If you’re looking for a revolutionary right-wing thought leader who will inflame the masses, force us to bend the knee to an autocrat, overturn elections, and inspire a new world order in California… keep looking.
The closest thing we have to a deep-red nightmare is a droopy Brit cosplaying as a disruptor in the governor’s race from a supersized Atherton mansion that is no one’s idea of a supervillain lair.
With Steve Hilton’s official entry into the general election alongside Xavier Becerra, there’s buzz about whether this strange outsider to American politics will have any pull come November.
He won’t. Hilton isn’t some meaningful barometer of a supposed rightward shift in California. He’s just another talking-head grifter who is so ineffectual that calling him a snake would be an insult to snakes everywhere.
Hilton has tried to create an air of legitimacy as the populist philosopher of the conservative movement, starting in his native Britain in the ‘90s, where he worked as a strategist to bring the Tories into power and spread the gospel of corporate-led free markets. Three decades have passed, and while Hilton’s tried to keep up with the times, he’s still grasping for a coherent political identity beyond the guy oft-mocked as a bellend by observers. (See: “Stewart Pearson" from The Thick of It, which portrays Hilton as an airheaded “ideas guy” who inspires scorn from colleagues.)
As November approaches, Hilton will have to figure out whether he’s a desperate pick-me Trumper or, as he’s started to spin himself, a “common-sense” pragmatist.” An apt metaphor for the state of the right, perhaps, but hardly the right vibe to play an intriguing villain in deep-blue California.
He’s about as scary as a kid in a ghost costume cut from an old sheet. Hilton’s done about as much work as one, too.
Like so many other right-wing grifters, Hilton’s career is notable more for gaffes and failures than any particular wins. In one of his earliest campaign efforts for politico David Cameron in the mid-1990s, Hilton backed a conservative ad that portrayed Tony Blair with demon eyes. Hilton’s ilk loved the ad, at least until the Tories got beat into a pulp at the polls in 1997, with one survey showing a majority of British voters disapproved of the attack.
Fast forward to Hilton’s biggest political achievement: Getting Cameron to the seat of Prime Minister in 2010 while serving as his strategist. Hilton was a unique advisor, considered a radical and a blue-sky thinker by establishment conservatives in Britain. He tried to play the role of Rasputin; sometimes, however, “blue-sky” just means “nothing of substance.”
Hilton pitched getting rid of all government press officers and replacing them with exactly one blogger. He wanted to defund Britain’s employment assistance office and let community groups fend for themselves. He floated plans for “cloudbursting” technology to artificially trigger rain so that Britain can be sunnier. Hilton once even suggested that the prime minister ignore European Union labor rules, an idea so gobsmackingly stupid that it forced an official to explain to Hilton that doing so would get the prime minister arrested.
Big-brain stuff!
No wonder that, according to British political insiders, Hilton was the poster boy for Tories falling for advice from unelected yappers with little grasp of politics. He allegedly had a habit of barking at civil servants to “go away and make this better,” which sounds kind of like a meek version of a Trumpian tantrum.
Then there are the feuds. “His issue with falling out with people is real and serious,” a source told The Times in 2012. That includes the sabotaging of his relationship with Cameron over their row on Brexit, which Hilton stubbornly, loudly supported. Once again, history has shown Hilton took a fat L on that prediction, with most Brits now opposed to the decision to leave the EU. Heck, Brexit was so bad that even Hilton fled for America on the coattails of his far more successful wife, Rachel Whetstone, who went from Tory strategist to senior exec in America’s tech industry, with stints at Google and Netflix.
Hilton moved to Palo Alto with Whetstone in 2012, became a US citizen in May 2021, and last year renounced his British citizenship. As for what he’s done in the US so far, it’s not much: His 2014 project, the political data organization Crowdpac, failed as a conservative project and was rebooted after his resignation as (irony alert!) a progressive-blue advocacy group. More recently, he co-founded a think tank called Golden Together that tried to push a housing bill and got exactly nowhere. L after L after L.
So what we have now is a perennial loser whose biggest claim to fame is being a mid-tier talking head on Fox News with so little charisma that he makes Piers Morgan look like Cicero.
Of course, in his appearances, he’s often inconsistent and waffling. Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election? Before the primary, Hilton refused to answer. Immediately after, he said Biden had obviously won. He’ll critique Donald Trump’s rhetoric today, without mentioning his years spreading COVID and election fraud conspiracies in a bid to get reposted by Trump. He’ll glom onto hot-button ragebait topics like trans athletes and a Department of Government Efficiency for California, then drop the topic when it stops generating clicks.
Hilton is so boring, so scattered, so unlikeable that he couldn’t even win the endorsement from the California GOP. I mean, listen to his interview with the New Yorker. Grab some coffee first: you’re going to fall asleep.
His posh British accent can’t cover up the fact that he grew up desperately poor, with state benefits keeping him and his Hungarian refugee parents afloat — the same sort of social safety nets that Hilton now wants to tear down.
Hilton once wrote about the excitement of “rubbing shoulders with the elite” at Oxford University given his humble beginnings, and the imposter syndrome of being an outsider. You can still feel that arriviste desperation in his gubernatorial campaign. Putting on a goofy grin while calling Del Taco a “street taco” isn’t exactly 4D-chess to subvert California liberalism. It’s just out of touch.
Good luck in November, Steve. Surely, your plans to team up with fellow loser Spencer Pratt is totally revolutionary and definitely not another waste of time.
