of the rules” compelled his resignation. He returned to office two years later in the humbler role of schools minister under Michael Gove.

Now, aged 51, having lost his parliamentary seat in 2015, he has started a third career: as head of the Education Policy Institute (EPI), a thinktank launched last year that aspires to the august role that the Institute for Fiscal Studies plays in economic policy.

If you move from the worst academy chains to the best local authorities, there is a massive improvement in performance

Like the IFS, Laws’s institute will, he tells me, be “data-driven, influencing debate by the quality of its analysis and its quantitative skills”. The quality of education policymaking is poor, Laws argues, and the institute wants to make it better.

Was policymaking poor whenlikes “visiting desert regions”.

He was born in Surrey and, since his mother was Catholic, went to mass every Sunday until his mid-teens and also to mostly fee-charging Catholic schools in Surrey. His mother was Tory, his father, a commercial banker, Labour, so Laws split the difference and decided he was a Liberal (as the party was then called) when he was 11 or 12. He knew he was gay from a similarly early age “but in those days you kept homosexuality a secret”. He didn’t come out publicly until it transpired that he was paying “rent”, charged on expenses, for rooms in a “second home” owned by his long-term partner, a former Lib Dem aide.

He chose economics at university. “I wanted to go into politics and so much