Cameron’s guru: Why we MUST quit the EU
DAVID Cameron’s closest friend in politics today breaks ranks to say Britain must leave the ‘arrogant and unaccountable’ EU.
In a shattering blow to the Prime Minister, Steve Hilton claims the UK is ‘literally ungovernable’ as a democracy while it remains in a club that has been ‘corruptly captured’ by a self-serving elite.
And in an attack on Project Fear, the former No 10 adviser dismisses claims by Mr Cameron, the IMF and the Bank of England that being in the EU makes us more secure.
In an exclusive Daily Mail article, Mr Hilton – who persuaded Mr Cameron to stand for Tory leader – also delivers a devastating assessment of the PM’s referendum deal. He says Mr Cameron made only ‘ modest’ demands of Brussels – and that even these were swatted contemptuously aside. He also warns that Brussels will take revenge on Britain for the referendum if it votes to stay, by imposing fresh diktats.
Mr Hilton concludes: ‘A decision to leave the EU is not without risk. But I believe it is the ideal and idealistic choice for our times: taking back power from arrogant, unaccountable, hubristic elites and putting it where it belongs – in people’s hands.’
His declaration for Brexit with exactly a month to go until polling day will send tremors through No 10.
Along with Michael Gove, he provided the intellectual heft behind Mr Cameron’s rise to power.
Both men now argue that the PM is wrong to urge voters to remain in what
DAVID Cameron has spoken publicly of his ‘disappointment’ that family friend Michael Gove decided to campaign for Brexit.
But to lose Steve Hilton to the Out camp – and at such a crucial stage in a bitter referendum battle that has already split the Tory Party in two – is arguably just as big a blow.
The shaven-headed Mr Hilton is the Prime Minister’s oldest friend in politics, and for years was his closest adviser. It was the Oxford-educated guru who first encouraged Mr Cameron to run for party leader in 2005.
The PM trusted him completely – Mr Hilton sat at the heart of the Cameronled party and its Notting Hill set, and was godfather to Mr Cameron’s son, Ivan.
Yet, on the issue which will inevitably define the PM’s premiership, he has been unable to carry the support of the man who put him on the path to No 10.
The most common description of Mr Hilton is as a ‘pint-sized Rasputin’.
He is perhaps best known for his scruffy appearance – he used to pad around No 10 without any shoes, does not wear a suit and is usually pictured wearing cycling gear.
But Mr Hilton has been described by political commentators as being just as important to Mr Cameron as Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson were to Tony Blair. In opposition, he was credited with changing Mr Cameron from an Old Etonian ‘Tory boy’ into the modern, cycling, green politician able to speak to Britain.
Ian Birrell, who worked alongside Mr Hilton in No 10 as a speech writer, describes ‘his restless determination to transform Britain’. In 2012, he wrote: ‘He is... an iconoclast and an idealist, prepared to confront the cosy consensus of the civil service and fight those politicians who prize pragmatism over principles.’
It is that cosy consensus – from the pro-EU views of those same big firms, the Bank of England and the rest – that Mr Hilton is challenging again now.
Mr Hilton is the son of Hungarian refugees who fled their home during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Ferociously bright, he won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital School in Sussex, before reading Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford – the same subject as the PM.
The pair became friends when they worked together at Conservative Central Office during the 1992 General Election, alongside George Osborne. Mr Cameron went on to work as a special adviser to Norman Lamont and Michael Howard. Mr Hilton departed to the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, before setting up his own consultancy, Good Business, which advised companies including McDonald’s on how they could do good by being socially responsible.
The Remain camp has tried to characterise those who want to quit the EU as being the old-fashioned Tory Right or having Ukip tendencies. It is, however, impossible to slide Mr Hilton neatly into this box (nor, dispelling this particular myth, is it possible to view Michael Gove in this way). Indeed, in 2001 Mr Hilton is said to have been so disenchanted with the Tories’ drift to the Right under William Hague that he supported the Green Party.
It was following the Tory Party’s third drubbing at the hands of Tony Blair, in 2005, that he returned full-time to the fold, and told Mr Cameron to run for party leader.
Mr Hilton is a firm believer in marriage and families – he has publicly urged the PM to do more to support them.
He is married to Rachel Whetstone, a former adviser to Michael Howard and senior executive at Google. She now holds the post of vice president of policy and communications at taxi app firm Uber.
It was in large part a desire to keep his family in the same place that he took up the offer of a post at Stanford University in 2012, after his wife’s work led her to the US.
Another reason, of course, was his exasperation with the EU and the way directives from Brussels had crept into every corner of Whitehall, stopping the elected government from implementing its wishes.
But there is a big difference between being frustrated with the EU and going over the top and declaring it is in Britain’s best interests to leave.
Only last month, Mr Hilton told the BBC he was not ‘going to get into the argument’ on the EU referendum. At the time, this must have come as a huge relief to the PM, following the loss of Mr Gove and his old sparring partner Boris Johnson to Leave.
Today, as the PM digests Mr Hilton’s devastating critique of a Brussels club which Mr Cameron is determined to keep the UK a part of, the mood inside No 10 will be very much darker.