Cloudbusting in California

Just over twenty years ago, in April 2006, British media gave generous space to film and photographs of a sled hauled over a vast expanse of snow by a team of six huskies. The man driving the sled, dressed in expensive Arctic gear, was David Cameron, who had been elected leader of the Conservative opposition party four months earlier. He was heading for the Scott-Turner Glacier on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Overseeing everything was his media and marketing adviser, Steve Hilton—now the Republican candidate for the governorship of California.

Hilton had arranged this 3,800-mile round trip from London for the sole purpose of generating these images. Viewers would see the new Tory top dog as a successor to the heroic age of plucky British polar exploration. More importantly, they would see him as radical environmentalist: the rapid melting of the glacier was dramatic evidence of global heating. The message Hilton was crafting was doubly deft: this new-generation leader embodied a manly past yet felt passionately about the earth’s future. The Tories cared.

Four years later, Cameron became prime minister of the United Kingdom. Twenty years further on, Hilton received the endorsement of Donald Trump in the California gubernatorial primary. At a personal level, his seems an utterly implausible story. But it has a much larger logic: no one quite reflects the relationship between the hollowing-out of traditional democratic politics on the one side and the rise of Trump and his international imitators as well as Hilton does. Nor does any other political career except Trump’s own quite capture the strange crossover between comedy and politics, entertainment and power, in the rise of the reactionary right.

I first became aware of Steve Hilton as long ago as November 1992, when he appeared, most improbably, in an Irish general election. Then aged twenty-three, he had emerged in British political circles as a member of what was called (after the location of Tory party headquarters in London) the “Smith Square brat pack.” The child of working-class parents who had fled to England from Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956, Hilton was a recent graduate from Oxford. He liaised between the party and its hugely influential advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi during that year’s British general election, won unexpectedly by the Conservatives under John Major. Hilton so impressed Maurice Saatchi (who remarked that “no one reminds me as much of me when young as Steve”) that Saatchi recruited him as a link man for its political clients.

It was nonetheless astonishing that Hilton turned up in Ireland as a hired gun for the dominant Catholic nationalist party Fianna Fáil. Founded and led for decades by Éamon de Valera, the only surviving commander of the rebel forces during the 1916 Easter Rising against the British, the party was one of the most successful political machines in the democratic world and prided itself on its innate, almost telepathic connection to the Irish electorate. That it would have to hire a callow mercenary operative from the Tory hinterland in London, and moreover one who had never even been to Ireland before, was a symptom of profound change in the nature of politics in Europe.

Advertising and media management had been central to electoral campaigns for decades, but in the aftermath of the cold war, democracy was becoming weightless. Increasingly stripped of ideology, it was now primarily a professional practice, a set of techniques—most of them imported from the advertising industry—that could be applied anywhere at any time. History, geography, culture, all the intimacies of local and national identity, were less important than image-making and the crafting of messages. Political leaders were products to be sold, and in a globalized economy marketing was a borderless science.

Thus, after his Irish sojourn Hilton was in Russia in 1993, advising its president, Boris Yeltsin, on how to win a referendum on his leadership. He turned up in the Polish general election and then worked with the Norwegian Conservatives in that country’s referendum on whether to join the European Union. It is unlikely he knew any more about Russia, Poland, or Norway than he did about Ireland—but such knowledge, in this new world of globally transferable political skills, was now evidently considered irrelevant.

The most memorable aspect of Hilton’s Irish gig, though, was its comedy. In his diary, the government press secretary, who was campaigning with the Fianna Fáil prime minister Albert Reynolds, recorded an episode in a rural market town. Reynolds was addressing a crowd of farmers at a cattle fair—time-honored retail campaigning. Some of them approached, wanting to ask questions about the complex details of European Union subsidies for livestock.

The press secretary could not resist directing the farmers toward Hilton and watching him founder as they harangued him about things he knew nothing about. He understood that Hilton was losing votes for his boss, but the joke was just too tempting. He and a well-known TV reporter watched the farce unfold, “the two of us rolling around like bold children.” This is another thing that Hilton’s subsequent career demonstrated: the rise of free-floating image-makers is both very serious and very funny. It turns democracy into a farce.

There is no evidence that Hilton really was a marketing magus. The Irish campaign he worked on was a disaster. The Norwegians voted, against the advice of the Conservative Party he worked for, not to join the EU. In 1997 Hilton was closely involved in Saatchi’s campaign to literally demonize the then leader of the Labour opposition, Tony Blair. The Tories mass-produced posters using the slogan “New Labour, New Danger,” featuring Blair’s smiling face with his eyes cut out and replaced with garish red “demon eyes.” The crude terror campaign was unpopular with voters, who gave Blair a huge majority, ending eighteen years of Tory rule.

Hilton established his own consultancy, called Good Business, to help companies project themselves as caring and socially progressive. He might have remained outside politics had he not had a close friend among the old Smith Square brat pack who was in need of the same service. Just three years Hilton’s senior, Cameron got elected as an MP in 2001 and quickly began to position himself among the demoralized Tories as their answer to the young and dynamic Blair. As Cameron puts it in his memoir, For the Record:

Steve and I had worked together at the party’s headquarters, Conservative Central Office, during our twenties. He had become renowned as a left-field thinker of the centre-right—passionate, bold, volatile, magnetic, and I’d made him my director of strategy. He was also a close friend to me and my wife, Samantha, and godfather to our first child, Ivan.

Hilton even lived near the Camerons in Oxfordshire.

His task as Cameron’s strategist was to detoxify a damaged brand. In 2002 Theresa May, herself a future Tory prime minister, told the party conference, “You know what some people call us: the nasty party.” By 2005, when Cameron was elected as Tory leader, Hilton’s job was to turn the nasty party into the nice party. That Svalbard sleigh ride was part of this rebranding. In this case Hilton seems to have managed the media perfectly. Cameron later admitted that he had somehow turned the sled over at high speed and “collapsed in a ball of snow, ice and, from everyone around me, hysterical laughter.” Yet miraculously “these career-maiming shots never made it onto viewers’ screens.”

Presenting the Tories as environmentally friendly was part of a package designed, largely by Hilton, to convince voters that the party of Margaret Thatcher was now hip and wholesome. Cameron embraced gay rights, ostentatiously cycled to work, spoke sympathetically about alienated young people (“We have to show a lot more love”), and called himself “Dave.” Hilton replaced Thatcher’s party logo of a blazing torch with a squiggly, smudgy, and charmingly childish drawing of an oak tree. Forget fire and fury, think shade and shelter.

Hilton also rebranded himself. In 1993 he was described in the London Times as “the only Armani suit wearer” among the brat pack. Now he cultivated a shabby hippy-ish vibe. At the 2006 Tory party conference, he appeared in “a tatty anti-racist t-shirt.” By July 2011, by which time Cameron was in power as prime minister in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the Financial Times was reporting that “during President Obama’s recent visit to Downing St., Mr. Hilton was barred from one meeting because of his lack of shoes; ‘Who is the beach bum?’ asked one White House aide.”

Dressing down from Armani to beach bum was the outward manifestation of Hilton’s elevation from mere political apparatchik to Cameron’s “left-field thinker.” This transformation was also symptomatic of a wider crisis. The growing problem with the technocratic advertising-driven politics that took hold across the democratic world was its vacuity. This vacuum could, however, be filled by figures presenting themselves as inspired intellectuals and semi-religious sages. Hilton achieved his own transition from marketing mechanic to mini-maharishi. By 2006 Tory insiders were telling the London Times that “Dave is not Dave” without Hilton: “He is the guru.”

This blissed-out New Age image was all an act. In 2008 Hilton was arrested and fined for abusing railway staff. As the London Times reported, he “flew into a rage after staff at Birmingham station demanded that he produce a ticket before boarding.” In internal government and party meetings, Hilton was fractious and irascible: Cameron wrote that, when in power, Hilton “was no longer excused as a free spirit when he was late for meetings—he was seen as someone who had disregard for others. His antagonistic style was no longer helping him advance his cause in Whitehall—it had started to hurt it.”

The other truth is that Hilton could also be a bit of an idiot. He took blue-sky thinking literally. It was later reported by the Financial Times that one of the big ideas he pitched to Cameron was “to buy cloudbusting technology to provide Britain with more sunshine.” Hilton denied this, and it did seem incredible. But Cameron confirms it in his memoir: Hilton suggested “no joke—introducing cloud-bursting technology that would, he claimed, stop it raining over Britain.”

Much of Hilton’s guru status was based on his futuristic vision of the revolutionary effects of the Internet. Yet in a column in the London Times in 1999, he confidently predicted that e-commerce had no future:

I’ve just got back from New York where the Internet craziness has peaked…. A year ago people were saying that Amazon and co would put the shopping malls out of business. Now they’re saying that Amazon will have to open branches in the malls if it wants to compete. It proves what the smart punters knew all along: that the real Internet revolution will be in business-to-business rather than consumer services.

As Cameron’s director of strategy, Hilton peppered Tory MPs with bulletins that many of them found puzzling: “This week: an update on our plans for National Citizen Service—some cool ways of harnessing the power of information—a really useful way of describing the post-bureaucratic age.” Underlying these cool concepts was an old conservative ideology: information technology and voluntary organizations could take the place of government and allow for a radical shrinking of the state.

The trendiest term in Hilton and Cameron’s rebranded Toryism was “big society,” essentially the devolution of state functions to local communities. It was such a successful exercise in linguistic engineering that the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary declared it the “word of the year” for 2010, “because it embraces so much of the year’s political and economic mood.” In reality, it merely provided cover for the slashing of spending on public services and welfare benefits, to the immense (and continuing) detriment of the poorer areas of Britain.

Stripped of this modish Newspeak, Hilton’s blue-sky thinking was mostly about depriving citizens of benefits, rights, and protections. According to the Financial Times’s reporting, he advocated internally for ending all maternity leave for women and suspending all consumer rights legislation for nine months “to see what would happen.” He suggested “Cameron just ignore European labour regulations on temporary workers.” He thought it would be a good idea to close all the employment exchanges that help jobless people to find work.

In 2012 he drew up a plan with two cabinet ministers to stop official monitoring of child poverty after indications emerged that, as the London Times reported, “it would produce a string of bad headlines for the Government.” Aside from their cruelty, these notions were politically unviable. Even Cameron concluded that “Hilton’s ideas continued to be one part brilliant to several parts bonkers…. He wasn’t interested in playing the game, just tipping it over and throwing the pieces all over the floor.”

Yet even as his real influence was fading, the ludicrous potential of Hilton’s persona that had surfaced in 1992 in Ireland was being gloriously realized. He inspired one of the great comic characters of the period, Stewart Pearson in the satirical BBC series The Thick of It (2005–2012). The show was the savage caricature that a hollowed-out politics deserved. Its creator, Armando Iannucci, and his cowriters (including Jesse Armstrong, later the creator of Succession) conjured a world in which elected politicians are hapless creatures utterly dominated by spin doctors—first the fantastically foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker when Labour was in power and then, after Cameron took office, Hilton’s alter ego Pearson.

One of the funniest episodes centers on the clash between Pearson and an old-style Tory politician, Peter Mannion, who is forced to attend Pearson’s “thought camp” in a remote country mansion where acolytes must sit cross-legged in a circle around the guru. Each participant must throw a ball and whoever catches it must come up with an instant policy: “Pay the unemployed to drive ambulances!” “Free maternity leave for people getting a puppy!” “Free coffins!” Mannion suggests “Reduce the deficit with spending cuts,” but is told off by Pearson: “Peter! Peter! I want to hear new ideas ricocheting off your sinuses like a pinball, not just a two-year-old slogan.”

Mannion eventually snaps and breaks the circle:

I’m fifty-four, Stewart. My knees are fucked and my patience is snapped. Some of us had to go through this hippy shit the first time around…. Just suppose your free-range, no-consequences bullshit was hugely entertaining when we were in opposition and shitting money but now that we’re in government and it’s all gone a bit J.G. Ballard, it’s irrelevant and infantile.

The scene is hilarious but also, in its own way, deadly. Hilton/Pearson’s no-consequences bullshit had indeed ceased to be entertaining—except as withering satire. Hilton’s absurdity spawned a parody Twitter account and a website that featured a random “Steve Hilton policy generator.” But the line between satire and reality was scarily thin: who was to say that a randomly generated policy or an idea shouted out in a fictional thought camp had not actually been proposed at some stage by Hilton?

The Thick of It (like Iannucci’s later US version, Veep) both reflected and amplified public contempt for the sanitized and professionalized version of democratic politics. Real ideas had given way to innately ridiculous “new ideas.” Old-fashioned politicians like Mannion seemed able to do nothing except rage against their own impotence and humiliation. True power in government lay with the Tuckers and Pearsons—unelected and unaccountable image manipulators. Even the satire had a despairing quality: traditional satirists thought of themselves as moral reformers; now the system seemed irredeemable. The only thing it was good for was a laugh—and since it couldn’t be useful, it must at least be fun, which as Hilton morphed in the public mind into Pearson it most certainly was.

In March 2012 it was announced that Hilton was leaving Downing Street for a one-year sabbatical at Stanford, but it was widely known that he was not coming back. He did return to Britain in 2016 to campaign with Boris Johnson for Brexit—the ultimate in “throwing the pieces all over the floor.” Essentially, however, Hilton’s political career in England was over. His wife Rachel Whetstone (herself a member of the original Smith Square brat pack) had become a powerful figure in the California tech world, first as head of public policy and communications at Google and then in a similar role at Uber. Hilton now remade himself again, this time in the American media-political complex.

In those circles, though, Hilton arrived less as Cameron’s former guru than as Stewart Pearson’s alter ego. In 2016, just after Trump secured the Republican nomination, the New York Times fashion section reported excitedly on a book party for Hilton cohosted by Tammy Haddad, a media strategist and a consultant on Veep. She spoke about The Thick of It and the Pearson character: “And then I meet Steve and I’m like: ‘Oh, my God! It’s the guy. He’s exactly the guy.’” When one of Hilton’s coauthors objected that “He’s much more serious,” Haddad dismissed the objection: “You’re not in politics,” she said. “It [the Pearson character] wasn’t goofy, it was the opposite. It was confidence.”

She clearly meant that characterizing Hilton as exactly like his own satiric caricature was, in the emerging politics of the US, a compliment. She finished with a toast: “To Steve, who is bringing the heart back into politics! And to being authentic.” Authenticity had been redefined as being entirely true to an absurdist parody of democratic politics.

By the following year Hilton was flying each weekend from his $12.5 million home in Silicon Valley to Los Angeles to host a Fox News show called The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton. In 2017 this made him an anomaly. As the Times reported, his Fox News identity “makes life complicated for Mr. Hilton in overwhelmingly liberal Silicon Valley, where supporters of President Trump are nearly nonexistent and few think populism would improve their lives.”

Yet in this at least Hilton was truly prescient. His British career had been largely about wrapping hard-right ideas in touchy-feely niceness. It was not yet obvious, but Silicon Valley, in its gradual accommodation to Trump, would want to do the same thing in reverse, ditching its “Don’t be evil” credo for the joy of being evil.

Hilton at that time suggested that although the tech industry seemed apolitical, “a lot of the foundational philosophical approaches of tech leaders are actually all about decentralization of power.” This was the “big society” brand transplanted to Silicon Valley—where it served again as a method of misdirection. The tech elite was not, of course, decentralizing power; it was building an oligarchy. To adapt Mannion in The Thick of It, now that it’s all gone more than a bit J.G. Ballard, this stuff is irrelevant and infantile. But it served its purpose of creating a general complacency about the rise of the new elite. Like Hilton’s makeover of Cameron’s Tory Party, it made the nasty look superficially nice.

Hilton hosted his Fox show dressed in tech-bro t-shirts and met his Times interviewer with Coachella and Glastonbury festival bracelets adorning his wrists—while railing against the “global elite” who’d sold out the working class. Yet it was on The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton that the far-right commentator Ann Coulter made one of the most memorable media interventions of Trump’s first term. In June 2018, when thousands of children were separated from their families at the southern border and held in cages, Coulter referred contemptuously to “these child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now.” Turning to face the camera, she asked Trump to “not fall for it”: “These kids are being coached, they’re given scripts to read by liberals.”

Hilton (an immigrant and the son of immigrants himself, of course) made weak efforts to intervene and later said he did not endorse her claims. But he did not apologize for broadcasting such outrageous lies, and there was a weird symmetry in this episode. To intertwine advertising and politics was to fuse reality and performance. Coulter was taking this fusion to its ultimate conclusion: everything you see is a performance. The weeping children are just child actors following scripts written by liberals. Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum that fascism is the aestheticization of politics was coming live into your living room.

This arc is why Hilton’s reinvention of himself as a Trump acolyte is so telling. There may seem to be a world of difference between the rebranding of Britain’s nasty party as the nice party and Trump’s brandishing of nastiness as a unique selling point. Cameron’s pose of wanting to “show a lot more love” seems to belong on a different political planet from Trump’s violent hatred. Hilton’s early internationalism, flitting from elections in the UK to Ireland, Russia, Poland, and Norway, seems utterly at odds with Trump’s America First anti-globalist branding. The environmental messaging of the Svalbard sleigh ride is a million miles from Trump’s insistence that global heating is all a hoax.

Yet there is a direct line from Hilton’s beginnings as a political detoxifier to his rise in the toxic world of Trump’s America. He helped to make democracy laughable—and Trump knew how to convert that ridicule into power. Trump fused both meanings of “branding”: the labeling of his TV and property-developer persona and the libeling of all those deemed to be enemies of the people. The demon eyes Hilton had stuck on Tony Blair’s face became the demonization of immigrants as invaders and criminals. The blue-sky thinking Hilton was encouraged to indulge came to mean that everything is thinkable and that whatever can be thought—however racist, misogynistic, cruel, or absurd—can be put into practice. Satiric thought camps have become real camps.