Andrew Adonis, Baron Adonis is a British Labour Party politician, academic and journalist who served in the Labour Government for five years. Adonis began his career as an academic at Oxford University, before becoming a journalist at the Financial Times and later the The Observer. Adonis was appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair to be an advisor at the Number 10 Policy Unit, specialising in constitutional and educational policy, in 1998. He was later promoted to become the Head of the Policy Unit from 2001 until being made a life peer in 2005, when he was appointed to the Government soon after as Minister of State for Education. He remained in that role when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, before becoming Minister of State for Transport in 2008. In 2009, he was promoted to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Transport, a position he held until 2010. Adonis has worked for a number of think tanks, is a board member of Policy Network and is the author or co-author of several books, including several studies of the British class system, the rise and fall of the Community Charge, and the Victorian House of Lords. [More at Wikipedia]

February 22nd, 1963 in London (Age 61)