Andrew Adonis comes out of the shadows Immediately after his re-election, Tony Blair said that he would listen to his critics. Any hope that this might actually happen was instantly dispelled as soon as he named his new cabinet.

Andrew Adonis, was one of the 80 or so unelected 'advisors' who seem to run the government. Tony Blair alone has 29 'advisors'. Straight after the election, Adonis was given a peerage, and made an unelected minister.

Because Andrew Adonis has never been elected, much of what he has done, and advocated, has been shrouded in secrecy, in a way that is only too familiar in the Blair government.

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None of these wretched propositions should have a place in the Labour Party.

None of them have been agreed by delegates at the Labour Party conference, nor have they received the imprimatur of the admittedly toothless National Policy Forum and policy commissions.

Unfortunately, the new elitism dictates the way in which policy is decided in the modern Labour Party.

Unsurprisingly, many members increasingly feel totally disenfranchised from it.

From the proposed attack on Iraq to the Private Finance Initiative, it is increasingly clear that party members have little say or influence.

This democratic deficit needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

In the meantime, the unelected advisers who purport to speak for the Government and the Labour Party must be put back in their boxes or, in some cases, told to find alternative employment.

One such figure is Andrew Adonis, the head of the Number 10 Policy Unit.

Mr. Adonis, in common with others close to the Prime Minister, has undertaken a political odyssey that has taken him from the ill-fated Social Democratic Party to the Liberal Democrats and finally the Labour Party.

Mr. Adonis does not have a natural empathy with the values that underpin his present political home.

So it is a travesty that he seems to wield more influence than most members of the Cabinet.

Lord Andrew Adonis Adonis is a former Lib Dem councillor, Parliamentary Candidate and journalist, firstly with the Financial Times and then with the Observer. He joined the Labour Party in 1995 and the Downing Street policy unit as an education adviser in 1998, becoming its head in 2001. It is within these roles that he is believed to have caused friction with former Education Secretaries David Blunkett, Estelle Morris and Charles Clarke.

He was the architect of the controversial business-backed "City Academes" as well as a strong advocate of top-up fees, even to the point of openly encouraging vice-chancellors to lobby for them. Many think that he has long been very influential and has the Prime Minister's ear, much more than some ministers.

Lord Adonis's elevation to the peerage in 2005 in order to become a junior minister was controversial: he has no ministerial experience, has never been elected and is widely seen as one of "Tony's cronies".

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