Blair’s peer pal divorces after 20 years
LABOUR peer Lord Andrew Adonis, who has undergone a startling conversion from cerebral centrist to radical Remoaner, has also been going through dramatic changes in his personal life.
I can disclose that Lord Adonis has split up with his wife, Kathryn, after more than 20 years.
‘It’s very sad, and the break-up has been particularly hard on Kathryn,’ one of their mutual friends tells me. ‘There are great sensitivities involved.’
Adonis, 55, declines to comment, but a close associate confirms that he and Kathryn, who have a son and a daughter together, have quietly divorced.
They met while Kathryn was his student at Oxford University, where he was teaching as a research fellow, and they married in 1994.
Known for his other-worldliness, the young Adonis once left his room at Nuffield College so deep in thought that he walked into a pond in the middle of the quad.
Kathryn, who is a close friend of Boris Johnson’s wife Marina, is an executive at a multi-national company, where she uses her maiden name, Davies.
Andrew was brought up by his father after his mother walked out on the family when he was three.
He was awarded a local education authority grant to attend a private boarding school. He went on to Oxford and was later made a Nuffield fellow.
Following periods in academia and journalism, he joined Tony Blair’s Downing Street policy unit and later became a minister after being elevated to the House of Lords.
Since the EU referendum, he has kept himself in the headlines by working to reverse the result.
When he quit a quango in protest at Brexit earlier this year, he claimed Theresa May had become a voice of ‘extreme Right-wing nationalism’.