Cameron at 10

by Anthony Seldon

  Hilton had gone away before the summer feeling very downbeat and disillusioned: the government isn’t radical enough, and is going nowhere; he thinks Cameron has allowed himself to become institutionalised by Osborne and the Civil Service. Hilton now sees the riots as a great opportunity, capitalising on the absence of Iain Duncan Smith, who is temporarily away, to lay out his thesis for a reinvigoration of the government’s Big Society agenda.

  In a speech he writes for Cameron on Monday 15 August, delivered in the prime minister’s Witney constituency, criminals are blamed for much of the disturbance during the riots: Cameron has learnt that gangs are at the heart of the trouble, and that three quarters of those arrested have previous convictions. He believes that not enough is being done to help people recognise the boundaries between right and wrong. Out of the speech emerges the ‘social policy review’, a cross-departmental initiative galvanised by Hilton, who wants to give Whitehall a good kicking and bring it back to his radical, reforming agenda. Hilton acquires a new lease of life and pads around Downing Street with a spring in his bare feet. But he encounters forces of resistance, against which even he is unable to prevail. Richard Reeves, Clegg’s director of strategy, fiercely challenges Number 10’s attempts to blame the riots partly on family breakdown, and believes, along with Labour, that economic hardship is the key factor. ‘The Lib Dems blocked it very, very aggressively,’ says Hilton. ‘I was really surprised.’20 But it is not only the Lib Dems who are dismantling Hilton’s big agenda.

  THIRTEEN

  The Big Society and Beyond

  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 rega
rds 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 follow
ing 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