The High Speed North
The case for HS3
Author Archives: Andrew Adonis
How to fix the housing crisis
The public sector owns vast tracts of undeveloped land. Time to start building on it
Preview: Boris has failed
The Mayor of London has been in office for five years, but he has not grasped the challenges facing a city that will soon be home to 10 million people
Boris has failed
The Mayor of London has been in office for five years, but he has not grasped the challenges facing a city that will soon be home to 10 million people
What if… the First World War had never happened?
Prospect's new counter-factual column
Taming plutocrats
The rich must pay
The coalition: cracks are already showing
The Lib-Con pact is riven with deep ideological faultlines
The people’s William
Today's leaders could learn a lot about crisis management from Gladstone
All change for Britain’s railways
Even America is investing in high-speed rail. It's time Britain did the same, says the transport minister
Blackboard idealism
In a reinvention of national service, top graduates are once again returning to teaching
A Liberal tragedy
Herbert Asquith mismanaged Ireland and sleepwalked into world war. Little wonder his centenary is neglected
A new age of the train
The story of Britain's railways is one of chaotic genius in the Victorian era followed by a century of more or less uninterrupted decline. Christian Wolmar charts this history in admirable detail, but succumbs to unwarranted romanticism when it comes…
Recycling Nixon
Conrad Black's weighty new biography of Richard Nixon portrays him as a "mighty and mythic" figure who made a "dignified exit" after being unfairly hounded from office—a code it's little trouble to break
The self-made exile
Michael Foot was the great rhetorician of his age. His tirades against government enlivened politics and helped sustain the credibility of parliament
Go north, upper house
Moving an elected House of Lords to one of England's regional cities would be more than a gesture of decentralisation
The biographer’s tale
In 1994 I asked Roy Jenkins if I could write his biography. By the time he finally agreed, three years later, he was about to embark on his Churchill biography and I was about to start working for Tony Blair.…
Schools, hospitals and elites
Why has Britain's state run health system been so much more successful than the state education system? The answer lies in the success of the NHS in creating an effective cross-class institution which has survived the rise of the new…
Jobs for the boy
Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. William Gladstone was his own Chancellor. If Tony Blair enters Downing Street, he should appoint himself Education Secretary