An interesting piece just published in The New York Times. Steve Hilton as an elected politician? The idea is as ridiculous as the man himself.
Over 2006-8 I worked as an independent business consultant for the Conservative party at their campaigning headquarters in London. I created and implemented a new commercial model for the autumn conferences. The events, the largest conferences in Europe at the time with 12,000+ delegates, had been outsourced and were loss-making for the party for a number of years.
The new conference model was managed by a newly-formed company established to only run the Tory party conferences, and delivered £11.5+ MILLION POUNDS to Conservative party coffers over 2007-14. It was, I was reliably informed, their #1 source of income over that period.
I wrote a blog piece about the matter in 2021, Mike Buchanan’s £11,500,000+ donation to the Conservative party. The future Baron Buchanan of Bedford, surely? Not long afterwards I was contacted by a feminist, threatening to report me to the parliamentary authorities for openly soliciting a peerage.
The progressive former Tory prime minister David Cameron – he loathed the older members of the party, and they loathed him – wrote the following in his autobiography For The Record (hardback edition, p.96), about the years following 2005, when he was elected as his party’s leader:
“We sold our historic headquarters in Smith Square, and even the loss-making annual party conference started to make money; by the time I left office [J4MB: 2016] it was making close to £2 million a year. The party was debt-free, and there was around £2 million cash in the bank.”
David Cameron’s chief strategist Steve Hilton (they became friends whilst both studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics – PPE – at Oxford university) was without doubt one of the strangest human beings it’s ever been my misfortune to meet (colleagues I spoke to about him almost all felt likewise).
In a meeting I had with Hilton and a number of other party officials early in my assignment – before I developed the new commercial model for conferences – I said something I thought utterly uncontroversial, at which he exploded like a bad-tempered toddler denied an ice cream. In my long business career I never witnessed such a lack of control on the part of anyone under any circumstances.
His colleagues were deeply embarrassed and one senior figure apologised to me for Hilton’s behaviour after the meeting, but everyone had kept quiet in Hilton’s presence during and after his outburst, given Hilton’s close relationship with Cameron. If you’d asked anyone if they’d vote for Hilton if he were seeking to become an elected politician, you’d surely have been met with howls of laughter.
In 2015 we published a post, Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s former chief strategist, fawns over Harriet Harman, with a link to a video (2:38) of the two of them being interviewed by Andrew Marr.
Hilton was satirised by the BBC comedy The Thick of It (2005-12) as the herbal tea drinking publicist Stewart Pearson.
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