The news that Steve Hilton, a man whose political career peaked with a stint as David Cameron’s strategist and a brief, unremarkable sojourn on Fox News, is eyeing the governorship of California is either a sublime joke or a sign of intellectual decadence so profound it rivals the late Roman Empire. Hilton, who now fancies himself a saviour of the Golden State, has declared that ‘British values could save America’. One must pause to savour the exquisite irony of a nation that once rebelled against British tyranny now being offered salvation by a man who looks like he stepped out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel.
Let us be clear: the ‘British values’ Hilton invokes are not the values of Churchill, Orwell, or even the stiff-upper-lip stoicism of the Blitz. No, they are the values of Brexit, of Nigel Farage, of a peculiar strain of English nationalism that mistakes nostalgia for policy. Hilton, who spent years in the Cameron machine, now wants to export this brand of cheerful nativism to California, a state that is, for better or worse, the laboratory of the American future. The hubris is staggering: a man who could not get elected to Parliament in his own country believes he can ride to power in the most populous state in the Union, a state that has more in common with the European Union than with Middle England.
But perhaps this is exactly the point. We are living in an age when celebrity and outrage have replaced competence and coherence. California, drowning in its own contradictions – homelessness, wildfires, tech oligarchy – is the perfect petri dish for a man who offers simple slogans for complex problems. Hilton’s ‘British values’ presumably include something about cutting red tape, promoting family, and standing up to the ‘woke’ mob. It is a script that has worked for Farage, for Boris Johnson, and for Donald Trump. Why should it not work for a man whose accent alone makes him sound like the headmaster of a minor public school?
Yet one cannot help but wonder if this is the final surrender of the American exceptionalist myth. The United States was supposed to be the beacon of self-government, a place where new ideas, not old-world twaddle, flourished. Now we have a British ex-politician telling Americans that they need a dose of Victorian morality to sort out their mess. It is as if the spirit of Rudyard Kipling has been reincarnated in a fleece gilet, carrying a clipboard of deregulation proposals.
The irony is that Hilton might actually have a point about the debasement of public discourse. But the cure he proposes is worse than the disease. ‘British values’ in the Hilton vocabulary are code for a kind of aggressive small-state conservatism that has failed to revitalise Britain and would be equally useless in California. The state does not need a man who thinks that the 19th century was the high point of civilisation. It needs someone who understands that the 21st century is not a dress rehearsal for a period drama.
This is the tragedy of our age: we have run out of ideas, so we recycle the ghosts of empires past. Hilton is not a serious candidate; he is a symptom of a civilisation that has lost its nerve. If California falls for this, it will confirm that the American experiment is indeed on its last legs. But perhaps that is too harsh. Perhaps it is merely a farce, and we should sit back and enjoy the show. After all, laughter is the only sensible response to a man who believes that the solution to California’s problems is more Britishness.
In conclusion, Steve Hilton’s bid for governor is a splendid piece of theatre, but it tells us more about our own intellectual bankruptcy than about any real political hope. The Romans had their bread and circuses; we have Hilton on a talk show. Let us hope California has sense enough to decline the offer.
