‘Intellectual’ who sat at the heart of New Labour
METROPOLITAN LEFTIE ASKED TO SORT OUT SHAMBLES... AND PUB BOSS IN REAL WORLD
THE intellectual reviewing self-employed workers’ rights for the Tories was once a key lieutenant of Tony Blair.
Matthew Taylor, 56, is the privately educated child of a socialist. He is the son of sociologist Laurie Taylor, whose antics as a 1960s and 70s university lecturer inspired novelist Malcolm Bradbury to write The History Man.
The novel, published in 1975, tells the story of a promiscuous self-proclaimed revolutionary academic who believes his genius gives him the right to do whatever he wants.
Matthew Taylor was the sole child of Laurie and his then wife Winifred. He attended private Emanuel School, Battersea, south London. Known for being a rare Labour supporter at the school, he once boasted after winning the English prize that he would refuse to receive it from the special guest – then Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher. But when it came to the crunch he accepted the book token from her.
After school, Mr Taylor first worked for an Australian bank before reading sociology at Southampton university, where he got a first. There, Mr Taylor was such a supporter of socialist MP Tony Benn that he fell out with the student union president, future BBC journalist Jon Sopel.
He started a long-term relationship with lawyer Claire Holland, with whom he had two sons, before they split in 2007. Three years later he set up home with Tony Blair’s ex-director of government relations, Ruth Turner. The couple have a child.
In 1992, Mr Taylor stood unsuccessfully to be Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington. Two years later, after the election of Mr Blair as Labour leader, he was put in charge of the party’s rapid rebuttal operation. During the 1997 election he was campaign co-ordinator and director of policy, helping to write the manifesto. After the election victory, Mr Taylor briefly became the Labour Party’s general secretary. He supported higher income tax and limits on party donations then considered too left wing for the Premier.
Between 1998 and 2003 he headed the Institute for Public Policy Research. But he was brought back by Mr Blair to head the Number 10 policy unit.
But a year after the 2005 general election, he left politics again to become chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts thinktank. But last October, he was brought back to the frontline by Mrs May, who asked him to lead an independent review into the rights of the self-employed and new ‘gig economy’ workers.