So Steve Hilton, the man who once brewed tea for the Iron Lady and helped craft the policies that made Britain great again — or at least less rubbish — has declared his intention to run for Governor of California. The land of avocado toast, tech billionaires, and progressive lunacy. The man who co-authored ‘The Cameron Betrayal’ now wants to save the Golden State from itself. If this were a novel, it would be laughed out of the publishing house. Yet here we are.
Let us first note the irony. Hilton, a former Downing Street aide under David Cameron, spent years championing the Big Society and localism. Now he wishes to govern a state that is the antithesis of both: a sprawling, centralised, bureaucratic nightmare where homelessness is a lifestyle choice and wildfires are nature’s way of saying ‘you’ve built too many mansions on cliffs.’
Hilton’s platform is a grab bag of Thatcherite nostrums: school choice, deregulation, and tax cuts. He promises to ‘blow up the system’ and ‘make California competitive again.’ One can almost hear the ghost of Milton Friedman applauding. But California is not 1980s Britain. It is a postmodern dystopia where government spends more per student than almost any other state yet produces graduates who cannot identify the 50 states on a map. It is a place where housing costs have become so absurd that people live in vans parked outside their own offices.
The real question is whether Hilton understands the nature of California’s decline. It is not merely a failure of policy, but a failure of spirit. The state has become a monument to intellectual decadence, where the ruling class confuses social justice with economic suicide. The homeless crisis is not a dearth of shelters; it is a moral collapse — a refusal to enforce basic norms of civilised behaviour. The wildfires are exacerbated not by climate change alone, but by a regulatory regime so Kafkaesque that clearing brush becomes a crime.
Hilton’s solution is to import the Swiss model: empower local communities, slash regulations, and unleash the private sector. It sounds splendid on paper. But Switzerland has a culture of civic responsibility that California lost long ago. In Palo Alto, entrepreneurs complain about zoning laws while their children attend schools where critical theory replaces critical thinking. You cannot Uber your way out of a cultural coma.
Moreover, Hilton is a foreigner. British to his core. His accent alone will be a liability in a state where identity politics is the only religion. He will be called a colonialist, a carpetbagger, or worse — a conservative. In California, the word ‘conservative’ is used the way the Victorians used ‘vulgar’.
Yet I shall not dismiss him entirely. History is full of outsiders who saw clearly what the natives missed. Hilton’s very otherness might allow him to say the unsayable: that California’s problems are not technical but spiritual. That the homeless crisis is a symptom of a society that has lost any sense of shame. That the education system has become a vehicle for indoctrination rather than enlightenment. That the state’s economy, while vast, is built on a bubble of venture capital and woke virtue-signalling.
And if he fails? Then we shall have another object lesson in the folly of trying to reform a decadent culture through policy alone. The Romans tried to reform their morals with laws and ended up with the Emperor Honorius. The Victorians tried to reform the poor with workhouses and ended up with Jack the Ripper. California will probably end up with Gavin Newsom’s third term. But Hilton’s campaign, however quixotic, serves a useful purpose: it reminds us that decline is not inevitable. It is chosen. And it can be reversed, but only by those willing to speak the truth, however uncomfortable.
Godspeed, Steve. You will need it.
