That Andrew Adonis, architect of the New Labour education reforms, was the Tories’ favourite minister when they were in opposition, tells you surprisingly little about the man himself. His reforms as the schools minister – subsequently adopted and pushed further by the Coalition government – have earned him the unflattering label of an ‘arch-Blairite’. But the Labour peer is scathing about today’s Conservatives and sees himself as rooted firmly in left-wing politics. Now an adviser to Ed Miliband’s team, the mild-mannered and unfailingly polite Oxonian spoke in our interview about Oxford, being caught amidst the Blair-Brown turf wars and where Labour needs to go next.

The first thing one needs to know about Adonis is that he’s a traitor, of sorts. The young Adonis was politically left-of-centre in his youth, but state socialism was too much. “I joined the SDP [Social Democratic Party] on the day it was formed.” And what a dramatic occasion it was, when the ‘Gang of Four’ broke away from Michael Foot’s dinosaur socialist Labour party to form a new social democratic one. When Adonis matriculated in 1981 the young party briefly looked like it might win the next General Election. It didn’t, and as the turbo-charged capitalism of the 80s took off Thatcher’s electoral success and popular appeal prevented the SDP from making the sort of breakthrough that third parties have failed to achieve in British politics ever since.

Roy Jenkins, who Adonis describes as his “great hero, then and now”, was one of the breakaway gang. Adonis argues that the social liberalism he pursued in two stints as Labour Home Secretary in the 1960s and 70s underpins British society now almost as strongly as Thatcher’s economic liberalism in the 1980s underpins (or “undermined”, as Adonis later put it) the British economy today. Moreover he sees Jenkins’ approach as a harbinger of the New Labour strategy. “He did more than any other minister in the 1960s to change society. And if you look at how [Jenkins] made Labour more than just a working-class socialist party, you can see parallels with how Tony Blair made Labour more liberal and open to the middle-classes.”

First and foremost therefore, Adonis was an SDP man. He wasn’t an especially political student, eschewing the Union. Its famous hacks, including William Hague, who was President when Adonis went up to Oxford, turned him off. Hague “did me a huge favour” in that regard, he now claims, since his ambitions took him elsewhere.

Academia, Oxford council politics and then journalism all preceded Adonis’ entry to No.10 as a policy advisor. Through ennoblement in 2005 he entered the third Blair government as an Education minister. “There are two morals to my career: you can’t really plan your [political] career, because it’s unpredictable; and second, do something else before politics. Don’t go into it too early. My ten years in journalism was an invaluable preparation for politics thereafter. Being the [Financial Times’] public policy editor prepared me much better than almost anything else could have done for being in government and working on education policy for Tony Blair.”

That said, he “doesn’t deride” what would seem to be the precise opposite of his prescription – being a special advisor. He describes the bag-carriers one can find busying around Westminster as “apprentice ministers”. “It’s very good training for government, because you’re part of the government.”

However, he later qualifies, “it is good to take some time out [of politics]. Ed Miliband, for instance, spent a couple of years at Harvard as a lecturer and I know from speaking to him that it was an incredibly formative period in his life.”

He chastises those special advisors who became infantrymen in the Brown-Blair wars, a conflict in which he became a “proxy” as Brownites attempted to frustrate the education agenda as a means to undermining Blair’s authority and reforming zeal. Sometimes it hurt. “You have to develop a thick skin. When I was on the front line in the earlier years I would take all the personal attacks” – what he calls the “Oxford Union bit of politics” – well, “personally”. 

He’s now more reflective, rather than reactionary, about those who levied attacks on him. But a thinly veiled critique of some of those advisors was forthcoming. “There’s a problem with rising too fast in politics,” Adonis says, “which is that you lose social awareness and perspective”. Many of that era’s special advisors – most notably ‘Bruiser Balls’ – are now members of the shadow Cabinet. Adonis suggests that the sort of politicos who shoot from university straight into the Westminster bubble – and never leave it on the way up – will lack the sort of self-control in handling relations which each other.

His support for Labour remains dogged. Though a backer of David Miliband in the leadership contest, Adonis is now firmly on Ed’s team. He rigidly stays on message when it comes to free schools –  “I don’t support a free for all [in education] where anyone who wants to come with a half-baked plan to set up a school can do so” – despite an interview with The Spectator in 2011 in which he described himself and Blair as “enthusiastic about the idea of entirely new schools being established on the academy model, as in Michael Gove’s Free Schools
policy.”

In general terms though the continuity from Adonis to Gove is undeniable. The  Labour front bench has been distinctly lukewarm about the expansion of the academies programme, but Adonis doesn’t distance himself from the policy– he stakes a claim to it. “There is a good deal of consensus but let’s be clear – the consensus is a New Labour one. It’s about privilege for all, rather than the old Tory policy of privilege for a few. 

“[Furthermore] Michael Gove is now coming behind my call for private schools to sponsor comprehensives. Labour can take pride that in important areas of public policy the Tories have been forced to accept a New Labour consensus.

“I very much hope that Michael Gove will read my book,” he says later. I expect that the Education Secretary, who has expressed admiration for Adonis, already has. If you care about modern social democracy, so should you.

What do you say to the man who presided over the dissolution of Iraq into chaos? What questions do you formulate for someone who had a leading role in a conflict which led to the subsequent deaths of what the BBC estimates to be 100,000 civilians? And how will he respond?

Lewis Paul Bremer III served as the effective viceroy of Iraq for the first fourteen months of American occupation. We spoke following his speech to the Oxford Union, an event intended to mark the swiftly approaching 10th anniversary of the March 2003 invasion: an event that few will celebrate.
In his Union address, Bremer presented a defence of his leadership of Iraq as Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority that amounted to shifting responsibility. He claimed that the catalysts of Iraq’s disintegration were out of his control. While highlighting what he characterised as economic and political successes, he blamed the inadequate number of coalition troops in Iraq for a lack of security, and saw the inability of the Iraqis to form a cohesive democracy as the result of a lack of “political scaffolding.”

Before he left for Baghdad in May 2003, Bremer was presented with a study of past American wars concluding that the US would need 480,000 soldiers to secure Iraq after the invasion, yet only 200,000 coalition troops were present during Bremer’s tenure. Asked to whom he brought his concerns over inadequate troop numbers, Bremer responded that he sent a memo to Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. “Rumsfeld never said anything to me about it…so I raised it with the President in my first meeting with him.”

President Bush blew Bremer off, explaining that Colin Powell was searching for more countries to send troops. As it turned out none besides Britain would ever send a significant number. “I raised it again quite often with Dr [Condoleezza] Rice, with [Stephen] Hadley, I mentioned it to Rumsfeld again.” Yet Bremer claims never to have received a response to his concerns.

Despite being sent to reconstruct Iraq without adequate military support, Bremer remains loyal to President Bush and does not place the blame at the feet of the Commander-in-Chief. “I have some sympathy for the President in this, because I heard the President in a number of meetings…ask the generals if they had enough troops, and they always said yes. Nobody ever said we need more troops.” According to Bremer this insistence that numbers were adequate was a result of short-sightedness: the generals did not envision fighting an insurgency after toppling Saddam.

In Bremer’s telling, the dearth of troops was the primary catalyst of the sectarian warfare that ensued, “I think this is the key failure: not having provided the security, right from the start, by setting the example when the looting happened, and not stopping the looting — if necessary shooting looters, which is what we did in Haiti. In the nineties, when we went into Haiti, there was rioting on the streets, we sent in the Marines, the Marines shot two people dead: that was the end of the rioting. You begin to show that you’re serious about providing security.” When the US did not provide security within cities like Fallujah, “the impression gained among the Iraqi citizens that they were going to have to protect themselves. So you started seeing the renaissance of [sectarian] militias and of course Al Qaeda concluded that we weren’t prepared to do what needed to be done.” Without an American referee, Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish militias competed to fill the power vacuum. “It was the failure of our providing security that led to things like the major sectarian outbursts in 2006,” Bremer concludes.

Bremer found a second defence in the recent struggles of other Arab states to transition to democratic governance from autocracy. Egypt, Libya and Syria, like Iraq before them, “lack a political scaffolding to move to representative government,” which Bremer defines as a lack of free political parties, freedom of expression, free press, internet, a viable constitution, and “no rule of law.” If other Arab states also stumbled when it came to democratisation, surely our expectations of success were too high.

Perhaps incongruously, he later asserts, “Another myth is that we forced democracy down their throats” – pointing to Iraqi voters’ enthusiasm and comparing voter turnout in Iraq’s referendum and four elections to US and British turnout. He cites Iraqi voter turnout higher than “any British general election since 1951, and higher than any US Presidential election since 1876.” Asked about Rousseau’s observation that “if you free slaves they will establish a slave state,” Bremer responds that democracy in Iraq would take generations to properly accomplish.

Bremer has been excoriated for his decision to ban the Ba’ath Party immediately after the invasion. He defends this by pointing out that his order was limited to the top one per cent of Baath party officials, and that it merely mandated that they could no longer work for the government. “I made a mistake, however, in the implementation of the decree,” he admits, in leaving the implementation to “a bunch of [Iraqi] politicians, who then tried to implement the decree much more broadly than was intended. I should have turned it over to a group of Iraqi judges or respected lawyers.” He defends his equally criticised decision to disband the Iraqi Army by asserting that it had already effectively self-disbanded after Saddam’s fall.

In defending his management of Iraq, Bremer argues that “we had substantial success” in the political and economic spheres. He praises the ability of the Iraqis to produce a constitution in ten months, comparing it to the eighteen months it took Egypt to produce a constitution. Additionally, only 31 per cent of Egyptians voted on the constitution, whereas 75 per cent of Iraqis voted for theirs. Economically, Bremer provides a bevy of statistics to prove his success: by the time he left in June 2004, oil production had been at pre-war levels for ten months, electricity production was 50 per cent above pre-war levels, limited foreign investment had been introduced, over 27,000 reconstruction projections had been completed and the Iraqi economy grew by 46 per cent in 2004, although “admittedly from a low level.”

Reflecting on the record of America’s efforts in Iraq, Bremer bluntly states, “Iraq has had some very bad days.” He has also criticised the Obama administration for not leaving a larger presence in Iraq: “I think it was a serious mistake of the present administration to not keep troops there to consolidate the gains that we had already made.”

Bremer has received swathes of criticism in the American media for his handling of Iraq. However, he expects eventual vindication: “I do believe that history will look much more favourably on what we and the British government and the other coalition parties tried to accomplish.”