Steve hilton

In Britain, public sector strikes always bring with them the whiff of national decline. They are a reminder of a time when the country was becoming less and less competitive and the civil service regarded its job as the management of decline, a mindset only broken by the Thatcher government.   But today Britain faces a choice almost as acute as the one it faced in the late 1970s. Is this country content with declining slightly less quickly than the continent of Europe as a whole, or does it want to equip itself for a new world in which economic power is moving east?   It is in this context

Not for the first time, a throwaway line in a Spectator article by James Forsyth has been picked up by Fleet St and set the hares running. It’s about Steve Hilton, Cameron’s best friend and chief strategist, and whether he’ll quit. Hilton is a man in a hurry — rightly, in my view, as the Tories are not incapable of blowing the next election. So he wants things transformed, and — for all his faults — acutely feels the sense of urgency and tries to communicate it through government. The Whitehall machine (and, more specifically, the permanent secretary of No.10) does not share this urgency and waters down change. It

If the expected happens today, the political debate will rapidly move to whether Cameron should offer some concessions to Clegg to bolster his position. I hear there are two camps in Downing Street on this question with Steve Hilton a particularly ardent advocate of the no more concessions line.   Hilton’s position may surprise some but makes sense when you consider how his public service reform programme has, as Ben Brogan writes today, already been diluted for political reasons.    My current expectation is that there won’t be many concessions to Clegg. One well placed Tory told me last night that “Clegg picked the question and the date. He can

Given that David Cameron will have a tougher fight than perhaps any postwar Prime Minister other than Thatcher, it’s a bit unfortunate that his team doesn’t like political combat. Losing to Rachel Johnson over forests last week exposed major weaknesses, and sent a message to the government’s enemies: that these guys have pretty poor political combat skills. Now word is out, the cuts protests in Liverpool today will be the first in a series of challenges. Cameron, too, is stung by the avoidable mistakes of the last few weeks – and is reshaping No.10 to account for them. Some changes are great, some less so, others downright worrying. Here’s my

I suspect the identity of the Prime Minister’s next director of communications is of far more interest to those who work in Westminster than those in the country at large. But the identity of Coulson’s successor will reveal something about the balance of power in the coalition and at the Cameron court. I’m told that the Tories are in no rush to make the appointment, they’d rather take their time and try and find the right person. Despite what Nick Clegg said on Marr this morning, I’m informed that this will be very much a Tory-run selection process. Those in the know say that as with the Coulson appointment, George

Courtesy of the ConHome tag team of Paul Goodman and Tim Montgomerie, two articles that are worth adding to your Saturday reading list. Both capture why Andy Coulson’s resignation matters, if not to the general swell of British politics, at least to internal operations in Coalitionville. The wider argument of Paul’s article for the Guardian is captured by its headline: “Andy Couslon had a nose for the view of the aspirational voter.” But it also homes in on the point that Coulson’s departure tilts No.10 in favour of Steve Hilton – something that, rightly or wrongly, will bother the Tory right far more than it does Lib Dems of any

The West Wing has an amazing hold over Fleet Street. The TV series has not only taught a generation of British reporters about US politics but even influenced the way that they see the workings of Westminster. Every time centre-right writers think David Cameron is seen as having made a mistake – mistreated his back-benchers, hired a personal photographer or made a foreign policy gaffe – they trot out the same refrain: No 10 needs a powerful Leo McGarry-type chief of staff who can bring the various parts of the operation together from Steve Hilton’s work to Andy Coulson’ operation. An enforcer, a puller-togetherer. I have three arguments against a

Is David Cameron just too nice? There are worse accusations to levy at a politician, but it’s one I have heard suggested quite a lot recently – and I have written about it in my News of the World column today. He seems to have adopted the politics of wishful thinking. There is a “zip-a-dee-do-dah strategy” and precious little contingency if things go wrong. He makes defence cuts, because he doesn’t intend to go on a massive deployment (neither did Woodrow Wilson). He will make prison cuts, because he thinks – bless him – that it won’t increase crime. He signs a deal with French for military co-operation, thinking they

What are we to make of the fact that No.10 gave the thumbs-up to Vince Cable’s bizarre anti-capitalist rhetoric today? “Capitalism takes no prisoners and it kills competition where it can,” he fumed – and you can argue that, technically, he is paraphrasing Adam Smith. But he has been in politics long enough to know what signal his speech sent out (and the reaction it would trigger). Mood music counts for a lot in politics, and in business. And the mood music from this government sounds like a bunch of politicians happy to tax the bejesus out of the high-paid – regarding them as ATM machines to be raided, rather

Three weeks ago, James argued that the Tories’ incoherence emanated from their disjointed campaign management. Steve Hilton, Andy Coulson, George Osborne and George Bridges were not communicating and the stark clarity on the economy and ‘Broken Britain’ was obscured. James urged the Cameroon duma to put its house in order. Cameron heeded some of his advice, but this morning brings the most significant change. Tim Montgomerie reports that Andy Coulson and Steve Hilton have at last joined forces and will report direct to George Osborne, who will be replaced by Ken Clarke as the Tory’s economic face. That that this is news reveals the utter chaos  that ruled the campaign;

At the beginning of this week the key figures in the Tory election campaign gathered together in Notting Hill to try and work out what was going wrong with the Tory campaign, why the Tory lead has halved since December. Our cover this week attempts to answer this question. My take is that the problem is largely caused by the structure of the campaign. Successful campaigns tend to have a chief strategist and a campaign manager. The strategist’s job is to work out what the election is about and the campaign manager’s role is to implement that vision and take charge of day to day tactics. The Tory problem is