We read that ‘Red Tory’ Philip Blond’s personal think-tank is in financial trouble. Bills haven’t been paid. Redundancies are on the way. There’s a little boy pointing at their offices in Westminster, crying ‘that think-tank has no clothes.’

I’ve seen Mr Blond on Newsnight a couple of times. I caught his act at the Progress conference last month, when he claimed the king was on the side of the peasants at the time of Magna Carta, and used the word ‘deracinated’ more than once. I’ve been in and around think-tanks for 25 years without ever feeling the need to use the word ‘deracinated’, mostly because I don’t know what it means. When the administrators move in, the reason for ResPublica’s collapse won’t be complex. It will because they confused using long words with producing useful or interesting ideas.

Sponsors, usually businesses, fund think tanks to influence a political debate, share a space with ministers and their aides, and to promote their cause. They don’t fund think-tanks to string complicated words together in the hope that Newsnight producers will think they have something clever to say.

Politicians have often turned to intellectuals to provide intellectual credence. Margaret Thatcher famously wrapped up her petit-bourgeois, small-minded provincial nastiness in the theories of Hayek. In the late 1970s, she slammed her well-thumbed copy of The Road To Serfdom in front of some Tory wet in a seminar and proclaimed ‘this is what we believe’. Neil Kinnock favoured Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, and author of the famous essay in 1978 in Marxism Today entitled The Forward March of Labour Halted? which showed how the manual working class had morphed into something entirely different from the one which elected Labour in 1945. Kinnock’s modernisation strategy was anchored in the idea that Labour campaigners could no longer approach blue collar workers with generous overtime, a house with a car in the driveway, and two holidays a year and say ‘we’ve come to liberate you from your oppression.’ Gordon Brown flirted with the US republican Gertrude Himmelfarb, an unlikely squeeze for a Scottish socialist.

Tony Blair wrote in 1996 in a book called ‘What Needs to Change’ that ‘the role of intellectuals and thinkers is crucial to changing the political climate. It is in fact critical to the regeneration of politics. I want Labour to be able to draw on a coalition of thinkers, including people outside the party. We should never forget that the 1945 Labour government’s programme was based on a broad centre-left tradition of ideas.’

Anthony Giddens stepped into the breach, and wrote a bestselling book on the Third Way. By the time of his memoir (out in paperback this week), Blair was disappointed, claiming that intellectuals seldom came up with anything useful to propel Labour’s reforms.

Labour’s intellectual du jour is of course Professor Maurice Glassman, who has sought to rediscover a pre-welfare state socialism and apply it modern society. Glasman cites the Hungarian émigré Karl Polyani as a major influence, who in turn was part of the GDH Cole wing of the Fabian Society before the war. In a historic marketing blunder he has dubbed it ‘blue Labour’ which guarantees its deliberate distortion by its enemies into something vaguely reactionary and right-wing, and a broader lack of comprehension amongst Labour supporters. This failure is not helped by Glasman’s own attempts to articulate it, for example in a recent interview with an Italian magazine:

‘There is a sense of bravery and tragedy in our position and that is one meaning of the word blue, that links Miles Davis with Picasso and Aristotle.

‘It is not mentally ill or depressed to feel triste and out of that understanding can flow a deeper understanding of the world and a more durable courage in resisting it than a superficial optimism that is the definition of Berlusconi and the progressive left. So first, blue is a disposition and argues that courage is rooted in the awareness that our enemies are strong, that there will be defeats and that solidarity is not a natural condition but needs to be rebuilt and renewed through conversation and building common institutions.

‘Solidarity is a state of grace that is achieved through relationships and action, it cannot be assumed by right.’

Intellectuals, like taxi drivers, doctors or journalists, have a language of their own, with words, phrases and reference points which belong only to their narrow social stratum. The above paragraph may mean something to some people. But to the majority of people, it may as well be Sanskrit. This is Labour’s problem. There is no shortage of grand theories, and clever-sounding people to argue about them. Ideas matter, of course. We are all prisoners of some long-defunct intellectual. But ideas must have a practical application. Thatcher never mentioned Hayek in public. She handed out shares in public utilities and the door keys to ex-council houses. She understood the connection between ideas and policies, and the necessity for policies to resonate and be understood. She understood metaphor.

As the think-tanks of the right collapse under the weight of their own emptiness, the think-tanks of the left have a duty to create a new post-coalition consensus. Ideas are needed, but so are practical, sellable policies, and a language which can be understood beyond the walls of the London Metropolitan University.