almost every count.
Salisbury’s talk of ‘splendid isolation’ is implied to have somehow fostered ‘a 30-year European War between the forces of democracy… and Communism and extreme nationalism’. That’s nonsense.
Adonis accuses Brexiteers of extremism, but I’m afraid he is the one who is manifesting alarming signs of the condition.
He needs to calm down, and his friends and family might usefully suggest a long and peaceful holiday – ideally outside the EU, which seems to occupy his every waking thought.
Two months ago, Adonis (pictured right) travelled to Brussels with arch-Remainers Nick Clegg (centre) and Kenneth Clarke (left) to hold a secret meeting with EU negotiator Michel Barnier
It’s surely obvious that a man holding such views could not go on working for the Government in any shape or form. No 10 wisely pre-empted his resignation by asking him to leave. It should have done so months ago.
The question is whether Adonis’s act of vandalism will harm Mrs May, as he plainly hopes it will.
I expect that in some parts of the anti-Brexit media, especially the BBC, it will be represented as a near-mortal blow to an already beleaguered Prime Minister.
That is what happened earlier this month when Alan Milburn – another ex-Blairite Cabinet Minister foolishly co-opted by the Tories – resigned as so-called social mobility tsar, saying that Mrs May was failing in her pledge to build a ‘fairer Britain’. He also managed to get in a sideswipe over Brexit.
But although there will doubtless be another hullaballoo, I believe that fair-minded people who look at the intemperate language sprayed around by Adonis in his letter, and very often over the past few months, will come to the conclusion that it betrays a lack of balance and good sense.
They may well take the view that the Government is fortunate to be rid of such a highly agitated man, who undermines his argument in his letter by saying that he would have resigned anyway because of the ‘indefensible decision to bail out the Stagecoach and Virgin East Coast rail franchise’. Well, which is it?
The fact is that Adonis is the epitome of the supercilious, out-of-touch technocratic politician whose love affair with the EU and all its works has trumped everything.
After Oxford University, he worked for the fanatically pro-EU Financial Times, which virtually takes its editorial line on Brexit from Brussels.
Needless to say, he has never done anything as grubby as being elected by ordinary voters. In 2005, at the tender age of 42, he was created a life peer by his friend and patron Tony Blair.
Adonis (pictured second right) was seen beaming with Conservatives Michael Gove MP, Ruth Davidson MSP, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP and Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable at the Parliamentarian Awards in London last month
It’s true that as a Blairite minister he pushed for the creation of academy schools free from the dead hand of local government control, which have been much developed by the Tories.
He was also the brain behind the notion of university tuition fees.
Partly out of a sense of guilt that these have ballooned in recent years, he has recently – and creditably – mounted a voluble campaign against university vice-chancellors paying themselves salaries of many hundreds of thousands of pounds.
But I am afraid his adulation of Brussels and his veneration of the EU have exposed his contempt for the democratically expressed views of those who voted Leave.
The reasons for their doing so – chiefly sovereignty and a desire to regain control of our borders – are simply beyond his comprehension.
No doubt Lord Adonis will be invited to tour broadcasting studios over the next 24 hours to explain himself, and in many quarters he will receive a sympathetic hearing.
However, whenever this apparently calm – but in fact secretly fanatical – man unveils his extreme vision of post-Brexit Armageddon, the response of all sensible democrats should be ‘Good Riddance’.