They wish we all could be Californian: the new Tory plan

Once every fortnight or so, David Cameron’s chief strategist lands at San Francisco airport and returns to his own version of Paradise. Steve Hilton has spent just six months living in this self-imposed exile — but his friends joke that, inside his head, he has always been in California. Look at it this way: this is the place on Earth which fuses everything the Cameroons most like in life, where hard-headed businessmen drink fruit smoothies and walk around in recycled trainers. It is where a dynamic economy meets the family-friendly workplace. And it is here, to an extent that is greatly underestimated, that the Conservative government-in-waiting is looking to find a new blueprint for Britain.

For some time now, George Osborne and Mr Cameron have been dropping hints about how West Coast ideas might be used to rebuild post-recession Britain. ‘This needn’t be California dreaming,’ the shadow chancellor declared a year ago. ‘It can happen in Britain.’ It would be an error to write this off as mere whimsy. For herein can be detected a vision of Britain’s future, of growing depth and clarity, which will be implemented from the first day of the Tory government. And it is all inspired not by a book — as Hayek’s works inspired Thatcherism — but by a place.

It is not unusual, of course, for British oppositions to look to America for inspiration. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did their ideological shopping in the mid-1990s and the results can be seen all around us — from tax credits to Sure Start nurseries to Bank of England independence. Few noticed the significance of this at the time: did it really matter if the shadow chancellor (aka G. Brown) was spending his summers on Cape Cod having barbeques with economists? As it turned out, this experience was transformative — for him, and for Britain.