The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday 11 August 2009
In the article below, we named a member of the shadow chancellor's circle as Rohan Silver. That should have been Rohan Silva.
'Ten years a minor academic in a provincial university," says Phillip Blond, with a kind of gleeful amazement, "and then suddenly, it all changed."
By way of proof, I am interviewing him at the futuristic London offices of Nesta – the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – where he has just been made a fellow. As a backdrop, it reflects his elevation to the top of a very metropolitan tree, while also forming a jarring counterpoint to his favourite reference points. Our two-hour conversation regularly touches on such figures as William Cobbett, GK Chesterton, Lord Shaftesbury, John Ruskin and Randolph Churchill – but its setting is a circular meeting room whose pristine surfaces and glowing white walls rather suggest the interior of a spaceship.
The scenery also highlights Blond's rather surreal recent experience. For most of the last decade, he was a lecturer in philosophy and theology at St Martin's College in Lancaster, Ambleside and Carlisle, which is now part of the University Of Cumbria. Then, thanks chiefly to a run of newspaper comment pieces, his work caught the attention of two very important groups of people: admirers rooted in the London media, Westminster and the capital's policy wonks; and, perhaps more importantly, some of the more adventurous minds grouped around the current leadership of the Conservative party.
Early this year, having just turned 42, he moved to London to become the director of a new "Progressive Conservatism" project set up by the once New Labour-aligned thinktank Demos – a job which quickly came to grief (more of which later), though that hiccup has hardly slowed his momentum: as well as his new role at Nesta, he has just set up his own thinktank, ResPublica (which translates as "common wealth").
"I've raised £1.5m in two weeks," he claims, once again sounding amazed. His thoughts have made it into speeches by David Cameron; his most fervent fans include the Tory leader's longstanding aide Steve Hilton, and one Rohan Silver, a member of the shadow chancellor's circle who plays the young Ed Miliband to George Osborne's Gordon Brown. The key to all this is what Blond calls Red Toryism, a critique-cum-credo that harks back to the old paternalist Conservatism that was all but obliterated by Margaret Thatcher, but is also aimed at providing an answer to an array of very modern problems.
Its foundation is Blond's three-way breakdown of modern British history, and the alleged scourges that have conspired to produce the "broken society" of modern Tory demonology. First, he says, there was the postwar expansion of the state, which eventually "atomised and separated" once-strong communities. Next came the left's embrace of what was supposedly all the rage in the 1960s – hedonism, moral relativism, "the politics of desire" – which Blond thinks trickled down to the most vulnerable layers of society and spread chaos. Finally, Thatcherism unleashed the free market, which fused with 60s individualism to squash the last vestiges of public morality, and in turn, fed the growth of the state, since society was now so out of control that government had to grow even more intrusive.
In keeping with his rhetorical showmanship, this broad-brush story tends to be dispatched with barely a pause for breath, and is capped by claims that can sound alarmist, to say the least: "We have a culture that doesn't believe in objective values"; "We're now in a society without communities." Those contentions tend to propel us into long arguments – for example, I'm really not having the thick lines Blond draws from modern social breakdown to the mores of a few thousand 60s bohemians. But once things quieten down, he sketches out a portrait of modern society that often sounds unarguable.
"Our society has lost a huge element," he says. "What I'm trying to say, is that if you look at civic disengagement, and the levels at which people no longer engage in their chambers of commerce, their school, relationships with their neighbourhood, the rise of loneliness, the fragmenting of families … well, this isn't something fake."
The solution, as he sees it, is a sea change that you hear echoed across just about the entire modern political class: a rolling back of government, the reawakening of community spirit, and a restoration of the kind of "intermediate civic institutions" that preceded the welfare state. Where Blond differs from Westminster groupthink, however, is in his emphasis on the "high culture" and upright moral standards that he claims both liberals on the left and right have damned as old-fashioned – and the failings of a "monopoly capitalism" that has squashed initiative and common endeavour almost as much as the bureaucratic state. Blond may bemoan the dead hand of government, but he also wants to break the power of, say, Tesco. Such is the "Red" part of his thinking, and the reason why his smattering of Tory fans often seem to be far outnumbered by hostile Thatcherites; as one Labour figure recently put it, "a Red Tory revolution would certainly need much blue blood to be spilled."
Much of his thinking is seemingly traceable to Blond's own childhood. "We were classic 60s children," he says. "It probably was a liberal upbringing. And I saw the limits of that."
His father, Max Blond, was a painter and gallery owner. Thanks partly to his parents' separation when he was 16, the years he spent in and around Merseyside were split between inner-city Liverpool and the Wirral, and both private and state schools (he was independently educated during his primary years, failed his 11 plus, and then went to a secondary modern, but he remains an enthusiastic supporter of selection).
As he sees it, "at different times, I've inhabited working-class positions, and very upper-class positions – which was a great benefit for informing my politics and philosophy." Though he greets my mention of it with a grimace, one of the more colourful aspects of his story is that – thanks to his father's second marriage – his stepbrother is the actor Daniel Craig, aka James Bond.
Blond's academic progress took him to three universities: Hull, then Warwick, and on to Cambridge's Peterhouse College (tellingly, once the home of the "Peterhouse right", who supplied 80s Tories with some of their more moral rhetoric). He did a PhD in theology, under the supervision of John Milbank, one of the Anglican pioneers of a philosophy known as radical orthodoxy, which still defines a good deal of Blond's thinking. At 27, Blond duly converted to the Church of England, a crucial staging-post on the road to his current renown – and, he says, a matter of intellectual conviction rather than mystical revelation: "It happened through reading St John's Gospel and thinking, 'This is philosophically right.'"
Red Toryism first stirred thanks to Blond's increasing distance from the side of politics with which he had once felt an instinctive affinity. "I grew up leftwing, as a kind of standard Northern kid," he says. "I was on the left, but I never really bought into it – and increasingly, as I got older, a lot of my friends didn't seem to be leftwing at all. They were right wing: they were all libertarians." His feelings towards Thatcherism, meanwhile, were defined by what happened to his home turf in the 1980s, and the malign consequences of the Tories' laissez-faire economics. So it was that he arrived at the idea that two different strands of liberalism – economic and social – had meshed and rendered politics increasingly meaningless: "For me, the realisation was that there was no genuine left and no genuine right."
Not entirely surprisingly, his response to New Labour was "complete disillusionment" – and his politics really began to cohere in the first few years of this decade, when he spent endless hours in the library, constructing his own kind of third way. In 2006, his enthusiasm was tweaked by the ascendancy of David Cameron and his first burst of touchy feely rhetoric. "I really believed in the politics that Cameron was trying to bring about," he says now. "For the first time in British politics, somebody was talking about wellbeing; about broader categories of human happiness and satisfaction, and civic and local solutions. In all honesty, I thought, 'This is right.'"
One question hangs over Blond: even if he keeps the company of high-up Tories, does his influence actually amount to much? The question is surely even more pertinent given the increasing sense that an incoming Tory government will be an altogether more austere, hard-headed set-up than Cameron's early burst of "progressive" speechifying suggested.
When I speak to a shadow minister and Cameron ally, he says that "self-consciously nostalgic" aspects of Blond's thinking are difficult to square with the Tory leader's emphasis on modernisation, but that doesn't mean that he isn't being listened to, as Hilton's admiration of Blond proves.
"Core to what David Cameron feels," says the source, "is that a Toryism that is all about the price of everything and the value of nothing, is arid and inadequate, and not him. He wants to find an account of the world that is rightwing and Tory, but which also explains why he doesn't want village post offices to shut. Phillip Blond provides him with that." This, he says, is more a matter of mood music than hard policy. "If you look to Phillip to come up with five proposals that could form the core of a white paper, you search in vain. But if you look to someone who can reinforce an intellectual climate, he can provide."
What's particularly interesting about the Cameroons' qualified embrace of Blond's work is the fact that – as he must know – there are parts of his thinking that sit very awkwardly with their attempt to push the Conservative party away from moralism of the Ann Widdecombe school. This, for example, is his take on abortion: "I find it deeply, deeply problematic, and very, very worrying. I think it's one of the more disturbing moral things we do … There probably are cases for abortion in very extreme instances … but by and large, I think it should become an unacceptable practice. I would probably want to limit it to only the most extreme cases: rape, or when someone was very young, or incest. It's not something I can philosophically support."
When I answer this with a suggestion that effectively banning it would result in all the horrors of backstreet abortions, his comeback reflects one of his occasional failings: an air of ivory-tower innocence, whereby blunt-end realities are answered by talk that sounds unconvincingly romantic. "Well, I would remove the pejorative on one-parent families," he says. "A lot of the reasons so many women have abortions is that the social cost of having a child is so horrifically high. I would actually honour them – because for me, women who choose not to have abortions are among the most moral creatures on these shores. What I think is incoherent in a conservative approach that is hostile to abortion is to be anti-single mothers."
Quite apart from its apparent naivety, this is Blond all over: pushing beyond two entrenched positions, finding a third, and sounding simultaneously conservative and radical, albeit in a slightly self-conscious way.
To the Tories who are less than enamoured of him, it may also give off a familiar whiff, of an academic take on politics with little practical appeal. Not so long ago, when I asked a very senior Conservative about him, they batted the question away, claiming that Blond was merely a showy contrarian: "The kind of person who'll say things like, 'the English civil war was actually not a civil war'." Moreover, as far as some sceptical Conservatives are concerned, Cameron is at the same stage of his ascent as Tony Blair circa 1995-6, when the latter was affecting enthusiasm for such fashionable notions as communitarianism and the stakeholder society. Such, as it turned out, were the indulgences of opposition; even in the boom years, power was a matter of urgency and pragmatism, high-flown ideas were a dispensable luxury – and so it will prove with Phillip Blond.
For now, though, he is still rising. There are not many people who could last barely six months at a highly rated thinktank, leave amid rumours of acrimony, and come out smelling of roses. Like a musician who has just left a band, he claims his split with Demos was a matter of "political and philosophical differences", and that "the values and philosophy I believe in can have a better home elsewhere"; his rapid progress over the last couple of years suggests he's not far wrong.
So, here he sits, with his seven-figure heap of donations, and a gleaming future. His benefactors, he says, are "rather lovely people, who say: 'I'm a little bit Red, I'm a little bit Tory. I've been a Conservative all my life, but I want to look after poor people.'"
He goes on: "The opportunity has presented itself to set up a new thinktank, based on the ideas that I believe in, and I'd be foolish not to take it. I just think there's a gap in the field."
Amid the glowing white walls and sci-fi fittings, what Phillip Blond says next sounds perfect. "There are just too many people rehashing the politics of the 1980s. What I want to do is something truly transformative."