{"id":353444,"date":"2026-06-09T18:45:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T18:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/353444\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T18:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T18:45:09","slug":"cloudbusting-in-california-fintan-otoole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/353444\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloudbusting in California | Fintan O\u2019Toole"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just over twenty years ago, in April 2006, British media gave generous space to film and photographs of a sled hauled over a vast expanse of snow by a team of six huskies. The man driving the sled, dressed in expensive Arctic gear, was David Cameron, who had been elected leader of the Conservative opposition party four months earlier. He was heading for the Scott-Turner Glacier on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Overseeing everything was his media and marketing adviser, Steve Hilton\u2014now the Republican candidate for the governorship of California.<\/p>\n

Hilton had arranged this 3,800-mile round trip from London for the sole purpose of generating these images. Viewers would see the new Tory top dog as a successor to the heroic age of plucky British polar exploration. More importantly, they would see him as radical environmentalist: the rapid melting of the glacier was dramatic evidence of global heating. The message Hilton was crafting was doubly deft: this new-generation leader embodied a manly past yet felt passionately about the earth\u2019s future. The Tories cared.<\/p>\n

Four years later, Cameron became prime minister of the United Kingdom. Twenty years further on, Hilton received the endorsement of Donald Trump in the California gubernatorial primary. At a personal level, his seems an utterly implausible story. But it has a much larger logic: no one quite reflects the relationship between the hollowing-out of traditional democratic politics on the one side and the rise of Trump and his international imitators as well as Hilton does. Nor does any other political career except Trump\u2019s own quite capture the strange crossover between comedy and politics, entertainment and power, in the rise of the reactionary right.<\/p>\n

I first became aware of Steve Hilton as long ago as November 1992, when he appeared, most improbably, in an Irish general election. Then aged twenty-three, he had emerged in British political circles as a member of what was called (after the location of Tory party headquarters in London) the \u201cSmith Square brat pack.\u201d The child of working-class parents who had fled to England from Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956, Hilton was a recent graduate from Oxford. He liaised between the party and its hugely influential advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi during that year\u2019s British general election, won unexpectedly by the Conservatives under John Major. Hilton so impressed Maurice Saatchi (who remarked that \u201cno one reminds me as much of me when young as Steve\u201d) that Saatchi recruited him as a link man for its political clients.<\/p>\n

It was nonetheless astonishing that Hilton turned up in Ireland as a hired gun for the dominant Catholic nationalist party Fianna F\u00e1il. Founded and led for decades by \u00c9amon de Valera, the only surviving commander of the rebel forces during the 1916 Easter Rising against the British, the party was one of the most successful political machines in the democratic world and prided itself on its innate, almost telepathic connection to the Irish electorate. That it would have to hire a callow mercenary operative from the Tory hinterland in London, and moreover one who had never even been to Ireland before, was a symptom of profound change in the nature of politics in Europe.<\/p>\n

Advertising and media management had been central to electoral campaigns for decades, but in the aftermath of the cold war, democracy was becoming weightless. Increasingly stripped of ideology, it was now primarily a professional practice, a set of techniques\u2014most of them imported from the advertising industry\u2014that could be applied anywhere at any time. History, geography, culture, all the intimacies of local and national identity, were less important than image-making and the crafting of messages. Political leaders were products to be sold, and in a globalized economy marketing was a borderless science.<\/p>\n

Thus, after his Irish sojourn Hilton was in Russia in 1993, advising its president, Boris Yeltsin, on how to win a referendum on his leadership. He turned up in the Polish general election and then worked with the Norwegian Conservatives in that country\u2019s referendum on whether to join the European Union. It is unlikely he knew any more about Russia, Poland, or Norway than he did about Ireland\u2014but such knowledge, in this new world of globally transferable political skills, was now evidently considered irrelevant.<\/p>\n

The most memorable aspect of Hilton\u2019s Irish gig, though, was its comedy. In his diary, the government press secretary, who was campaigning with the Fianna F\u00e1il prime minister Albert Reynolds, recorded an episode in a rural market town. Reynolds was addressing a crowd of farmers at a cattle fair\u2014time-honored retail campaigning. Some of them approached, wanting to ask questions about the complex details of European Union subsidies for livestock.<\/p>\n

The press secretary could not resist directing the farmers toward Hilton and watching him founder as they harangued him about things he knew nothing about. He understood that Hilton was losing votes for his boss, but the joke was just too tempting. He and a well-known TV reporter watched the farce unfold, \u201cthe two of us rolling around like bold children.\u201d This is another thing that Hilton\u2019s subsequent career demonstrated: the rise of free-floating image-makers is both very serious and very funny. It turns democracy into a farce.<\/p>\n

There is no evidence that Hilton really was a marketing magus. The Irish campaign he worked on was a disaster. The Norwegians voted, against the advice of the Conservative Party he worked for, not to join the EU. In 1997 Hilton was closely involved in Saatchi\u2019s campaign to literally demonize the then leader of the Labour opposition, Tony Blair. The Tories mass-produced posters using the slogan \u201cNew Labour, New Danger,\u201d featuring Blair\u2019s smiling face with his eyes cut out and replaced with garish red \u201cdemon eyes.\u201d The crude terror campaign was unpopular with voters, who gave Blair a huge majority, ending eighteen years of Tory rule.<\/p>\n

Hilton established his own consultancy, called Good Business, to help companies project themselves as caring and socially progressive. He might have remained outside politics had he not had a close friend among the old Smith Square brat pack who was in need of the same service. Just three years Hilton\u2019s senior, Cameron got elected as an MP in 2001 and quickly began to position himself among the demoralized Tories as their answer to the young and dynamic Blair. As Cameron puts it in his memoir, For the Record:<\/p>\n

Steve and I had worked together at the party\u2019s headquarters, Conservative Central Office, during our twenties. He had become renowned as a left-field thinker of the centre-right\u2014passionate, bold, volatile, magnetic, and I\u2019d made him my director of strategy. He was also a close friend to me and my wife, Samantha, and godfather to our first child, Ivan.<\/p>\n

Hilton even lived near the Camerons in Oxfordshire.<\/p>\n

His task as Cameron\u2019s strategist was to detoxify a damaged brand. In 2002 Theresa May, herself a future Tory prime minister, told the party conference, \u201cYou know what some people call us: the nasty party.\u201d By 2005, when Cameron was elected as Tory leader, Hilton\u2019s job was to turn the nasty party into the nice party. That Svalbard sleigh ride was part of this rebranding. In this case Hilton seems to have managed the media perfectly. Cameron later admitted that he had somehow turned the sled over at high speed and \u201ccollapsed in a ball of snow, ice and, from everyone around me, hysterical laughter.\u201d Yet miraculously \u201cthese career-maiming shots never made it onto viewers\u2019 screens.\u201d<\/p>\n


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Andrew Parsons\/PA Images\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Steve Hilton filming David Cameron during a visit to Mumbai, India, 2006<\/p>\n

Presenting the Tories as environmentally friendly was part of a package designed, largely by Hilton, to convince voters that the party of Margaret Thatcher was now hip and wholesome. Cameron embraced gay rights, ostentatiously cycled to work, spoke sympathetically about alienated young people (\u201cWe have to show a lot more love\u201d), and called himself \u201cDave.\u201d Hilton replaced Thatcher\u2019s party logo of a blazing torch with a squiggly, smudgy, and charmingly childish drawing of an oak tree. Forget fire and fury, think shade and shelter.<\/p>\n

Hilton also rebranded himself. In 1993 he was described in the London Times as \u201cthe only Armani suit wearer\u201d among the brat pack. Now he cultivated a shabby hippy-ish vibe. At the 2006 Tory party conference, he appeared in \u201ca tatty anti-racist t-shirt.\u201d By July 2011, by which time Cameron was in power as prime minister in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the Financial Times was reporting that \u201cduring President Obama\u2019s recent visit to Downing St., Mr. Hilton was barred from one meeting because of his lack of shoes; \u2018Who is the beach bum?\u2019 asked one White House aide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dressing down from Armani to beach bum was the outward manifestation of Hilton\u2019s elevation from mere political apparatchik to Cameron\u2019s \u201cleft-field thinker.\u201d This transformation was also symptomatic of a wider crisis. The growing problem with the technocratic advertising-driven politics that took hold across the democratic world was its vacuity. This vacuum could, however, be filled by figures presenting themselves as inspired intellectuals and semi-religious sages. Hilton achieved his own transition from marketing mechanic to mini-maharishi. By 2006 Tory insiders were telling the London Times that \u201cDave is not Dave\u201d without Hilton: \u201cHe is the guru.\u201d<\/p>\n

This blissed-out New Age image was all an act. In 2008 Hilton was arrested and fined for abusing railway staff. As the London Times reported, he \u201cflew into a rage after staff at Birmingham station demanded that he produce a ticket before boarding.\u201d In internal government and party meetings, Hilton was fractious and irascible: Cameron wrote that, when in power, Hilton \u201cwas no longer excused as a free spirit when he was late for meetings\u2014he was seen as someone who had disregard for others. His antagonistic style was no longer helping him advance his cause in Whitehall\u2014it had started to hurt it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other truth is that Hilton could also be a bit of an idiot. He took blue-sky thinking literally. It was later reported by the Financial Times that one of the big ideas he pitched to Cameron was \u201cto buy cloudbusting technology to provide Britain with more sunshine.\u201d Hilton denied this, and it did seem incredible. But Cameron confirms it in his memoir: Hilton suggested \u201cno joke\u2014introducing cloud-bursting technology that would, he claimed, stop it raining over Britain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of Hilton\u2019s guru status was based on his futuristic vision of the revolutionary effects of the Internet. Yet in a column in the London Times in 1999, he confidently predicted that e-commerce had no future:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve just got back from New York where the Internet craziness has peaked\u2026. A year ago people were saying that Amazon and co would put the shopping malls out of business. Now they\u2019re saying that Amazon will have to open branches in the malls if it wants to compete. It proves what the smart punters knew all along: that the real Internet revolution will be in business-to-business rather than consumer services.<\/p>\n

As Cameron\u2019s director of strategy, Hilton peppered Tory MPs with bulletins that many of them found puzzling: \u201cThis week: an update on our plans for National Citizen Service\u2014some cool ways of harnessing the power of information\u2014a really useful way of describing the post-bureaucratic age.\u201d Underlying these cool concepts was an old conservative ideology: information technology and voluntary organizations could take the place of government and allow for a radical shrinking of the state.<\/p>\n

The trendiest term in Hilton and Cameron\u2019s rebranded Toryism was \u201cbig society,\u201d essentially the devolution of state functions to local communities. It was such a successful exercise in linguistic engineering that the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary declared it the \u201cword of the year\u201d for 2010, \u201cbecause it embraces so much of the year\u2019s political and economic mood.\u201d In reality, it merely provided cover for the slashing of spending on public services and welfare benefits, to the immense (and continuing) detriment of the poorer areas of Britain.<\/p>\n

Stripped of this modish Newspeak, Hilton\u2019s blue-sky thinking was mostly about depriving citizens of benefits, rights, and protections. According to the Financial Times\u2019s reporting, he advocated internally for ending all maternity leave for women and suspending all consumer rights legislation for nine months \u201cto see what would happen.\u201d He suggested \u201cCameron just ignore European labour regulations on temporary workers.\u201d He thought it would be a good idea to close all the employment exchanges that help jobless people to find work.<\/p>\n

In 2012 he drew up a plan with two cabinet ministers to stop official monitoring of child poverty after indications emerged that, as the London Times reported, \u201cit would produce a string of bad headlines for the Government.\u201d Aside from their cruelty, these notions were politically unviable. Even Cameron concluded that \u201cHilton\u2019s ideas continued to be one part brilliant to several parts bonkers\u2026. He wasn\u2019t interested in playing the game, just tipping it over and throwing the pieces all over the floor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet even as his real influence was fading, the ludicrous potential of Hilton\u2019s persona that had surfaced in 1992 in Ireland was being gloriously realized. He inspired one of the great comic characters of the period, Stewart Pearson in the satirical BBC series The Thick of It (2005\u20132012). The show was the savage caricature that a hollowed-out politics deserved. Its creator, Armando Iannucci, and his cowriters (including Jesse Armstrong, later the creator of Succession) conjured a world in which elected politicians are hapless creatures utterly dominated by spin doctors\u2014first the fantastically foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker when Labour was in power and then, after Cameron took office, Hilton\u2019s alter ego Pearson.<\/p>\n

One of the funniest episodes centers on the clash between Pearson and an old-style Tory politician, Peter Mannion, who is forced to attend Pearson\u2019s \u201cthought camp\u201d in a remote country mansion where acolytes must sit cross-legged in a circle around the guru. Each participant must throw a ball and whoever catches it must come up with an instant policy: \u201cPay the unemployed to drive ambulances!\u201d \u201cFree maternity leave for people getting a puppy!\u201d \u201cFree coffins!\u201d Mannion suggests \u201cReduce the deficit with spending cuts,\u201d but is told off by Pearson: \u201cPeter! Peter! I want to hear new ideas ricocheting off your sinuses like a pinball, not just a two-year-old slogan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mannion eventually snaps and breaks the circle:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m fifty-four, Stewart. My knees are fucked and my patience is snapped. Some of us had to go through this hippy shit the first time around\u2026. Just suppose your free-range, no-consequences bullshit was hugely entertaining when we were in opposition and shitting money but now that we\u2019re in government and it\u2019s all gone a bit J.G. Ballard, it\u2019s irrelevant and infantile.<\/p>\n

The scene is hilarious but also, in its own way, deadly. Hilton\/Pearson\u2019s no-consequences bullshit had indeed ceased to be entertaining\u2014except as withering satire. Hilton\u2019s absurdity spawned a parody Twitter account and a website that featured a random \u201cSteve Hilton policy generator.\u201d But the line between satire and reality was scarily thin: who was to say that a randomly generated policy or an idea shouted out in a fictional thought camp had not actually been proposed at some stage by Hilton?<\/p>\n

The Thick of It (like Iannucci\u2019s later US version, Veep) both reflected and amplified public contempt for the sanitized and professionalized version of democratic politics. Real ideas had given way to innately ridiculous \u201cnew ideas.\u201d Old-fashioned politicians like Mannion seemed able to do nothing except rage against their own impotence and humiliation. True power in government lay with the Tuckers and Pearsons\u2014unelected and unaccountable image manipulators. Even the satire had a despairing quality: traditional satirists thought of themselves as moral reformers; now the system seemed irredeemable. The only thing it was good for was a laugh\u2014and since it couldn\u2019t be useful, it must at least be fun, which as Hilton morphed in the public mind into Pearson it most certainly was.<\/p>\n

In March 2012 it was announced that Hilton was leaving Downing Street for a one-year sabbatical at Stanford, but it was widely known that he was not coming back. He did return to Britain in 2016 to campaign with Boris Johnson for Brexit\u2014the ultimate in \u201cthrowing the pieces all over the floor.\u201d Essentially, however, Hilton\u2019s political career in England was over. His wife Rachel Whetstone (herself a member of the original Smith Square brat pack) had become a powerful figure in the California tech world, first as head of public policy and communications at Google and then in a similar role at Uber. Hilton now remade himself again, this time in the American media-political complex.<\/p>\n

In those circles, though, Hilton arrived less as Cameron\u2019s former guru than as Stewart Pearson\u2019s alter ego. In 2016, just after Trump secured the Republican nomination, the New York Times fashion section reported excitedly on a book party for Hilton cohosted by Tammy Haddad, a media strategist and a consultant on Veep. She spoke about The Thick of It and the Pearson character: \u201cAnd then I meet Steve and I\u2019m like: \u2018Oh, my God! It\u2019s the guy. He\u2019s exactly the guy.\u2019\u201d When one of Hilton\u2019s coauthors objected that \u201cHe\u2019s much more serious,\u201d Haddad dismissed the objection: \u201cYou\u2019re not in politics,\u201d she said. \u201cIt [the Pearson character] wasn\u2019t goofy, it was the opposite. It was confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

She clearly meant that characterizing Hilton as exactly like his own satiric caricature was, in the emerging politics of the US, a compliment. She finished with a toast: \u201cTo Steve, who is bringing the heart back into politics! And to being authentic.\u201d Authenticity had been redefined as being entirely true to an absurdist parody of democratic politics.<\/p>\n

By the following year Hilton was flying each weekend from his $12.5 million home in Silicon Valley to Los Angeles to host a Fox News show called The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton. In 2017 this made him an anomaly. As the Times reported<\/a>, his Fox News identity \u201cmakes life complicated for Mr. Hilton in overwhelmingly liberal Silicon Valley, where supporters of President Trump are nearly nonexistent and few think populism would improve their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n


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Keith Birmingham\/MediaNews Group\/Pasadena Star-News\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Steve Hilton talking to the press after the gubernatorial debate at Pomona College, Claremont, California, April 28, 2026<\/p>\n

Yet in this at least Hilton was truly prescient. His British career had been largely about wrapping hard-right ideas in touchy-feely niceness. It was not yet obvious, but Silicon Valley, in its gradual accommodation to Trump, would want to do the same thing in reverse, ditching its \u201cDon\u2019t be evil\u201d credo for the joy of being evil. <\/p>\n

Hilton at that time suggested that although the tech industry seemed apolitical, \u201ca lot of the foundational philosophical approaches of tech leaders are actually all about decentralization of power.\u201d This was the \u201cbig society\u201d brand transplanted to Silicon Valley\u2014where it served again as a method of misdirection. The tech elite was not, of course, decentralizing power; it was building an oligarchy. To adapt Mannion in The Thick of It, now that it\u2019s all gone more than a bit J.G. Ballard, this stuff is irrelevant and infantile. But it served its purpose of creating a general complacency about the rise of the new elite. Like Hilton\u2019s makeover of Cameron\u2019s Tory Party, it made the nasty look superficially nice.<\/p>\n

Hilton hosted his Fox show dressed in tech-bro t-shirts and met his Times interviewer with Coachella and Glastonbury festival bracelets adorning his wrists\u2014while railing against the \u201cglobal elite\u201d who\u2019d sold out the working class. Yet it was on The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton that the far-right commentator Ann Coulter made one of the most memorable media interventions of Trump\u2019s first term. In June 2018, when thousands of children were separated from their families at the southern border and held in cages, Coulter referred contemptuously to \u201cthese child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24\/7 right now.\u201d Turning to face the camera, she asked Trump to \u201cnot fall for it\u201d: \u201cThese kids are being coached, they\u2019re given scripts to read by liberals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hilton (an immigrant and the son of immigrants himself, of course) made weak efforts to intervene and later said he did not endorse her claims. But he did not apologize for broadcasting such outrageous lies, and there was a weird symmetry in this episode. To intertwine advertising and politics was to fuse reality and performance. Coulter was taking this fusion to its ultimate conclusion: everything you see is a performance. The weeping children are just child actors following scripts written by liberals. Walter Benjamin\u2019s famous dictum that fascism is the aestheticization of politics was coming live into your living room.<\/p>\n

This arc is why Hilton\u2019s reinvention of himself as a Trump acolyte is so telling. There may seem to be a world of difference between the rebranding of Britain\u2019s nasty party as the nice party and Trump\u2019s brandishing of nastiness as a unique selling point. Cameron\u2019s pose of wanting to \u201cshow a lot more love\u201d seems to belong on a different political planet from Trump\u2019s violent hatred. Hilton\u2019s early internationalism, flitting from elections in the UK to Ireland, Russia, Poland, and Norway, seems utterly at odds with Trump\u2019s America First anti-globalist branding. The environmental messaging of the Svalbard sleigh ride is a million miles from Trump\u2019s insistence that global heating is all a hoax.<\/p>\n

Yet there is a direct line from Hilton\u2019s beginnings as a political detoxifier to his rise in the toxic world of Trump\u2019s America. He helped to make democracy laughable\u2014and Trump knew how to convert that ridicule into power. Trump fused both meanings of \u201cbranding\u201d: the labeling of his TV and property-developer persona and the libeling of all those deemed to be enemies of the people. The demon eyes Hilton had stuck on Tony Blair\u2019s face became the demonization of immigrants as invaders and criminals. The blue-sky thinking Hilton was encouraged to indulge came to mean that everything is thinkable and that whatever can be thought\u2014however racist, misogynistic, cruel, or absurd\u2014can be put into practice. Satiric thought camps have become real camps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just over twenty years ago, in April 2006, British media gave generous space to film and photographs of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[144273,7,9,8,536,17382],"class_list":["post-353444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-british-politics","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-donald-trump","tag-steve-hilton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}