‘We need 10,000 mayors’

‘Let me give you a Californian hug,’ says Steve Hilton, and I try my best to give him a Scottish one. We have met a few times before. He served as David Cameron’s chief strategist and his job was to keep out of the headlines and newspapers. In government, he took on a near-mythical status as a restless, shoeless radical who roamed around Downing Street terrifying civil servants. Then, after two years in power, he jetted off to California, where he has kept quiet. Until now.

We meet to discuss his new book, More Human, which is his manifesto for radical conservatism. It is, he says, an outline of where David Cameron’s government will go next. ‘That’s the direction we’ve already been going down. Now, with the removal of the constraint of coalition and the improvement in the economy, it just makes it easier to do more of that.’ The book is, perhaps, the closest we’re going to get to an agenda for David Cameron’s second term.