Blue Labour's Jonathan Rutherford Is Helping No 10 Find Purpose, Energy And A Story To Tell

Jonathan Rutherford (Photography by Dinendra Haria)

Sienna Rodgers

@siennamarla

“This is not a progressive era. It’s a tragic era. Things don’t always get better.”

Jonathan Rutherford has advised many Labour MPs – including much of the present Cabinet – over the past 15 years. After developing “the everyday economy” with Rachel Reeves and working with Lisa Nandy for 18 months on a response to levelling-up when Labour was in opposition, today he is advising the government as it is hit by difficult issues from Southport to rape gangs.

In particular, he is understood to be helping with storytelling, in a way that will enable Downing Street to craft a narrative that holds everything together, giving it energy and the clear sense of direction many think is badly needed.

He is now running a project out of the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange called ‘Future of the Left’, consisting of public events and private roundtables in Westminster’s Old Queen Street. It is feeding into No 10 via regular meetings and papers.

“It’s building a coalition around a more conservative left view of politics. And by conservative, I don’t mean reactionary,” Rutherford says of the project. “It’s about the importance of conserving what matters to people. It’s a revolt against change.”

Rutherford is perhaps best-known, if he is known at all, as a co-founder of the original iteration of Blue Labour, which has no membership. This tradition within the Labour Party is currently enjoying a renaissance – a new Blue Labour group of MPs has recently formed, which he calls “a pretty revolutionary moment” – but its politics are still poorly understood.

Many hear ‘Blue Labour’ and assume it means Labour but right-wing; in fact, it is socially conservative and economically left-wing. Woke? Good riddance. Tariffs? Bring ‘em on. With Donald Trump in the White House again, it is easy to see why No 10 would be attracted to Blue Labour’s thinking.

It also helps that, as the more high-profile co-founder Lord Glasman has previously told The House, “Morgan is from us”: the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney developed his campaigning skills alongside them in a fight against the BNP in Dagenham. The core influences on McSweeney’s politics are described by one figure as a combination of Blue Labour, Unherd political editor turned New Statesman editor-in-chief Tom McTague, and The Liberal Patriot newsletter, which urges Democrats to reject identity politics.

One of the themes that has emerged most clearly from the new Blue Labour group of MPs is a critique of Treasury orthodoxy. Is one of Rutherford’s aims to overturn it?

“I’d destroy it if I had half the chance,” he tells The House. “I would split the Treasury, like [Harold] Wilson, but not in a ministry – I’d put it in No 10. You have to, because otherwise the Treasury will just gobble it back up again.

“Economic development, levelling up, rebuilding the country cannot be with the Treasury. They’ll never let it happen.”

“That will create political problems,” he acknowledges. “But frankly, this is the age of Trump. You’ve got to start doing stuff. You’ve got to. Otherwise, we’re just going to creep along, end our turn in office, maybe get back with a much-reduced majority, maybe not get back, but we’ll have lost the chance.”

Rutherford, 68, was raised by middle-class parents – homemaker mother; stockbroker father – in Surrey alongside three siblings. He went to private school, which offered a “lousy” education, and when he left at 18 it was to travel the world. A month into this adventure, acute appendicitis brought it to an early end.

Instead, he worked in a hospital for children with learning difficulties, and for SE1 Community Newspaper, a small publication with no bylines and much scrutiny of the local Labour-controlled councils. It was the battle for Waterloo – a grassroots fight to save Coin Street from developers – that kickstarted his political education.

Then Rutherford went to university, reading sociology at Southampton. Like school, it was a “massive disappointment”, and he left after just a year to run a community project in the town. After that, followed by collecting paper for recycling at Friends of the Earth, he moved to London and aged 25 had a son with his wife Frances.

Feeling somewhat lost after being a stay-at-home dad through the toddler years, he took up journalism, writing for publications including women’s magazine Cosmopolitan. When he ran out of steam, he returned to higher education: cultural studies at Middlesex university, where he went on to acquire a PhD and become a lecturer.

In his early days at Middlesex, Rutherford was in the Communist Party (CP). “If you want to know what’s happening in the country, in terms of the educated versus the non-educated, and that class divide, it started in the CP,” he says.

He sided not with the ‘Tankies’ (more conservative Stalinists), nor the orthodox Marxists (the Morning Star crowd) but, surprisingly in retrospect, the Antonio Gramsci-influenced Eurocommunists. “I was with the younger, more radical group. I have to say, I think we were the grandparents of woke,” he laughs.

They sought to create relationships between movements – Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners being a notable example. He knew Mark Ashton, LGSM’s founder, and says the 2014 film Pride was “quite accurate”.

“That was very much a CP-type politics – trying to broker different kinds of dialogue and discussion. Looking back on it, it wasn’t bad, not bad at all. It didn’t last… The miners’ strike was the defeat of organised labour and the rise of the professional class that I belonged to.”

The Blue Labour seed was planted when Rutherford was introduced by Neal Lawson, the political organiser and chair of pressure group Compass, to Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham, for whom he started writing speeches.

“That changed all my politics, really. I’d gone through from being an anarchist when I was 20 to CP and Eurocommunism and getting a political education there. But it was still not connecting to the millions. It was a politics about the thousands,” Rutherford says.

“There is something in Labour’s culture that is very utilitarian. It tends, by default, to become quite dead, incurious, quite hard to like”

Cruddas in turn put him in touch with Maurice (now Lord) Glasman; thereafter, the pair met weekly. Oxford academics Marc Stears (Labour’s chief speechwriter under Ed Miliband, now director of the UCL policy lab) and Dr Stuart White (who still teaches politics there) invited them to run events. Papers from the Oxford London seminars of 2010-11 were published, The Politics of Paradox, and Blue Labour became a controversial but real force under Miliband’s leadership.

“Maurice, of course, got in the news a lot. The whole thing blew up,” Rutherford remembers. “I started working for Ed, worked on the policy review for two years, and learnt about the party.”

“I blame Jon on this,” he says of Cruddas, Labour’s policy chief at the time, and the trouble Blue Labour ran into. “He talked to two people who happened to be from the Sunday Times – he thought they were just ordinary people – about the ‘dead hand’.”

Cruddas had attributed a “profoundly dead hand” at the party’s centre to its habit of blocking interesting policy ideas. Rutherford articulates a similar complaint, saying: “There is something in Labour’s culture that is very utilitarian. It tends, by default, to become quite dead, incurious, quite hard to like. I say that, and a lot of the people I know feel similar, and yet curiously we’re committed to it.”

The tension within Labour between its utilitarian flank on the right and its “more romantic” politics on the left is, according to Rutherford, reflective of English intellectual life: Jeremy Bentham versus RH Tawney. He despairs that the party has failed to generate an intellectual life of its own in recent years, and described the left as “defunct” and Labour as a “zombie” in an earlier conversation of ours. Since the New Labour years, with its IPPR and modernisation thinkers Anthony Giddens (The Third Way) and Philip Gould, “We’ve had nothing,” he says now.

“Come this extraordinary majority, the Labour government enters power with fairly empty coffers in terms of policy programme or any kind of political philosophy underpinning it. That is now its challenge: it has to try to do that in power. I don’t see it’s got any alternative.

“The first six months was revealing of that weakness. It made policy announcements that didn’t really hold together… Nothing added up, and there were a lot of mistakes made, and consequently annoyed a lot of people. There’s an effort in No 10 to try and get a grip of all of this.”

Hence the Future of the Left project. “It’s an irony, in a way, that it’s based in a centre-right think tank. Some people might say, ‘That’s because you’re Blue Labour and you’re all right-wing’, but it isn’t! It’s because the progressive think tanks have abandoned the whole space of any kind of political thinking.”

Could it not have been set up in a left-wing institution? “Labour is stuck inside the bubble, still. Its membership and its culture promote compliance and conformity. And it can get pretty unpleasant if you don’t conform and comply. So, no, we couldn’t have done it inside.”

“Policy Exchange is a good thing. It’s in another league to the progressive think tanks on the left,” he adds.

But what of the Tony Blair Institute? It is huge, and produces both people and papers that influence this government.

“TBI has a lot of very clever people. They’re very wealthy. But they’re a liberal, progressive think tank. That is just not the answer. If anything, they’re a red rag to a bull as far as populism goes.

“When Tony Blair says the answer in politics is new technologies and AI will transform politics, that isn’t democracy. The problem is with a crisis of democracy in this country. More technocratic solutions, more lawyers, more managerialism are not going to provide the answer.”

Some might say Rutherford has just described the PM and his Cabinet, which is a worry that has troubled Keir Starmer’s colleagues for as long as he has been Labour leader. Theo Bertram, a former New Labour No 10 adviser, has written that Labour MPs are searching for purpose – but also that nobody in Downing Street “believes the answer is to make Starmer wear a philosophical suit that doesn’t fit”.

“Nobody’s trying to get Keir Starmer to wear an ideological suit, but to develop a politics in response to the state of the country, then to try and operationalise it in government. That’s what we’re trying to do,” Rutherford counters.

But does Blue Labour not clash with Starmer’s instincts on a fundamental level? If you take Attorney General Lord Hermer as his proxy, say, that would suggest it does.

“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we? Because the other thing about Keir is he’s not ideologically progressive,” Rutherford replies.

“Keir Starmer has certainly adopted in rhetoric a lot of what would be called Blue Labour rhetoric. To be quite honest, they’re just things that people in the country would generally agree with. In the end, that’s what a lot of it adds up to.”

“There are people in No 10 who do understand what needs to be done... but it could be the right who get there first”

Common-sense policies may be the way to go, but Rutherford does acknowledge too that the challenges facing Starmer’s government are difficult to overstate.

“Our room for manoeuvre is so limited. We’re not in the EU now, and I’m OK with that. We don’t have an empire – that’s fine, that’s history. But we’re on our own for the first time in hundreds of years. It’s like we’re a toddler learning to walk,” he says.

“There are some really good people in the Cabinet, but this generation, of which I’m part, is what it is, and is probably not going to do a lot more. It’s going to have to be a younger generation that has grown up in the new realities, not in a progressive era… There are people in No 10 who do understand what needs to be done, but it could be the right – not at the moment – but it could be the right who get there first.”

Rutherford identifies this moment as a chance for a true reset of Labour – “not milestones or missions, but a fundamental reset”. Blue Labour prescriptions, however, are not easily accepted by those in the party who are uncomfortable with what they interpret as its views on gender, race and religion.

“It doesn’t know how to deal with Islam. It doesn’t know how to separate Islamism from the great majority of moderate Muslims. It doesn’t know how to deal with race, except to be anti-racist or to go along with DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion],” he says of Labour, while pinpointing this as “where Blue Labour has taken the most abuse”.

And yet he has written before of believing in “an England that is of the hijab and of the bowler hat” – a stance he maintains now. What did he make of the online debate, prompted by an episode of podcast Triggernometry, over whether Rishi Sunak can rightly be considered English?

“Englishness is a membership,” replies Rutherford. “A lot of people think that English is some sort of ethnic absolute, and I don’t think it is.”

But he continues: “The problem is that the left has convinced itself that we’re an immigrant nation, and we’re not. We’re just not… What it’s trying to do is say things like ‘we’re for progressive patriotism’, i.e. we’ll pick and choose the bits we like. But you can’t – you have to embrace the whole lot.”

The government appears to oscillate between rejecting so-called ‘woke’ and embracing it. Rutherford used to write primarily about masculinity; his chapter in the 1998 book he co-edited, Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, was focused on the need for white heterosexual men to create a language and politics that was not simply oppositional.

Asked what he made of the push for Netflix show Adolescence to be shown in schools, he – like Kemi Badenoch – has not seen it but says: “There’s always a moral panic about masculinity. Every generation, masculinity is always in crisis. I don’t like the idea of toxic masculinity at all.”

“The pornography thing is an issue,” he adds. “Andrew Tate is an obnoxious caricature. He’s a joke, really – you couldn’t make it up. But that’s not the real problem.

“Where do young boys and young men fit into our society? Where can they find a sense of who they are and feel good about themselves, feel that they’ve got a future? A lot of them don’t feel that at the moment.

“Manly virtues of the past that were seen as good things about men – to have courage, integrity – are dismissed now. Boys are supposed to be in touch with their feelings. Well, I’m not saying they shouldn’t be, but there’s more to it than that.”

A recent Newsnight episode saw Victoria Derbyshire demand to know when her guests – three young men – last cried. “If we get into a war, we won’t be asking boys those questions,” Rutherford remarks pointedly.

The revolt against Treasury orthodoxy and ‘woke’ is being channelled through the Future of the Left project, which has made a particular effort to bring in young people. This rests on the premise that it is they who best understand the current political landscape. They appreciate, for example, that discourse on the online right is prescient nowadays in the ‘posting to policy’ pipeline (when government takes its agenda from the online world, or is forced to respond to its demands; see rape gangs, for example). More controversially, they think the online right – while anathema to liberals in Westminster – usually reflects opinion regarded as common-sense by most people in the country.

As well as influencing No 10’s thinking now, Rutherford hopes the Policy Exchange initiative will nurture a new generation of talent. Having attended a private roundtable hosting these young advisers, writers and think tankers, it was evident that some could well be future Cabinet ministers. Notably, some were from Civic Future, the organisation led by Munira Mirza – once known as “Boris Johnson’s brain” – that aims to “encourage talented people in the UK to enter public life”. Civic Future and Glasman even share a staff member.

“We won’t get the chance of a second term unless we have a completely new generation that simply comes through and takes over. That’s one option: we get another chance, and we have that new generation. Because it won’t happen with this one, but this one can prepare the way for the next one,” Rutherford explains.

“Those who are now in their 20s, who are far more attuned to what’s happening – there will be an opportunity for them to finish the job and turn the left completely back to the country. The future of the left is a 25-year, 20-year project. It’s just starting.” 

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