‘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.

Living in Palo Alto has confirmed Hilton’s view that the UK places too much power in too few hands. As he puts it, ‘In America, economic, cultural and political power is dispersed. In the UK, centralisation is a gift to the vested interests.’ This is the theme not only of his book but of the Prime Minister’s new agenda to grant devolution to English regions.

‘I developed this very closely with Oliver [Letwin] and we had a mantra for it: you should devolve power to the individual where possible, and to the lowest level of government where that’s not possible. Only higher where necessary. It’s a very, very bottom-up approach and that informed our thinking in all sorts of areas.’ Hilton’s ideas may change their name, but they never go away. His plan for devolution is now known as George Osborne’s plan for a ‘Northern Powerhouse’: a deal where councils are given extra powers if they agree to impose an elected mayor.