Steve hilton

Steve Hilton has called for Theresa May to resign as Prime Minister, blaming her for the security failures that lead to the three recent terror attacks. Without intimate knowledge of the workings of the Cameron administration it’s hard to know where blame does lie. And there certainly has been a large increase in the number of terror plots for the authorities to deal with this year. The security services have an awesome job in keeping track of as many as 23,000 individuals, and so we may now be facing a sort of Israelification of British life, with barriers going up on London’s bridges this morning. Already we now have bag searches

As David Cameron continues to receive flak over his resignation honours list, yesterday his old pal Steve Hilton stuck his head above the parapet to make his criticism be known. Not content with going against his old boss on the EU, Hilton — who is Cameron’s former director of strategy — says the honours system is ‘corrupt’. Alas it turns out not everyone on the Tory benches is so happy about Hilton sharing his views from across the pond. Richard Benyon, the former environment minister, took to Twitter to call Hilton a ‘pompous arse’: Oh joy. I thought we had heard last of @SteveHiltonx but he's back from his Californian

During Steve Hilton’s time in 10 Downing Street, David Cameron’s former director of strategy’s reputation for ‘modernising’ the Conservative party inspired the creation of PR guru Stewart Pearson in The Thick of It. However, while Brits may now be used to Hilton’s penchant for casual-wear and ‘blue sky thinking’, across the pond it’s a different story. Word reaches Steerpike that Americans at last week’s Republican Convention were left puzzled over a bedraggled attendee who strolled the vicinity shoeless. Republicans at the Cleveland meet were overheard asking: ‘who is that dude?’. Happily Mr S’s Brit-in-the-know was on hand to assist. On turning round to see what all the fuss was about, they saw Cameron’s old pal walking

So long as the economy was at the top of the agenda, ‘Remain’ will have felt safe in the knowledge that ‘Leave’ could do little to win over the public’s trust. But today, the Prime Minister has his former aide and friend Steve Hilton to thank for bringing the issue of migration soaring back into the headlines. What’s particularly dangerous for the Government about what Steve Hilton had to say is his claim that the PM was directly told in 2012 that meeting the promise to bring net migration down to the ‘tens of thousands’ was impossible. Here’s what Steve Hilton told the Daily Mail: ‘We were told, directly and

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Are David Cameron and George Osborne using the same techniques of deceit deployed by New Labour in the run-up to the Iraq war? In his cover piece this week, Peter Oborne argues that’s just what is happening. He says that in their EU campaign, the Chancellor and Prime Minister have put dirty tricks back at the heart of government. But Matthew Parris in his column says that in politics there’s no point complaining about being lied to. That’s the cry of the bad

Obviously there is no such thing as ‘Cameronism’, as there is ‘Thatcherism’; but once upon a time, David Cameron did have a project. It was called Tory modernisation, and his most imaginative adviser on the subject was Steve Hilton. At Policy Exchange, on Wednesday, Mr Hilton spoke, Mark Antony-like, over the dead body of Tory modernisation. On virtually every modernising count — localism, openness to the world, looking to the future, ignoring the interests of the rich — the EU is failing, he said. Yet Mr Cameron is staking his career on it. It is rather as if Mrs Thatcher, in her last years in office, were fighting flat out for nationalisation.

In a speech to Policy Exchange today, Steve Hilton—David Cameron’s former senior adviser—will make the case that ‘any intellectual rigorous examination makes it impossible for a Tory moderniser to support staying in the EU’. He argues that Tory modernisation was about trusting people, and that the EU does not; that modernisation was about localism, and that the EU is inherently centralising; and that the EU helps the rich and not the rest. I think there’s much to be said for Hilton’s analysis. (Though, of course, it should be recognised that there are Tory modernisers on both sides of the argument.) But where Hilton is surely right is that the EU

Boris Johnson is on the Vote Leave campaign trail in York this morning, and has just addressed a medium-sized crowd in the city centre. Unlike some of the election rallies that we saw last year, there were some real members of the public attending – and a chap who had turned up to egg he former Mayor, but didn’t manage to. Boris turns to the chap who had brought an egg to throw at him and tells him people are going hungry pic.twitter.com/z6Wfl7eRwD— Isabel Hardman (@IsabelHardman) May 23, 2016 Afterwards, the failed egger claimed he had never intended to throw the egg, but had just brought it along to ’cause

In More Human, Steve Hilton describes the EU as ‘a stinking cesspit of corporate corruption gussied up in the garb of idealistic internationalism’. So given his strong words on the issue, in theory it would seem that David Cameron’s former director of strategy — who is also one of the Prime Minister’s closest friends — has all the makings of a Brexiteer. However, speaking on Today to launch his new website Crowdpac — which aims to show which candidates match your priorities — Hilton appeared to get cold feet on the issue. When Sarah Montague asked him if he was backing Out, Hilton attempted to avoid the question several times: SH: Well Sarah,

It’s been a good week for the Conservatives, topped off by one of the best speeches   David Cameron has ever given. James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss the Prime Minister’s keynote address in this View from 22 podcast special — looking the new policies and themes he has laid out, the direction we can expect to see the Tories heading in and his strong attacks on Jeremy Corbyn. Can Steve Hilton’s influence be seen in the text? And does this mark a new era for Cameron’s leadership? You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer every week, or you can use the player below: