‘Election campaigns are like voodoo’: Fiona Hill breaks her silence

Not so long ago, Fiona Hill was the most powerful woman in Whitehall. She ran Downing Street with an iron grip for the first year of Theresa May’s premiership alongside her co-chief of staff Nick Timothy. Ministers bowed to their authority, civil servants feared them, Tory MPs complained of a power grab by a duo of unelected officials. As the former Labour MP Frank Field put it: ‘People know that Fiona is not someone you mess around with.’ But after the Tories fell short of a majority in the 2017 snap election, she and Timothy were forced to resign. Hill flew to America and disappeared from public life.

We meet in The Spectator’s offices to record an episode of my podcast, Women with Balls. She is bright-eyed and dressed in a red two-piece suit. This is her first interview since leaving Downing Street five years ago, and she tells the story of election night. Some polls had predicted the Tories would win a majority of more than 100 seats. Instead, the tiny majority won by David Cameron in 2015 was lost and there was a hung parliament. Hill recalls how she got the news just before 10 p.m. ‘Andy Marr called me and told me what the exit poll was,’ she says. ‘I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. I was aware that I was there in body, but I wasn’t really there at all in my mind.’

May had called the snap election to deliver‘ certainty and stability’ and had ended up with neither. What went wrong? ‘The polls indicated that we would win fairly well,’ she says. ‘Election campaigns are almost like voodoo. You can get [good] luck and you can also get bad luck. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got your messages right.’

Some factors were, however, within the campaign’s control – such as the ‘dementia tax’.