FEW appointments of a parliamentary under-secretary of state can have been as problematic as that of Andrew Adonis this week. But this is not just any old “bog-standard” junior education minister.

Mr Adonis (or Lord Adonis as we shall soon be calling him) has been the driving force behind the Government’s strategy on education for most of Labour’s two previous terms. His position in Downing Street as Tony Blair’s personal policy adviser on this subject has irritated or even enraged successive education secretaries, including David Blunkett, Estelle Morris, Charles Clarke and Ruth Kelly.

It was he who came up with the description of comprehensives as bog-standard, a phrase subsequently made notorious by Alastair Campbell’s ill-judged briefing to journalists.

Mr Adonis was the architect of the plan, resisted by the Education Department, to replace many of those failing schools with shiny new city academies. He was also the champion of the Government’s scheme to make students pay top-up tuition fees, which hastened Ms Morris’s departure from the post of Education Secretary three years ago.

As a former Liberal Democrat candidate and the biographer of the late Roy Jenkins, elements of the Labour Party will always resent him. But he has also attracted animosity from officials and ministers as the fount of Mr Blair’s frustration with the slow pace of reform in education.

After the 2001 election the Prime Minister expressed this by installing David Miliband, another former No 10 policy adviser, as Schools Minister. But Mr Miliband soon found himself facing accusations that he had been “captured” by the producer interest.

Ms Kelly’s arrival last December was supposed to change all that but, six months on, Mr Blair’s decision to parachute in his own adviser scarcely represents a ringing endorsement of her work. Although the Education Secretary has dug in her heels and blocked Mr Adonis’s appointment as her deputy, she has not prevented him entering her department as a junior minister with specific responsibility for city academies.

So, is this story about a donnish bespectacled wonk, described by friends as “more Andrew than Adonis”, finally getting the chance to wield real power rather than just designing policy? Well, not quite. He does have a little previous experience of running a school, even if he is probably reluctant to discuss it.

Six years ago he agreed to join the board of governors of the failing George Orwell School in Islington, North London. The comprehensive had been picked out as one of those that would benefit from Downing Street’s Fresh Start scheme, a forerunner of the city academies and a policy upon which Mr Adonis had once again laid his imprint.

The school was renamed Islington Arts and Media School (IAMS) and a new “superhead”, Torsten Friedag, was appointed. Six months later it had become quite probably Britain’s most embarrassing comprehensive. The builders arrived in mid-lesson to take out the windows because an expensive refurbishment had not been completed. A fight between rival groups of pupils was branded a race riot. The superhead left after less than two terms in a year when just 5 per cent of students achieved five GCSEs at A-C grade.

To make matters worse, a fly-on-the-wall series for the BBC entitled Head on the Block had filmed the descent into chaos in great detail.

Mr Adonis resigned in May 2000, shortly after the school had been closed for two weeks while adminstrative problems were rectified and the staff urgently retrained.

Those who worked with him during this traumatic period give mixed reports. Mr Friedag, now working as an educational adviser in Suffolk, said he had “a very positive time” with a man he described as a supportive and constructive governor. “Andrew had an in-depth knowledge of how policies were going to be applied and where things were going,” he said. “I had a lot of respect for him.”

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