ES News email The latest headlines in your inbox twice a day Monday - Friday plus breaking news updates Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive lunchtime headlines Monday - Friday plus breaking news alerts, by email Update newsletter preferences

He’s standing for election under a party label that doesn’t quite exist, in a contest that shouldn’t be happening, in a place that isn’t a country — but none of this puts Andrew Adonis off. The Mediterranean sun glints off his EU electric-blue tie as he strides through Gibraltar’s old town, its solid limestone walls reeking of the days when the Royal Navy called this peculiar bastion home.

Adonis — academic-turned-journalist-turned-Tony Blair policy wonk-turned-peer — is doing what he has never done before in a long career shaping Britain, and standing in a national election.

He’s on the list for the Labour Party in the South West constituency which, thanks to a quirk, includes Gibraltar’s 20,000 voters even though they live as close to Sierra Leone as they do to Plymouth.

Placed in care as a child and brought up in a council children’s home before gaining a place at Oxford, Adonis is no run-of-the-mill Westminster politician. Now he’s using his unique blend of hardcore Twitter trolling and cerebral persuasiveness to fight for a party he calls “Remain Labour”.

He uses the title all the time, oblivious to the fact that Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t lead any such thing. His quick-fire certainty is such that he can bend reality to his will.

“Go back a year and I was in a tiny, tiny minority calling for a second referendum,” he says. If one takes place Adonis will be one of the reasons why.

“The issue for Labour is becoming the overwhelmingly dominant party of Remain because that is the way we can stop Brexit,” he says. His message is that only a big Labour vote can stop Nigel Farage’s movement coming first.

He does not seem chastened by a row over a Facebook post in which he seemed to tolerate a “Labour” Brexit — a sign, said some, that he was compromising with Corbyn.

As he tours Gibraltar trying to urge trade unionists to support Labour — in the 2014 elections only 659 people backed the party with the clearly pro-European Lib-Dems far ahead — he insists Labour won’t take Britain out without another vote. But a Corbyn speech which barely mentions Brexit pops up online as we walk, and produces furrowed brows.

Adonis’s style is that of a fluent historian who has already written the book on how the Brexit story will end — with Britain still in the EU. On Twitter recently he compared a crucial meeting of Labour’s National Executive Committee to the party’s decision in May 1940 to join Churchill in government. But, I point out, when it came to the crunch the NEC vote was lost by supporters of a referendum.

He’s touring Gibraltar with the frank and engaging Manuel Cortes, a British trade union boss born in the territory who sits on the NEC. The pro-European Cortes was on the losing side. As a result, the official party line on Brexit is a fudge: “If we can’t get changes to their bad deal or a general election, Labour backs the option of a public vote”, says a party leaflet posted through my front door this week. That hardly sounds like clear support for Remain Labour, I say to Adonis. “We are getting to the right place in stages — it didn’t all happen in one meeting, it moved halfway,” he admits.

But if Remain Labour is real then why hasn’t Jeremy Corbyn pressed for a referendum in talks with the Government on getting a Brexit deal? “He hopes that Brexit might bring down the Government and cause a general election,” Adonis says. The party’s Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer has raised the issue of a referendum, he points out. So why hasn’t Starmer called for one in all circumstances, as Adonis does?

The would-be MEP’s response is revealing about both his confidence in Corbyn and in what might follow. “Keir hasn’t said that yet. I hope he will because he could then be the leader who would take us into the referendum,” he says. “I see myself holding the fort until figures like Keir occupy the citadel. At the moment they are at the gates. I need them in the citadel.”

He is firm on where the talks will go otherwise: “I don’t think there is any possibility of a deal [with the Tories] without agreement on a referendum.” He thinks a “compromise waiting to be done” is “we vote for a Tory deal with a referendum”. He would tolerate — although not support — a three-way referendum with no deal as an option too, although “I don’t believe in putting unicorns on the ballot paper”.

To some of Adonis’s friends his persistence with Labour is infuriating. He says he has got used to being called names by Lib-Dems. “I am a social democrat. I haven’t changed my politics since I was 18,” he says. Adonis has always been a champion of the liberal, reforming home secretary Roy Jenkins who helped lead the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Sixties. Gay himself, Adonis has not spoken of it in public before, but says he is “happy and at ease with who I am”. He is still happy in Labour too. “If the Labour Party had been overwhelmingly taken over by people who were extreme Left then obviously I couldn’t belong to it,” he says.

In his view that point hasn’t been reached and, almost regardless, he sees unity as crucial to stopping Brexit: “Unless we hold together, Brexit will happen.” So doesn’t it pain him to see the anti-Brexit vote being split between a multitude of parties — including the Greens, Lib-Dems and Change UK? “Unfortunately in British politics you can’t abolish parties.”

The proportional system used in the European elections in Britain makes electoral pacts hard but he points out that “if we had first past the post in this election we would be in a really terrible position with Nigel Farage”.

I remember being with Adonis a couple of years back when he tried to send one of his first tweets. Since then he’s used Twitter to tear into everything from the BBC to pay in a way that often looks divisive, effective and a bit below the belt — doing to his opponents what the alt-Right did to mainstream politics. Is it fair? “I only attack people because they are acting as agents of Brexit,” he says.

In fact, he thinks he should go further. “I feel an overwhelming responsibility to lead this. I think I am too restrained. My critique of myself over the past year is that if I had been more successful in leading the Remain Labour cause then people wouldn’t be questioning in this election whether Labour is a Remain party — so I reproach myself.”

Adonis is a man who believes good policy and human drive can change the world: he’s obsessed with transport, dismayed that Gibraltar has no railway but delighted to discover that it has a free bus network. He darts off suddenly, spotting a bus heading for a destination called Referendum House. That’s where he wants to pilot Labour too.

So will this be his only election? “I have become much more self-confident as a politician over the past year,” he says. He regrets joining the House of Lords not the Commons. Might he switch? Adonis looks thrilled by the prospect. “For the first time I could see myself doing so because I have become so fired up”.