It was Michael Gove who once observed that “it is sometimes impossible to know where Steve ends and David begins”. The bond between the prime minister and his one-time senior adviser Steve Hilton long predated their arrival in No 10. Will it survive the abrasions of office and – in particular – this venomous referendum campaign?
In politics, friendship is often more of a problem than rivalry. Boris Johnson has never been close to Cameron, or done much to conceal his belief that if there’s going to be an Old Etonian in Downing Street, it should be him. But Gove and Hilton – author and subject, respectively, of the above quip – are in a different category. They are both longtime confidants of the prime minister, social brethren as well as political lieutenants. As I wrote in my book on the coalition: “The Cameroons existed as a social set even before they had acquired a clear political purpose.”
No bond better exemplified this than the friendship that arose between Hilton and Cameron, both alumni of the Conservative research department. Hilton built on his experience at Saatchi & Saatchi – where he was mentored by Maurice Saatchi himself – to become a political professional, while Cameron sought elected office. But the two men struck up an easy, deep and durable friendship in the twilight years of the John Major era – an intimacy that was to serve them well as (along with George Osborne) they set about rebuilding the Tory party between 2005 and 2010. Their personal lives were entangled with their political careers: Hilton, for instance, was godfather to the Camerons’ eldest child, Ivan, who died tragically young in 2009.
Throughout this campaign, the prime minister has drawn an implicit contrast between opportunistic Brexiteers seeking only self-advancement and those who are driven by long-established conviction. Naturally, he has been embarrassed by Hilton’s interventions, including a report in the Daily Mail that he was told four years ago that his immigration target was “impossible” as long as Britain remained in the EU.
I have heard those around Cameron growling that Hilton is lobbing petrol bombs into the public square to help sell the paperback edition of his book, More Human. But I suspect the prime minister’s former strategist – now living in California, teaching at Stanford, immersing himself in web entrepreneurship – would have got stuck in anyway. He is a radical by temperament, dismayed by Cameron’s recourse to the principle best expressed by Lord Falkland: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”
Long before Johnson even asked himself the question, Hilton had concluded that Brexit (as it wasn’t yet known) was essential to Britain’s future. Not, it must be stressed, for reasons that Nigel Farage would recognise. As the son of Hungarian refugees, Hilton was appalled by the “skinhead conservatism” of William Hague’s 2001 general election campaign, and claimed to have voted Green.
In his Mail piece, he lets slip that, as well as believing that it cannot be achieved, he disagrees with Cameron’s proposed immigration cap: “The target itself is set at the wrong level. I would actually like to see more entrepreneurs, engineers, computer scientists – as well as those in genuine need of refuge – welcomed to Britain. I think that would help boost our economy and strengthen, not weaken, our society.”
Hilton’s objection to the EU is all about power and where it is to be found. How can UK government ministers act upon the instructions of the electorate when they are hemmed in by the directives of barely accountable Eurocrats? Before he left on his indefinite sabbatical, he told Cameron and Osborne repeatedly that there needed to be an in-out referendum in their second term and that the government had to be on the side of exit. He urged the prime minister to stop claiming after every EU summit that Britain was “winning the argument”. Cameron, he said, had to make clear to the public that EU membership was holding back Britain in what the prime minister was then calling the “global race”.
Hilton had hoped that Cameron would be a transformative prime minister, a guerrilla–statesman, but saw him morphing into a steady incremental reformer. He also regarded the ascendancy of Sir Jeremy Heywood in No 10 as proof that evolution had triumphed over revolution. Cameron cannot say that he wasn’t warned.
Political friendships as deep as this last a lifetime. The second president of the US, John Adams, called the name of the third from his death-bed: “Jefferson survives!” At the precise moment that Tony Crosland died in 1977, Roy Jenkins was visited by his shade in a dream: “I am going to die but I’m perfectly all right.”
It takes more than a referendum to kill such a bond. The alliance between Hilton and Cameron will never break entirely. But – where once it was a simple force of clarity – it is now a mess of scar tissue.
