It is a sign of the influence that Steve Hilton has on the Cameron project that there have been more column inches devoted to his departure from Downing Street than there would be to most Cabinet resignations. But even after he heads to California in May, Hilton will still be part of the Cameron brains trust. He is already scheduled to work on the Prime Minister’s conference speech.
Hilton has, I understand, been mulling the idea of taking a sabbatical since last summer. His decision to go ahead and take next year off seems to have been motivated by a variety of factors. But those closest to him stress that family reasons genuinely were key.
This is not to say that Hilton is not frustrated. But he long ago accepted that being frustrated was part of his job as he tried to drive change through a government machine that has the engine of a lawnmower and the brakes of a Rolls Royce.
Fittingly, Hilton’s last task before he goes West will be to try and push through change to the Whitehall machine. The civil service has never quite known what to make of Hilton. One day he turned up at Number 10 in his cycling shorts and wandered round the building asking baffled bureaucrats if he could borrow a pair of trousers. The explanation: he had biked in and left his jeans at home.
But the civil service moved from puzzlement to outright hostility when Hilton insisted that they publish just how many civil servants there were working in each team in each department. The mandarins knew that this was all part of Hilton’s agenda to shrink the size of the bureaucracy. His wonderfully ambitious aim is — apparently — an 80 percent reduction in the size of Whitehall.
The question now is whether Hilton comes back at the end of his sabbatical or not. I suspect that a stint in the sunshine will likely revive — not dampen — Hilton’s enthusiasm and radicalism. Coming back to fashion a manifesto for a truly Tory government is an attractive opportunity, and one that Hilton may well take up.
But it says something about the changing perceptions of Hilton that it is now the right who most want him to return. He has gone from being seen as a ‘hello clouds, hello skies’ moderniser to ‘Thatcher in a t-shirt’. In truth, he is a bit of both.
The friendships Hilton has stuck up with Thatcher-era Cabinet ministers are intriguing; he recently went to see the Thatcher movie The Iron Lady with Lord Young and Ken Baker. I suspect that whether he or not he returns will depend on him believing that second term Cameron will be as radical as second term Thatcher.
Comments