THIRTEEN
May 2010–April 2012
‘Steve made the PM. He would never have become prime minister without him. Dave loved him,’ says someone who knew them both. ‘But the PM found it hard to live with him in Downing Street.’1 These comments sum up the oddest story in Cameron’s far from conventional premiership. The lead character, Steve Hilton, is one of the most creative and unusual figures ever to hold a senior role in Downing Street: he regularly padded around the corridors of Number 10 barefoot. On one particular morning, 17 June 2010, he arrived at Number 10 in his cycling shorts. He had a meeting scheduled with the prime minister and panicked until a member of the policy team took off his own trousers and handed them to him. He wore them all day, apparently unaware they were completely the wrong size. Hilton at 10 is a story of love, genius, inspiration, and if not ultimately betrayal then certainly rejection. He was the booster on Rocket Cameron. He gave his boss the self-belief, inspiration and the ideas to make it to Downing Street. But the core mission fulfilled, his role became gradually redundant, and he fell to earth, leaving Cameron and his team, who had also come of age with him, to find their own way onwards into an uncertain future without their pilot-in-chief.
Hilton is the son of Hungarian refugees. He attended Christ’s Hospital, an independent school in West Sussex, read PPE at Oxford, and met Cameron at the Conservative Research Department in 1992. Opposites though they were in most ways, they were powerfully attracted to each other. ‘At heart Hilton is a radical reformer, an angry young man breaking free from the shackles of Communism. He wants to change everything all at once and hates anything that is secret, not transparent, or that reeks of an impersonal officialdom.’ Hilton’s ability took him on a stellar rise through the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. One of his assignments was selling the Conservative Party: he displayed a natural gift for ‘political imagery, communications, and sloganeering’, which caught the eye of those in power.2 He joined Cameron’s team in 2005 and made an immediate impression. ‘He tells me stuff from the heart,’ said Cameron, who was captivated by Hilton’s mind and breadth of vision. He was everything Cameron was not. He made Cameron a more complete person and professional politician. His role resembled New Labour’s Peter Mandelson, without his guile.
Cameron looks back with special fondness on Hilton’s impact on his party conference speech in 2007, his best, he says, of the Opposition years, and delivered, on Hilton’s prompting, without notes.3 In this 2005–7 period, Hilton was at the forefront of the Conservatives’ ‘detoxification’ drive, moving away from the traditional emphasis on immigration, law and order, and anti-Europeanism, towards a more metropolitan, compassionate and liberal vision of conservatism.4 He gave Cameron a passion for enterprise, transparency, the environment, well-being and the digital agenda.
The crash of 2008 changed everything. Osborne moved up into the driving seat, and Coulson advanced up the pecking order within the inner court. The primary task now became winning the trust of the electorate for Cameron’s and Osborne’s leadership and economic agenda. Hilton departed for a time to California with his wife, Rachel Whetstone, former political secretary to Michael Howard. When he returned in the autumn of 2009, the landscape was very different. But his experience of Palo Alto and California had brought him into contact with a wealth of new ideas. He was a whirling dervish, firing off communications in all directions. He worried that the Tory pitch for the general election, as we have seen, lacked positive messages. His energy was boundless, as one of several thousand emails, this one sent to Tim Chatwin who ran the grid, shows: ‘Tim, I love this on schools and urban regeneration – can we please put something in the grid on this in the New Year?’5 He continually wanted activity, fresh thinking, and he wanted it now.
On 10 November 2009, Cameron gave the ‘Hugo Young’ lecture in London. Written by Hilton, it was the most persuasive case Cameron made for Hilton’s ‘Big Society’ agenda. The state, he said, had become too big, taken too much responsibility from people, and caused economic and social problems. There was more than an echo here of the mantras of the Institute of Economic Affairs, founded by Whetstone’s grandfather, Antony Fisher. To take the place of the state, Cameron said, you need to build up family, community, neighbourhood and local government, creating a strong civil society. At the same time, Hilton began drawing on his California experience and was pushing his notion of the ‘post-bureaucratic age’ with its concomitant ideas of decentralisation, technology, transparency and freedom of information. The ideas coalesced in Cameron’s ‘TED’ (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk on 16 February 2010, called ‘The Next Age of Government’, and in the launch the same month of the ‘Network for a Post-Bureaucratic Age’. The Big Society was taking shape in Hilton’s mind in those months under three broad headings, in order of priority: decentralisation, public sector reform, and social action.
But by early 2010, as we saw in Chapter 2, Hilton ran into problems, with Cameron finding it difficult to juggle the two very different agendas. Osborne and Coulson were arguing that ‘Plan A’ was all that mattered and should be the main narrative. ‘What people wanted was competence and effective leadership,’ says one person at the heart of the 2010 election campaign. ‘They didn’t want grand schemes or the Obama vision of hope and change.’ Hilton responded that his Big Society agenda was the right way forward, and that it was nothing to do with the fiscal cuts. He wanted the Big Society as the only item in the shop display. Cameron hates conflict, and charged Letwin with weaving both agendas into a coherent narrative. Letwin was the ideal choice. His economic views chimed with Osborne’s and he possessed the shadow chancellor’s total trust. Equally he made Hilton believe he was on his side too. But Letwin is a clever man, and it soon became obvious to him that he was merely papering over a glaring crack, one which would emasculate Cameron and the clarity of the Conservative message at the 2010 general election. Indeed apart from when the party launched its manifesto, in which the Big Society took centre stage, the concept was hardly mentioned in the rest of the election campaign – a reflection of the doubts about its electoral appeal within the team.
Cameron’s core philosophy and beliefs remained elusive to many. They were clear in his own mind. ‘People say they don’t know what I stand for,’ he said in 2014: ‘I would say that my own agenda is aspiration for all, Big Society and service, education and welfare reform.’6 One person close to Cameron is sceptical about Hilton and regards his influence as overblown and damaging: ‘The Big Society stuff came out of absolutely nowhere. Dave agreed with parts of it, on personal responsibility and taking control of your life. But most people had absolutely no idea what it was talking about.’ Yet the Big Society agenda did come from somewhere. Much of the approach – including the sense of community, the importance of family and stability, and the value of charity and service – struck a chord deep within Cameron. Hilton was Cameron’s muse. He knew Cameron better than almost anyone, and articulated Cameron’s most profound instincts. ‘He is a really modern, liberal, socially concerned person: not at all like George or Andy,’ says Hilton. ‘He really believes in decentralisation of power, family, entrepreneurs, transparency, communities and neighbourhoods, and gay marriage.’7 By 2015, Hilton however had accepted that although Cameron still believed in the Big Society agenda, he had taken a conscious decision to prioritise stable government, holding the coalition together and leading Britain through the economic crisis.8
Hilton had an insatiable energy and in the weeks leading up to the 2010 general election demanded to be involved in everything. Together with Chatwin, he mapped out in great detail the first hundred days of a Cameron government. Rohan Silva became a major ally in his crusade.9 With Letwin and Francis Maude, the shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, they worked through each department’s Structural Reform Plan with each shadow Secretary of State, later to be renamed ‘business plans’ once in power. ‘Steve’s instinct was to go for it and get a lot done very quickly,’ says Letwin. ‘That impulse was shared by Osborne and Cameron. We took a clear decision that we should have the architecture very firmly in place if we became a government.’10 Each plan had a timetable creating a powerful sense of impetus and incentive. Cameron told Hilton, ‘I want you to get things done now so when we look back at the end of the five years, we can see how much we did.’
After the election, Hilton bursts onto an unsuspecting Number 10. Civil servants were warned about this odd creature, but nothing could prepare them fully for what hits them. None have ever known a figure like him at the heart of government. Hilton is as wary of Civil Service obstructionism as any in Cameron’s team so moves quickly on the transparency agenda, to increase the openness of government through the publication of data and information, before official resistance can be organised. ‘Steve, Rohan and I acted together on this very swiftly after the general election,’ recalls Maude. They bring together a ‘Transparency Board’ containing high-octane figures such as Web-inventor Tim Berners-Lee, and artificial intelligence expert and later co-founder of Open Data Institute, Nigel Shadbolt.11 Hilton wants every new policy proposal to be submitted to the ‘family test’, and is passionate to make it ‘the most family friendly government ever’12: policies aimed specifically at helping families take up nearly half his time in Downing Street.
Hilton looks back nostalgically to the dynamic Number 10 operation of Thatcher’s heyday in the 1980s. He disagrees with Letwin’s determination to slim it down. Instead, he becomes frustrated that it lacks the right machinery to pursue his policy ideas. Cameron and Ed Llewellyn are anxious that Number 10 shuns the bloated Blair and Brown models, and do not want it to give the impression of throwing its weight around. The Policy Unit will have only a handful of staff, overseen by James O’Shaughnessy, manifesto writer and head of the research department when in Opposition. Hilton eschews the idea of any title for himself: he doesn’t want his role to be defined or bureaucratised. To Gus O’Donnell, the lack of capacity in Number 10 is bound to create problems. ‘Steve was brilliant and bonkers, apt to lose his temper. But the PM knew he was like this. The problem lay more below the level of Steve and Rohan. They had pared too much back so lacked the capacity in Number 10 to drive change through.’13 Fatally, Cameron’s team do not heed his advice on Number 10, nor Heywood’s.
On Thursday 1 July, Heywood convenes a meeting for Number 10 staff, introducing them one by one ‘with customary professionalism’. Hilton gives a talk about his three cross-cutting ideas that bind the government together: Big Society, transparency and families. Letwin goes on to outline the philosophy of the government: ‘Wherever possible, markets should be open to provide choice: if a market is not possible, there should be payment by results, as in welfare and prisons; if that is not possible, as in with the police, there should be direct elections; and if that is not possible, delivery should be scrutinised to be made as efficient as possible.’ Officials swallow hard. Not since 1979 has there been such an ideological shift in the thinking behind government operations. Hilton knows at this early stage that Whitehall has not grasped the concept of the Big Society. ‘In a well-intentioned but typically bureaucratic way, they heard the phrase and thought “there must be a Big Society programme or policy we can roll out and implement” rather than seeing it as the central argument for domestic reform,’ Hilton recalls. ‘That is the moment when it first started to go wrong.’14
The Treasury are expected to obstruct the enterprise agenda. Hilton wants to open up government contracts to small companies, introduce tax breaks for early-stage companies and have start-up loans. Treasury officials are indeed not enthusiastic about this agenda, though Osborne is personally. They both think the Treasury is never at its strongest generating fresh ideas.
Cameron’s speech on 19 July in Liverpool officially launches the Big Society, and speaks of ‘a new approach’ to government and governing. He calls for an end to regulation and bureaucracy that hinders volunteering, and for people to act as volunteers.15 Even in these early days, the Big Society has its critics, including Cameron’s erstwhile rival for the leadership, David Davis, who is reported in the Financial Times as dismissing it as ‘Blairite dressing’ to compensate for the baleful agenda that has come from the ‘Brokeback Coalition’.16 Hilton soon starts running into problems. He deeply resents the Civil Service ring of officialdom that descends around Cameron and fills his day with meetings and state business, which Hilton thinks is largely a waste of Cameron’s time. ‘Why the fuck is he proposing to have four or five separate intelligence meetings each week?’ he demands to know when discussing the PM’s diary.
Hilton gets off to a good start with the Lib Dems. He shares a small office adjacent to the Cabinet Room with Lib Dem policy chief Polly Mackenzie. ‘He generates fresh thinking, an antidote to the technocratic tendencies of the Civil Service,’ says one Lib Dem.17 His initial fights are not with civil servants, nor the Lib Dems, but friendly fire. Within days of taking power Hilton and Coulson are falling out badly: ‘You can talk this crap if you like, but I’ll just keep chucking meat out to the red tops’ is how one aide sums up Coulson’s approach. Hilton implores Cameron to reach out to a more liberally minded audience than the tabloids. Hilton’s relations with Osborne are no better in power than in Opposition. Soon the chancellor is refusing to have Hilton at meetings of the Quad. Hilton’s flair for ideas does not translate into know-how at getting things done in Whitehall. He is reluctant to compromise on his agenda or align it with anyone else’s, insisting the Big Society is nothing to do with the programme of fiscal cuts. He does not build alliances and relationships to win people over: his irascibility irks and alienates those who might have been his allies.
His relationship with Heywood is intriguing. The biggest iconoclast in Downing Street for many years meets the most savvy and powerful official figure to bestride Downing Street since the 1980s. In these early months, Heywood is galvanised by working with Hilton and makes a big effort to support him. He asks Hilton to attend, at the outset, the weekly meeting of Whitehall’s permanent secretaries: ‘They need to understand what it [the Big Society agenda] means for them,’ Heywood says. He arranges for Hilton to chair a series of weekly meetings in Number 10 to help him deliver the agenda on family policy and the Big Society. He even supports Hilton’s thinking on open data and transparency in government. It is at Heywood’s suggestion that Hilton later brings in Louise Casey to devise policies that help troubled families following the riots. In the first few months of the government, Hilton is instrumental in bringing in Labour figures, like Frank Field and Graham Allen, to conduct reviews into child poverty and early years intervention. He also draws heavily on the advice of two Tory grandees, Lord Heseltine and Lord Young, who become his mentors ‘on how to get things done’ in government as well as his friends and allies. Both undertake important reviews into urban regeneration and deregulation respectively. Heywood is intrigued by and admires Hilton’s creativity and willingness to draw on thinking from across the political spectrum. Heywood is a subtle civil servant. His prime responsibility is to serve the prime minister. As long as Hilton has his master’s favour, Heywood will facilitate his wishes.
Coulson’s departure in January 2011 revitalises Hilton. Within days, he inaugurates a huge push on the Big Society with emails charging through the system again to widespread irritation, or admiration. Briefing of the press by Cameron’s team, which Coulson had strongly discouraged, reaches new heights. Concerns begin to be voiced in Number 10 that Hilton is stirring up the large 2010 intake against the inertia, as he sees it. Hilton presses Cameron to deliver another speech. The left have consistently attacked the Big Society as a smokescreen for hiding the cuts. Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian, describes it as a ‘national joke’. The attacks are striking home: two-thirds of voters believe that the Big Society agenda is merely the government’s attempt to put a positive spin on the cuts.18 The response comes in a speech delivered on 14 February at Somerset House in London. In it, Cameron launches a week-long drive of activities to persuade the public that the policy is not a ‘sepia-tinted’ wash. A torrent of initiatives is announced. £200 million is promised for a Big Society Bank. To fill shortfalls caused by local authority cuts, charities are to be offered ‘lifeline’ funding totalling £110 million. Cash machines are to have a facility to allow donations to good causes. A National Citizen Service (NCS) is to be established offering tens of thousands of teenagers the chance to gain skills and participate in social action projects, while 5,000 community organisers are to become the manifestation of the Big Society across England.19
This might have been the take-off moment for the Big Society. But instead, it begins to unravel. The relaunch fails to achieve the impact that Hilton hopes for. Aside from the NCS, many of the initiatives do not capture the public imagination. Personal relationships are seriously deteriorating. On top of excluding him from meetings of the Quad, Osborne now refuses to let Hilton attend his bilateral meetings with Cameron and deliberately cuts him out from key papers. Hilton is furious. Nat Wei, a peer, who was appointed as an unpaid adviser on the Big Society before the general election, and who continued in government, leaves the role in May 2011. It is a bad sign. Lib Dem enthusiasm for the agenda is replaced by cold hostility. Even before Polly Mackenzie departs on maternity leave in autumn 2011, her relationship with Hilton sours. ‘The Lib Dems hate the Big Society,’ Hilton is regularly heard to say. He is particularly angry that Clegg and Communities Secretary Eric Pickles gang up to emasculate the proposal for elected mayors as they fear the animosity of their councillors and activists on the ground. ‘Dave really believed in local mayors,’ fumes Hilton. ‘But he wasn’t going to bust up the coalition over it.’20 Heywood, who has worked as hard as anyone to facilitate what Hilton was trying to do, begins to show doubt. ‘At some point, from early/mid-2011, Jeremy decided to dodge the bullet and move onto the next thing,’ says one insider.
Hilton falls out badly with Paul Kirby, head of an expanded Policy Unit since February 2011. On 1 June, a private diary records that ‘Hilton doesn’t like Kirby’ and feels he is being undermined by him; Kirby is openly contemptuous of Steve, and ‘whereas Heywood always respects Steve and tempers him when necessary, Paul always seeks to undermine him’. Hilton complains that ‘Paul Kirby is George’s person. It’s been like Yes, Minister with me being kept out of things. I’m told I’ve been copied in on key documents, but I only receive them at the last minute, when it’s too late.’ Hilton protests to Cameron about being marginalised from the work of the Policy Unit: ‘Your job is to make it happen,’ Cameron responds brusquely. Hilton now excludes himself from the twice-daily meetings in the PM’s room, which he considers reactive and unstrategic. Distance is growing from Cameron’s team, who were once so close to him. Hilton soon falls out with Andrew Cooper, who had arrived in Number 10 as director of strategy in March 2011. ‘The prospect of polling and focus groups makes me physically ill,’ Hilton tells him. Ed Llewellyn and Kate Fall have been his closest friends and allies for years, but he grows apart from even them too. He becomes scornful of Coulson’s successor, Craig Oliver. He blames Rupert Harrison for leading Osborne astray.
Fatally, differences are beginning to appear between Hilton and Cameron himself: ‘He is completely falling for the fucking establishment line, we are never going to get anywhere like this!’ he says. He speculates that there are two sides to Cameron: the radical, who he loves, and the traditionalist, who he doesn’t. He fears Cameron’s liking for due process as prime minister is trumping the radical side. There is much unhappiness among Cameron’s close team in the first half of 2011. They retain great affection for Hilton, and, following the departure of Coulson, are deeply anxious not to lose another member of their tight group, least of all when under so much attack from party and press. But Hilton’s iconoclasm, his bombastic style, his lack of discipline and his anger are making enemies across the piece, and causing untold worries: ‘We are always trying to find the right niche for him,’ says one. ‘It was so much easier in Opposition, but he remains the intellectual live wire among us. We need him,’ says another.
Cameron is not giving up on Hilton just yet. He consents to a further Big Society relaunch, in Milton Keynes on 23 May. It includes the announcement that ministers will lead from the front, pledging themselves to undertake a day of voluntary service a year. ‘The Big Society is not some fluffy add-on to more gritty and more important subjects,’ Cameron insists.21 But the reaction of the media remains as cynical as ever. Polls are published showing that the agenda will either be neutral or damaging to the Conservatives at the next general election.22 This is toxic.
The policies Hilton is driving are running into new kinds of problems, cranking up tension still further. He wants the Open Public Services White Paper to be radical, but is thwarted by the Lib Dems, who keep pushing back publication. Officials say progress is difficult with both coalition partners in such different places. Hilton is insistent that contracts be subject to more competition, and public services be opened up more to private sector providers. A high point of tension comes in July 2011 with a Cameron article in the Daily Telegraph written by Hilton, which lays out the aims and principles of the White Paper.23 The Lib Dems hate its advocacy of competition and profits and continue to push publication back to after the summer recess. Hilton wants the Office of Fair Trading to act against monopolies in the public sector, as they do against monopolies in the private sector. For a while, Richard Reeves, Clegg’s director of strategy, is supportive, but Clegg’s implacable opposition to personal budgets in health and social care and competition in public services proves decisive. Losing this battle is a major blow to Hilton.
Lib Dem opposition now thwarts another of his crusades. He wants to liberalise the labour market and asks Adrian Beecroft, a venture capitalist, to look at how this might be done. Beecroft’s suggestions include making it far more difficult for employees who have been dismissed to appeal to employment tribunals. Cameron gives his backing to Hilton, but he runs headlong into the opposition of Business Secretary Vince Cable, who considers this his domain. Hilton cannot understand Cameron’s reluctance simply to push it through against Cable’s blocking. He does not have time for the nuances of holding the coalition together. Progress with the business community and entrepreneurs seems to be getting nowhere, while the TUC, which strongly opposes the plans, is having its way. The forces are stacked too heavily against him. He works tirelessly to build up support for the changes, but he has to admit defeat. Months later, Cameron tells him candidly, ‘I couldn’t tell Vince Cable what to do. I couldn’t overrule him on this.’
On 1 June 2011, Hilton has a frank talk with Silva. They acknowledge they are trying to fight on too many fronts and together draw up a Venn diagram with the overlapping areas in the middle denoting what is really important to both of them. This brings forty areas down to just ten, which they decide to concentrate on. They draft a note, with initials in brackets showing which of them will be principally responsible for driving each agenda item forward in the coming year. They are: open public services White Paper (SH), mayors and decentralisation (SH), families (SH), Somerset House (SH), marketing Britain (SH), Tech City (RS), pharmaceutical industry (RS), sex trafficking (RS), planning (RS), well-being/social value (SH and RH). ‘Somerset House’ refers to Hilton’s obsession that the entire British Empire had been run from buildings that size in the nineteenth century, and that the Civil Service should be shrunk down to the same size today, an idea which, unsurprisingly, provokes anger among senior mandarins. ‘Pharmaceutical industry’ speaks of the determination to make Britain world class in the life sciences. ‘Sex trafficking’ refers to curbing the sex-slave problem.
Hilton’s rationalisation of priorities comes too late. ‘He let himself become involved in minor issues and lost sight of the big picture,’ is the verdict of one senior official. Perhaps the forces are now arrayed too strongly against him. On Monday 20 June, he has a frank conversation with his policy colleagues, having read rumours in the press again over the weekend that he is on the verge of resigning. ‘As you can see, I am still here. We have known each other for years. We are friends in the Tory Party, not in some psychodrama. When we disagree it is a genuine policy disagreement. My role for the prime minister is to push the agenda forward. Others are here to push it back, and that is fine. We are grown-ups and disagreement is fine.’
Matters come to a head at Chequers, where senior ministers assemble for a political Cabinet on Sunday 24 July. Hilton has been uncharacteristically depressed in the early summer. Letwin and Danny Alexander have prepared a paper advocating a new coalition agreement for the second half of the government. Hilton believes their whole approach is fundamentally wrong, and argues they should be first trying to ‘implement the radical things we said we’d do rather than water them down’. Hilton finds a quiet moment and confronts Cameron: ‘We haven’t done a thousandth of what we should have done. The government is far too timid. We are wasting our chance. You need to put me in charge rather than people like Ed [Llewellyn] and Craig [Oliver].’ An acrimonious discussion follows. Cameron is losing patience. His team are feeling undermined. Reports leak that Hilton will shortly be leaving Number 10 – variants of that story have been in circulation in the building since New Year.
The riots in August, which he sees as a great opportunity to reassert the importance of the Big Society, came at the right time for him. The riots have happened, he says, because of insufficient regard for community, personal responsibility and family. The social policy review is set up. He returns to Number 10 in September in a much happier frame of mind. But the old problems soon emerge. Hilton is infringing a golden rule of Cameron’s inner circle – you do not talk to the press. It alienates him badly from them. Deep down, the mood is changing. Trust has been lost and Hilton’s old friends are afraid of what he might be telling the press about them. But they still do not want to lose a second member of the team. He must be taken off day-to-day policy work and immerse himself instead in long-term thinking, with a seat in the office outside the prime minister’s study, alongside Llewellyn, Fall and Heywood. Cameron says he wants him at all his meetings, even those with Osborne. But he doesn’t come. Neither does he take up his seat at his desk in his office.
The annual party conference in October 2011 is a crunch point. Hilton fights hard for his decentralisation agenda to be in the prime minister’s speech. Cameron’s team argue that it is jarring when the country’s attention is so focused on austerity and terrorism. Prioritising decentralisation will seem irrelevant. A fight takes place over a line that Hilton has written for Cameron: ‘The purpose of my leadership is to unleash your leadership.’ Cooper is particularly unhappy and says the line should be cut. ‘Most people do not want to run their library, they don’t want to run their school, they want government to do these things, and to lead them, not to be leaders themselves,’ he says. Cooper is attacking the very soul of the Big Society. After heated discussions, they compromise with Cameron delivering the line: ‘That’s why so much of my leadership is about unleashing your leadership.’
Christmas 2011 at Chequers. Hilton tells Cameron to get rid of Kirby as head of the Policy Unit. Cameron tells Hilton outright he will not do this, but repeats that he wants Hilton there at all his meetings. Hilton has begun listening to other voices. Nigel Lawson tells him that he can only remain as a backseat driver for so long. Blair regrets that his advisers were not more radical than he was as prime minister. Rachel is tired of her husband’s unhappiness. She has had a second baby and remembers the happy time they spent in California after their first baby was born. She thinks this is where their future lies. At Chequers in early January 2012, Hilton tells Cameron he is contemplating resigning. The prime minister tells him to sort himself out.
Of all Hilton’s defeats, he finds the lack of progress on Civil Service reform hardest to stomach, because Cameron cannot claim as usual that the Lib Dems are blocking it. Responding to Hilton’s frustrations, Letwin had suggested that Hilton throw his passion into reforming the Civil Service, a campaign for which Letwin, as well as Maude, are keen enthusiasts. While Maude works with permanent secretaries across Whitehall to draw up a coherent reform plan, Hilton and Silva immediately start work on a number of separate proposals. The central idea is still to shrink the Civil Service radically ‘so it is small enough to fit inside Somerset House’, and make it more open and competitive, ending the public sector monopoly over the delivery of services. But in Hilton’s final few months they run into problems with Heywood, now Cabinet Secretary, and Bob Kerslake, the newly appointed head of the Civil Service from January 2012. Both are open to reforming the Civil Service and increasing its efficiency, but the extreme changes Hilton envisages frightens them because they believe it will drastically reduce the Civil Service’s capability and ability to support governments. While Heywood is still willing to seek an accommodation with Hilton, Kerslake finds his way of working too unfocused and disorganised. It does not augur well.
Had the Civil Service reformers themselves been unified, they might have prevailed even against the mighty Whitehall. But difficulties had started to appear in 2011 even before the promotions of Heywood and Kerslake. Differences with Maude and, unusually, with Hilton’s principal lieutenant, Silva, blunted the focus. Hilton is categorical that the Civil Service has to be cut by 70% and wants that figure written into the policy proposal. Silva thinks it more sensible to begin small, with the Department for Education where Michael Gove is such an enthusiastic supporter, and prove that dramatic efficiency savings can be made, before scaling up across the entire Civil Service. For Hilton, the 70% figure is a red line. In 2012, when Kerslake and senior officials from the department propose a more modest downsizing at one meeting, conscious of the impact on morale, Hilton explodes. ‘You haven’t done what I wanted to do.’ Turning his fire on Kerslake, he shouts, ‘You’re lying about what I want to achieve!’ before storming out of the room. ‘He just lost his bottle,’ Kerslake recalls, ‘he swore at me and slammed the door. In my view some of his work never really added up to a coherent body of argument.’24 Meetings on Civil Service reform drag on and failure to achieve progress in this area, more than anything, destroy Hilton’s morale.
The approaching death of the Big Society had been evident the previous autumn: ‘more a fizzling out than one deliberate decision’, says an insider. One by one, totemic Big Society policies fall. A Civil Exchange report later says the Big Society ‘largely failed’ to meet its goals.25 The initial fervour around the post-riots social policy review dissipates into nothing. Elected mayors fail to capture the imagination and succeed only in Liverpool. Police and Crime Commissioners are elected on painfully low turnouts. On 8 February 2012, Hilton presents a set of slides on Civil Service reform to Cameron, hoping to win him over. ‘They weren’t very good,’ recalls one senior official. ‘He hadn’t really thought it through very much.’ Hilton is bitterly disappointed that Cameron fails to give him the backing he needs. ‘If you wanted me to be radical you should have won me a general election victory,’ Cameron tells Hilton.
In March, relations plummet to a new low. The prime minister is to give a speech to the Institute of Civil Engineering. Hilton has been working hard to introduce radical reforms into the road network, and to promote ‘Boris Island’ as London’s new airport. He is in despair when he reads the text on 19 March. ‘If this is where we are going, it is all useless. The government is useless. We’ve given up on everything. What the fuck is the point in carrying on?’ This time, there is to be no going back. ‘The Big Society might not have been a very good idea,’ he says to anyone who will listen, ‘but it was the only fucking idea we had.’ Around Downing Street, he is regularly heard to make comments like ‘Fucking hell, I don’t know what they stand for anymore or what the fucking point is in being here.’
The end comes swiftly in the spring of 2012. He goes to Washington with Cameron in March but tells him before they travel that he is leaving. Hilton has run out of allies. Clegg objects strongly to his neo-Thatcherite policies in his final phase. Hilton’s attempts to portray Cameron in the media as a free-market liberal prove too much. Osborne lost faith months ago and is not fighting to retain him. Craig Oliver is thoroughly alienated from him and finds him ‘massively destabilising’. Llewellyn has become alienated by his briefing. A mawkish moment had occurred at Osborne’s fortieth birthday party at Dorneywood in 2011 when Hilton had embraced Llewellyn and made out that they were great friends; but the gulf has now become unbridgeable. Kate Fall is the last of the inner court to hold faith, but even she feels that the team will be more cohesive without him. Andrew Feldman has repeatedly told Cameron, ‘You’ve got to let him go.’ The noise is building and building. Before Easter, Hilton finally leaves for California.
The arrangement is that he is to reappear for annual party conferences. But his reign is over. With him goes a creative genius and innovation that is never to be replaced. Indeed, arguably Number 10 has never seen such a creative, one-man Policy Unit. Whitehall breathes a collective sigh of relief when he leaves, though within three months, forward-thinking mandarins are mourning the loss of the impetus, urgency and fresh thinking he provided. His departure sounds the death knell for the Big Society, though some of it remains and Cameron regards aspects of it, like the National Citizen Service, as among his proudest achievements. Volunteering and charitable giving rates grow despite the economic gloom. But in his 2012 party conference speech, which places individual aspiration and Britain’s role in the ‘global race’ at the heart of the Tory message, the Big Society is hardly mentioned.
Letting Hilton go is one of the hardest things Cameron has to do as prime minister. He never loses his love and admiration for him, and is profoundly pained that his philosopher has had such a difficult ride in government. Despite all that has happened, their strong friendship endures. Cameron’s remaining team begin to think Hilton has become a security blanket, preventing his boss from realising he can flourish without him. Whether Cameron will be able to find his voice without his muse by his side remains to be seen. Osborne, Llewellyn, Fall and Oliver tell him, ‘You can’t talk about the Big Society.’ Cameron tellingly responds: ‘It’s our idea for reforming the country. We can’t just drop it. It’s what we are all about!’
First Coulson, now Hilton: Cameron is losing key lieutenants. He is in trouble from all sides. Things are about to get worse still.