About

Stuart Bruce is a long-standing Labour Party member and activist. He was one of the first politicians in the UK to start a blog and  the first councillor to do so. That blog is now defunct, as it was very definitely a ‘councillor blog’ and not about national politics (as The Guardian made clear in Blogging for better bins.)

As well as being a local party campaigner and activist Stuart has also worked professionally full-time for the Labour Party. He also worked for Andy Burnham MP as Deputy Director for Strategy and Communications in the Labour leadership elections. In 2007 Stuart was the Director of Communications for Alan Johnson during his bid to become Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. The campaign was at the forefront of using new forms of online campaigning and was one of the first political campaigns in the world to use Twitter (Member of the Twittering classes, The Guardian).

Outside of politics Stuart is a well known independent public relations and social media consultant and is listed in the PRWeek Power Book of the UK’s top 1% of most influential public relations people. He started his professional business blog, A PR Guy’s Musings, at the start of 2003 and was one of the world’s first public relations blogs and is ranked in the AdAge Power 150 as one of the most influential PR blogs in the world. Although based in the UK Stuart regularly visits and works with clients all over the world including Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.

In 2007 he was the founder and managing director of Wolfstar, a specialist public relations, social media and word of mouth marketing and communications consultancy. Wolfstar is based in Leeds and London and its clients included the NHS, British Waterways, First Direct, Sony Ericsson, Inland Waterways Authority and the Appointments Commission. It was also on the Central Office of Information (COI) framework of PR agencies approved to work with UK government departments and the public sector.

From 1997 to 1998 he worked for the Labour Party, mainly on helping it to develop a strategy for working with the small and medium sized business community. Stuart also acted as Hilary Benn’s campaign manager during the by-election in which he was first elected to Parliament.

From 1998 to 2006 he served as a Labour Party councillor for the Middleton ward and then after boundary changes the Middleton Park ward in south Leeds. During this time he held several position including Chair of the Middleton and Hunslet area committee, Lead Member for Leisure and Lead Member for Corporate Communications and Customer Service.