I suspect that ‘Weekend secrets of the “chillaxing” Prime Minister’ (£) is one of the last headlines that Number 10 wanted to see this Saturday. It is acutely sensitive about the idea that Cameron doesn’t work hard enough, a charge that it thinks is as unfair as it is damaging.
But perhaps more interesting than the details of the Prime Minister’s Sunday routine — a ‘crap film’ and a few glasses of wine at lunch — is what Francis Elliott and James Hanning reveal about the Cameron-Hilton relationship. As Cameron’s biographers, Elliott and Hanning know the Cameron circle extremely well and they provide an intriguing perspective on what has happened to the relationship between Cameron and his senior adviser Steve Hilton.
They report that, after the election, Cameron asked Hilton to be the man telling him if he was being radical enough. But Hilton then became disillusioned. They quote a friend of his saying (£) at the end of last year, ‘He’s having a miserable time. He can’t believe what power has done to them all, including Dave. He thinks Dave has just become focused on power. He’s not the person he thought he was.’
Hilton’s reasons for going on sabbatical for a year are undoubtedly complicated. He’s genuine in his desire to have his whole family in the same place, which is currently only possible in California given his wife’s job with Google. But there’s no doubt that he’s also frustrated by the pace of change in government, hence his row with Bob Kerslake about civil service reform. How much, though, this frustration extends to his old friend the Prime Minister is more difficult to judge. In some ways, I think we’ll only be able to judge this by whether or not Hilton returns at the end of his sabbatical.
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