Just as Labour has started to get into a thorough discussion of blue Labour as advocated by Maurice Glasman, the grouping whose political cross-dressing its name was devised in angry reaction to appears to be going down the tubes.

The leading (only?) guru of ‘red Toryism’, Phillip Blond, launched his thinktank, ResPublica, very publicly back in 2009, literally walking down the aisle with David Cameron at his side at an over-the-top glossy launch. It is not often that a party leader attends the launch of a new thinktank so its failure now is acutely embarrassing for Cameron.

Back then the political purpose of ResPublica was abundantly clear: to help detoxify the Tory brand. Literally making it a bit less blue and a bit more red by Blond castigating the free-market values of 1980s Thatcherism, and attacking big business as much as the big state. It sought to find a heritage of community and reciprocal values in Tory history. At the time Cameron’s spokesperson was keen to stress that ‘the fact that David Cameron is appearing at this event doesn’t mean that he endorses all of Phillip Blond’s views’, but it helped him to appear to be taking policy advice from such an ideologically ambiguous source and to shrug off accusations of being a Thatcherite. The Tory right, of course, hated Blond’s assault on their heroine’s legacy. They are delighted by his current discomfort.

I do not welcome the prospect of ResPublica ceasing altogether. It is sad when anyone loses their job, even Tory thinktank staff, and it is good for democracy and a flourishing level of political debate to have thriving thinktanks, even ones I disagree with.

As a political moderate, and someone who cares about the pain this government is inflicting, I am sorry that it looks like Blond’s ideas were never really embraced by Cameron. I do not agree with them but they might have been preferable to the rightwing austerity cult we are currently experiencing. They were a useful pre-election smokescreen but they never took root in mainstream Tory thinking. Their only influence on the Tory agenda for government is the ill-fated ‘big society’ concept, relaunched repeatedly to widespread derision from the public and privately from most Tories. Then as soon as an alternative mechanism for detoxifying the Tory brand turned up – coalition with the Liberal Democrats and using them as the repository for public bile – the red Tory agenda suddenly stopped being as attractive for Cameron.

The harsh reality is that cash flows from donors and corporate sponsors to thinktanks that are seen as being proximate to power. If businesses thought Blond’s ideas were influential with ministers they would be queuing up to sponsor his research. That they are not confirms that Cameron has dropped any pretext of triangulation to pursue an orthodox Thatcherite policy where every aspect of social policy is driven by austerity economics. It is a very different story to the fundamental and deep-seated changes Tony Blair made which led to him governing as New Labour as well as campaigning as New Labour.

Photo: Michael Newman