David Cameron’s barefoot warrior bids for glory in California

LONDON — He came to fame as the barefoot warrior who refused to wear a tie and tried to make the Conservatives cool.
Now Steve Hilton is aiming to take the California governor’s mansion for the Republicans.
It would take one hell of an upset for the Golden State to ditch its Democrat ties — but Hilton has plenty of experience in that department.
The former Fox News host and top adviser to ex-Tory PM David Cameron is considering a run to succeed California Gov. Gavin Newsom in two years’ time, POLITICO revealed last week.
And that means the state could soon come to know the wit and wisdom of one of the most colorful and unorthodox characters ever to grace the U.K. political scene.
While known in the U.S. as a pro-Trump commentator, Hilton is remembered in the U.K. for his maverick approach to modernizing the Conservative Party, immortalized as the unbearably pretentious spin doctor Stewart Pearson in “The Thick of It.”
Despite the mockery, as Cameron’s righthand man in the early 2000s Hilton helped transform the Tory leader from an underdog into an election winner, and the Conservatives into a distinctly more modern political force.
Under Hilton’s watch, Cameron sought photo ops with huskies to build his green image and called for more sympathy for troubled youth, also known as his “hug-a-hoodie” moment.
In government he clashed with other senior Tories and officials convinced his outside-the-box ideas could not survive contact with reality.
His tilt at the governor’s mansion comes out of the blue, with Hilton never having held elected office in the U.K. or the U.S.
Yet POLITICO spoke to half a dozen of Hilton’s friends and former colleagues, some of whom were granted anonymity to speak frankly, who predicted that his entry into U.S. politics could upset the race.
“He is a natural disrupter,” said Michael Gove, one of Britain’s most prominent former cabinet ministers who worked with him over many years. “I don’t think anyone should underestimate him.”
Hilton became known early on in his time with Cameron as part of the “Notting Hill set,” which aimed to remake the Conservatives as something rather more trendy and up-to-date.
Those who worked with him at the time, both allies and rivals, credit his instincts for the party’s return from the wilderness. 
In the 2005 contest to become Tory leader, Hilton helped Cameron present himself as a family man who was approachable and (almost) cool, in contrast to the more staunchly Conservative image of David Davis, then seen as the favorite. 
Ed Vaizey, another early Cameron ally who served on his front bench, recalls that an evening news broadcast during a party conference that year showed Davis climbing out of a Jaguar, whereas Cameron was pictured stopping off at a nursery.
“It would be overdoing it to say that’s the moment I knew David would win, but not much,” he told POLITICO.
Hilton directed the replacement of the Conservative Party logo, scrapping its red-white-and-blue torch for a scribbled tree in blue and green to match the party’s new emphasis on tackling climate change.
And he framed the Conservatives’ winning 2010 manifesto as “an invitation to join the government” in line with his vision of a more participatory state known as “the big society.”
George Osborne, Cameron’s finance chief and fellow architect of their 2010 victory, said these ideas were “very much Steve’s contribution,” and were designed to “show we were different from previous generations of Conservatives and different from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who didn’t talk about the environment back then.”
Pollster Andrew Cooper, another senior aide to Cameron at the time, described Hilton as talismanic. Cameron saw Hilton as his “lucky feather — David thought Steve had a way of viewing things and an ability to crystallize things that he didn’t have.”
On entering Downing Street as Cameron’s director of strategy after the 2010 election, however, things became more turbulent.
“In government, Steve got more and more frustrated,” said Cooper. “He felt that David was being constrained by officials and not taking seriously Steve’s bold visions.”
The “bold visions” put forward by Hilton became the stuff of Westminster legend; at one point he was reported to have proposed abolishing maternity leave and all consumer rights legislation as part of an initiative to jumpstart the economy. Hilton hit back at this characterisation of his approach, saying: “This claim, which has been circulated for years, is totally false. I never argued for abolishing maternity leave and never would. Pro-family policies have been a central focus of my work for decades.”
He reportedly suggested ministers should simply ignore European labor regulations, prompting Jeremy Heywood, then Downing Street’s chief official, to explain this would put the prime minister at risk of going to prison.
Several former colleagues describe Hilton as having either a “volatile temper” or a “bad temper,” saying he would vent his frustrations forcefully at civil servants. An ally of Hilton rejected the first claim but acknowledged he often clashed with officials. 
He was known for walking around No. 10 with no shoes on, often sporting shorts and a T-shirt. Cooper recalls that Heywood had to spell out to him that he needed to be properly dressed for a rare visit from the Queen in 2011. 
But his anti-authoritarian streak landed him in trouble with the police on one occasion, when he was detained at Birmingham New Street Station for refusing to produce his ticket after being confronted by an officer while running for a train. 
To this day, Hilton rarely wears a collared shirt, never a tie, and doesn’t own a smartphone, instead relying on a flip-phone for texts and calls only. 
He was satirized in “The Thick of It” as Stewart Pearson, purveyor of such pearls of wisdom as: “I like the plasmic nature of your data modeling.”
One ex-colleague said: “He became progressively unhappy because he was pulling levers that didn’t really work. He was walking around Downing Street in his socks, becoming an increasingly unhappy figure.”
A second contemporary chimed in: “He would just come out with these mad ideas and had no patience for people who said ‘hang on, isn’t that a bit mad?’ That was just their fault not being revolutionary enough.”
Osborne admitted Hilton brought what he called both “positive and creative tension” by “demanding we stuck to ideas about opening up government,” while Osborne was focused on what he described as the “mess” they had inherited from the previous Labour administration and on enacting a program of spending cuts.
The two former co-workers quoted above said his growing frustrations made his exit from government in 2012 inevitable. Hilton previously insisted his departure owed solely to family reasons, since his wife, former Google and now Netflix executive Rachel Whetstone, was living in California at the time. 
Those who know Hilton agree he would mount a strong campaign for governor, but it’s less clear what would happen after that.
“He will be a wildly different candidate from the norm,” said Vaizey, “but you’ve got to try something different if you’re a Republican in California, because there’s no way you’re ever going to cut through otherwise.”
While Hilton hasn’t commented publicly on his plans, three people in close touch with him told POLITICO he is seriously considering putting himself forward.
After leaving Fox News last year he has been making more frequent appearances on the public policy circuit in California while running his Golden Together outfit aimed at boosting social mobility in the state.
Hilton’s bid would run against the grain in California, which is dominated by Democrat representatives, traditionally hands its 54 electoral college votes to the Democratic presidential candidate, and is the home state of Kamala Harris.
Yet a win by a conservative outsider is hardly unprecedented, with movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger having served two terms as governor from 2003 to 2011. 
Gove commented that Hilton “has the policy smarts and the drive” to take on the job. He noted that “of course it’s a blue state, but governor races are different, and the entrenched problems that California has — housing affordability, transportation, crime, drug problems and homelessness — no one could deny that they haven’t been resolved on Gavin Newsom’s watch.”
Others describe Hilton as passionately anti-left, partly owing to his parents’ experiences in Hungary under Communism before they fled to the U.K. in 1956, making him well-placed to take on the Democrats. 
Yet some see trouble ahead in Hilton’s unorthodox style. Vaizey noted: “Even as governor of California, you can’t wave a magic wand. You will have to work with people, you’ll have to work with systems.”
A third ex-colleague and admirer of Hilton argued that, like Trump, he was more skillful at “identifying the source of all the world’s ills, i.e. the Democrats and the elites” than at forging solutions. Others noted that a perceived tendency to rail against others’ failings rather than identifying solutions had not held Trump back.
“Put it this way,” Osborne said. “I wouldn’t be completely surprised if I woke up one morning and heard the new governor of California is Steve Hilton.”