A Conversation With Robert Colville

CPS Director talks about The Telegraph, BuzzFeed and The Sunday Times

“We were lunging after new business models on a weekly basis,” Robert Colville recounted to me. Now the Director of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), a think-tank co-founded by Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, Colville was once a journalist at The Telegraph when digital journalism was on the rise. 

The right-leaning broadsheet was at the forefront of popularising online content amongst the mainstream – making and breaking hacks via its Telegraph Blogs section under Damian Thompson and pioneering the daily newsletter beat in Britain under then Deputy Editor Benedict Brogan and later Stephen Bush. 

The outlet also effectively absorbed the British political blogosphere when it had reached its zenith by the end of the 2000s. By then, Iain Dale’s blog and Tim Montgomery’s ConservativeHome had become staples on the right alongside Paul Staines’ GuidoFawkes, which launched in 2004. 

On the left you had LaboutList, LabourUncut and LeftFootForward, amongst others. The movement was amateur – sometimes semi-professional, at best – and it mimicked the US’ own blogosphere, most notably TalkingPointsMemo. 

But it did foster genuine and worthwhile philosophical and practical debates, with plenty of re-blogging and interaction by authors, readers and haters in the comments. Substack is still yet to achieve this.

“For quite a while Telegraph Blogs was the place for right-wing commentary. You would have this extraordinary mix of people: Norman Tebbit [the former Chancellor and Thatcher loyalist] would interact with the readers entirely seriously and courteously – they loved him for it,” Colville said. 

It was Twitter which “took the energy out of it”, Colville argued. “It was quite weird being inside the Telegraph newsroom at that time because it went from ‘stop pissing about on Twitter all day, otherwise we’re going to fire you’ to ‘everyone needs to be like [consumer hack] Harry Wallop and build-up their following’,” he explained.

As for the ultimate demise of Telegraph Blogs, and some sections of the British blogosphere, Colville put it down to something very simple, but rather fundamental: money. It was incredibly hard to draw advertising revenues from the highly political content. 

Colville, who had joined The Telegraph as a trainee sub-editor, rose through the ranks of the comment and opinion sections of the paper, eventually becoming an Assistant Editor. 

A brief spell followed at BuzzFeed UK, where he was appointed as ‘News Director’. Colville went freelance after his five-month stint there, going on to edit CapX, the media arm of the CPS, in 2016. 

He became Deputy Director of the think-tank at the start of 2017 and then got the top job nine months later. In doing so, Colville had arguably become one of the most influential people in Westminster.

Before The Sunday Times came knocking with a columnist slot in 2020, Boris Johnson’s team reached out. They wanted Colville to edit the Conservatives’ 2019 General Election Manifesto. He compared the role to being an air traffic controller.

“Every department has fed into it and every Cabinet Minister needs to be happy that their ideas have been reflected,” he said. “You’ve also got the guys who have come over from The Treasury who are costing every single sentence. You even have to think about the photos.” 

The series of pledges helped Johnson secure the largest majority the Conservatives have won since the 1980s. At the next general election, it’s expected to go the other way, with Labour tipped for a majority in the House of Commons. 

Whoever the next government is, Colville is still trying to influence them and he edits every single one of the CPS’ reports. The think-tank recently released an extensive report on migration, a top three issue for the UK public and a policy area which Labour is also trying to address. 

Housing is also a top issue for Colville, who wants to liberalise the rules and regulations around the sector to help stimulate building and ultimately increase the UK’s housing stock.

“Britain has been building fewer homes than it used to. It has been building fewer homes than it needs to, especially given the growing population. And those homes it has been building have been smaller than almost anywhere else,” a 2023 CPS report warned. 

This stance, one which runs contrary to the nimbyism of countryside Conservative MPs, could rule him out of any general election role with Rishi Sunak’s team. And due to his family commitments, Colville would find another manifesto editing job hard. But he doesn’t rule it out: “they know where I am”. 

If Keir Starmer does get into Number 10, Colville plans to hold the government to account on its policies. And he also wants to work on helping rebuild the centre-right: “You can see that there are lots of directions the Tory Party could go in and I quite want it to go in the direction of all the things I’ve been arguing for.” 

You can listen to the full interview, including how Colville puts his Sunday Times column together, on The Political Press Box.