David Cameron's strategy chief was a Tory moderniser who traditionalists believe was responsible for election 'failure'
Steve Hilton's decision to leave Downing Street and decamp to California's Silicon Valley with his wife and young son says a lot about politics, some of which is deeply traditional and a lot of which is peculiar to the times in which David Cameron's closest source of strategic wisdom – to Star Wars fans his Yoda – cut his teeth as a workaholic practitioner in an addictive trade.
Politics has always been a rough old business in which reputations can be made or destroyed by unforeseen events, bad judgment and worse luck. No one could have predicted a sitting prime minister being linked to an elderly police mount loaned to a scandal-laden tabloid apparatchik, as happened to Cameron in "Horsegate" this week. Hilton could be forgiven for banging his head on a desk.
Yet it is par for the course once any government's ever-briefer honeymoon with the voters – and events – is over. Unseen civil servants who run Whitehall's private offices, as well as party appointees giving political advice such as Hilton, work gruelling hours, are there to shout and be shouted at when things go wrong, to share the adrenalin rush when their plans work. The pace wrecks nerves and livers, family life and marriages – and has long done so.
Sheer physical stamina keeps the addicts afloat but most burn out sooner or later and need quieter jobs in which to recover. But nowadays the changing nature of communications technology makes the pressure that much greater, there is so much more that informed people are supposed to know from all quarters. It is the same for many professions, but government is conducted in the spotlight and nowadays that spotlight is never switched off by 24/7 TV, by the internet, Twitter and the rest.
Hilton, 42 last August, is deeply enmeshed in this world. His parents were refugees from the Soviet tanks which crushed the Hungarian revolt in 1956 (it is, alas, not true that the Hirckacs adopted the name Hilton because they spent their first British night in one). Hilton went on a scholarship to Christ's Hospital school in Sussex and did the inevitable PPE degree at Oxford, as Cameron and much of today's political class also did.
The pair met in John Major's HQ campaign team in 1992, bright young men with an eye to the main chance, who shared some of the credit when Major came from behind to beat Labour and seed the fateful myth that "It was the Sun Wot Won It". Cameron became a Whitehall special adviser – alongside Hilton's future wife, Rachel Whetstone – while Hilton set up his own Good Business consultancy, advising firms (Coke and McDonalds were among his clients) on corporate social responsibility.
That alone must have marked his card among free market Tories, that and the refusal not only to wear a suit and tie, but often socks and trousers. Biker Hilton still prefers T-shirts and shorts, a suit remains the big occasion option. Many on the right argue that a firm's social responsibility is to make profits, create jobs and pay taxes – leaving social goals to government.
When the Tories were defeated in the 1997 campaign by Tony Blair (Hilton shares some blame for the misjudged "demon eyes" poster) Hilton recoiled from William Hague's doomed lurch to the right (and is rumoured to have voted Green). When Cameron succeeded Michael Howard in 2005 he saw that such "no such thing as society" talk had critically tarnished the Tory brand and that dramatic symbolic gestures of reform – hugging hoodies and huskies, learning to love the NHS, choosing HS1 over that third Heathrow runway – were need to "detox" the brand.
Turning Etonian "Tory Boy" Cameron into middle class Dave was also a priority. The concept of the "big society" in which the state shrunk and private or voluntary groups grew to fill gaps is also laid at Hilton's door as an over-arching election theme which few voters understood. With a recession under way it came to look like a posh word for cuts.
In any case such marketing language appalled traditional Tories who believe that softie Hiltonian policies simply drove disaffected voters into the arms of UKIP or their own armchairs and help explain why Cameron failed to win an overall majority and was forced into a coalition with the hated Lib Dems.
The bad feeling lingers on in disputes over NHS reform, welfare, the AV referendum which Cameron conceded (but also squashed) and Lords reform.
That underrates Hilton's successes, which include the promise of a referendum on the Lisbon treaty and putting fashionable theories – Richard Thaler's "nudge" is one – into a practical context. But he clashed with Andy Coulson, Cameron's ill-chosen hotline to Essex voters and thus a counter-weight to the brainy immigrants' son, also with civil servants and colleagues who resented his influence, his restless energy, so much greater than most, and his lack of the silkier diplomatic skills.
According to tonight's No 10 statement Hilton is simply off to mighty Stanford University for a year's intellectual refreshment, something he did before when his wife – as tall and willowy and Hilton is short and chunky – landed a senior post at Google, another of the IT treadmills which makes political life more demanding.
It is a blow to Cameron and may signal disappointment that the sharp realities and constraints of coalition government two years in (Lib Dems and Thatcherites pulling the pragmatic Cameron in both directions) have finally dampened Hilton's boundless enthusiasm.
Then again, when Cameron speaks of the importance of a better work/life balance and non-material satisfactions he is articulating Hilton Speak which their author also believes.
Hilton likes to see a bit of his son, Ben, and would probably like to see more of his wife too. If a wife's career takes her across eight time zones to California then sometimes a husband has to compromise with his own and go too. The very thought is enough to get older Tory MPs spluttering into their gin this weekend – but it's probably a factor and a very zeitgeisty one. Very Steve Hilton.