Google

Friday

Fraser Nelson

25 February 2009: They wish we all could be Californian: the new Tory

With the news that Steve Hilton is heading back to the West Coast, we’ve dug up this piece from 2009 by Fraser Nelson. He discusses the last time Hilton decamped to California and the culture changes he could bring back to the Tories in Westminster. 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

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Steve Hilton to leave Downing St

The Prime Minister’s strategy chief is heading to California to teach for a one year sabbatical, we learn. But who takes a one-year sabbatical in the middle of what’s supposed to be a five-year fight to save Britain? He did this before in Opposition, and came back. But this time, I doubt he’ll be back. He’s joining Stanford University as a visiting scholar, presumably to spend more time with his wife Rachel Whetstone who is communications chief for Google. Hilton’s friends say that, in his head, he never quite came back from California — his aversion to shoes (and sometimes manners) has led to much mockery. But overall, he is

Monday

James Forsyth

Whitehall could use some Google thinking

Today’s New York Times has a fun piece about Google X, the secret lab where Google is working on its special projects. The ideas are, suitability, far out. They are, apparently, looking at connecting household appliances to the internet and creating a robot that could go to the office so you don’t have to. It would be tempting to laugh if not for what Google has already pulled off. Indeed, the NYT reports that Google’s driverless car might soon go into production. But in political terms what struck me about the article is that this is the culture that Steve Hilton embraces. Remember that when Hilton was working from California,

Wednesday

Alex Deane

Fighting back against Google

The Tory MP for Harlow, Rob Halfon, has secured an historic backbench business debate tomorrow on privacy and the internet. In my opinion, this subject is of vital importance to our public life. I attended the Backbench Business Committee with Rob as a witness to secure the debate, and invasions of privacy online are of growing concern to many of us. One centrally important aspect of this discussion (but not by any means the only issue) is the behaviour of Google with their Street View programme: as the infamous cars trundled down the highways and byways of Britain taking pictures of all and sundry, they had Wi-Fi receptors on board

Tuesday

James Forsyth

The press’ obsession with the Tories, Rachel Whetstone and Google is immature 

Nearly all the papers have run articles on Rachel Whetstone today. These pieces concentrate on the fact that she’s the partner of Steve Hilton, Cameron’s chief strategist, and that the Tories mention Google quite often. Frankly, this strikes me as a nothing story. The Tories are mentioning Google so much because it is the kind of modern, successful brand that they want to be associated with, not because Whetsone, who was Michael Howard’s political secretary and who used to be close for Cameron, works there. Also, considering how Google has become shorthand for so much of the technological change going on around us, it would be rather hard for a