Show caption ‘Rich people really, really don’t get it’ … Steve Hilton. Photograph: Robert Gumpert/The Guardian Saturday interview Steve Hilton: ‘I’m rich, but I understand the frustrations people have’ David Cameron’s former blue-sky thinker says the rise of populism is due to the super-rich’s inability to put themselves in the shoes of those less well off – before accepting a free cab ride and becoming lost for words about his own wealth Decca Aitkenhead Sat 15 Apr 2017 02.00 EDT Share on Facebook

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Steve Hilton’s office looks so typically San-Fran tech-startup that it could be the work of a set designer. Surfaces are matt white, the centrepiece is the kitchen, and there are various bins for different types of recycling. The only thing missing is Hilton.

He can’t call to say he’s running 45 minutes late, because he doesn’t own a smartphone. The CEO of Crowdpac ditched his five years ago. This presents another problem when he arrives, because he has to leave again in 15 minutes, having promised to attend an exhibition at his sons’ school. Would I mind coming too? We could do the interview in the back of an Uber?

Sure, I say, assuming he’ll call one. Doesn’t he have an Uber account? He looks at me, bemused. “I don’t have a phone.” So I call an Uber on my account, and we set off south together to Silicon Valley. We are an hour’s drive from the school, and a very long way from Downing Street.

In his old life, Hilton was David Cameron’s close friend, strategy director and blue-sky thinker, godfather to his eldest son, Ivan, and so close that Michael Gove once observed: “It’s impossible to know where Steve ends and David begins.” Rumoured to have voted Green in 2005, he was the funky, liberal architect of Cameron’s detoxification programme, the acceptable face of the new Tories who dreamed up the Big Society and became famous for arriving at work barefoot in cycling shorts.

He also became famous for falling out with almost everyone in Whitehall, and in 2012 left for California and a new life with his wife, Rachel Whetstone, suddenly very much the second half of the power couple: Whetstone was then Google’s director of communications and later moved to Uber; but she abruptly quit her job there this week. Hilton tells an illuminating story about his wife demonstrating an early prototype of Google’s voice activation software. She spoke into a phone: “OK Google, who is Steve Hilton?” It replied: “Steve Hilton is married to Rachel Whetstone.”

Hilton with George Osborne and David Cameron in 2015. The severing of relations since has been ‘their choice. I don’t think about it.’ Photograph: Dafydd Jones/Rex Shutterstock

But last year he resurfaced on the British political scene in the referendum campaign, arguing passionately for Brexit, and claiming that, were Cameron a backbencher, he would be supporting leave, too. Relations between the pair were reportedly strained to breaking point, though Hilton has until now maintained that they remained friends. He raised eyebrows even further by coming out as a Trump supporter – and now he has joined Fox News, with a show called The Next Revolution, which will explore the rise of populism in a weekly primetime Sunday night slot.

Now 47, Hilton has lost none of his restless, bouncy energy, and talks flat-out for our whole journey. I want to know what a nice, green liberal is doing promoting Trump on Fox, but my questions seem to strike him as typical of the left’s lamentably lumpen way of looking at the world. I’ve got Fox News all wrong, he says. “It’s the only place where there is actual political debate going on in America.” When I ask if he didn’t wince to see veteran Fox presenter Bill O’Reilly mocking the hairstyle of congresswoman Maxine Waters (he called it a “James Brown wig”), a suppressed smile dances round his mouth. “I just think people make jokes, say things, you know.” What Trump said about grabbing women by the pussy “was disgusting, yes. But let’s be honest, it’s not just Donald Trump that treats women with disrespect and sexualises them.”

Had Bernie Sanders been the Democratic nominee, Hilton “probably would have supported him”. Hilton says he is not really a conservative or a liberal: “It’s hard to pin me down because I’m a bit of Bernie Sanders, a bit of Rand Paul, bit of John Kasich.” He’s pro-Trump simply because he was the candidate most likely to “shake things up”. What Hilton really is, he has realised, is a populist.

“I only really heard of it as a political notion here in the campaign last year. I won’t say l’d literally never heard the word, but it definitely wasn’t part of any thinking.” Now he believes his 2015 book, More Human, was in fact a populist manifesto, and Crowdpac, his political crowdfunding tech company, a vehicle for promoting it. Populism may have “more negative connotations than positive ones”, but he intends to change all that through his Fox show. “What I would love it to be is presenting the positive version of populism, which is what I’ve always believed in, and that’s been consistent.”

Does his enthusiasm for populism extend as far as hoping for a Marine Le Pen victory in France? He won’t say, because “I just don’t know enough about it”, but he will say that he’s fed up with liberals accusing politicians like her of racism.

‘The thing that has always motivated me is that sense of unfairness’ … Hilton with Cameron at No 10. Photograph: Rex Shutterstock

Last year, post-Brexit, Hilton expressed dismay at the anti-immigrant mood that quickly spread, but looks impatient now when I suggest that ugliness, even if unintended, is the all-but-inevitable consequence of populist rhetoric. “I don’t think it’s inevitable at all. I just think that we need massive revolutionary change in the way that we do things, and it’s not enough to say that we can’t even talk about the necessity of that because it might have [ugly consequences].” The rise of populism, he says firmly, has nothing to do with values and everything to do with “the collapse of economic security”.

“The median US household income is lower today than in 1999. Half of the country are on lower incomes, and the poorer you are, the worse it is, and the other half has gone up. You’ve had such a catastrophic effect on people’s incomes and economic security from this agenda of unconstrained globalisation and all the things that a, kind of, Davos crowd believe in. The impact of that on real people’s lives – that’s ugly. And what you’ve got is a cry for the pain of people whose lives for decades have been really shit. The thing that has always motivated me is that sense of unfairness.”

More than anything, what upsets Hilton is the “staggering lack of empathy of the rich people for the lives of most people. I’m rich, but I understand the frustration that people have.” Does he think the rich people around him don’t get it? “They really, really don’t.”

He and Cameron last spoke in December 2015. At the infamous Sexy Fish party? “Yes, I think that would have been the last time.” Did lobbying for Uber, as has been alleged, take place at that party? He cites a long-standing pact with his wife never to discuss each other’s jobs, so can’t say anything. But wasn’t the alleged cosy chumocracy exactly the sort of thing Hilton rails against? “Yes, and, you know, in many ways it feels frustrating that I can’t get into that. But I think it’s a perfectly fair point, yes. I see that. But I’m already doing more than I said I would in terms of talking about it.”

He is scathing about George Osborne becoming Evening Standard editor while remaining an MP. “I think it looks entitled. I guess in the UK, maybe, to a certain extent, constituents have got used to the idea that a lot of their MPs just don’t really give a shit about them, and they’re off in London doing their stuff.” It is, he says, the worst example of revolving-door syndrome, and if he were allowed to donate he would love to contribute to an #OsborneMustGo campaign someone has launched on Crowdpac.

Does he think he has been disloyal to his former friends? “Well, not from my point of view.” The severing of relations is “their choice. I don’t think about it.” Hilton knew Cameron would be “really cross” about him campaigning for leave, but didn’t realise it would cost him their friendship. “And I still don’t think it needs to.” Hilton was “shocked” when he resigned, and sent his old friend an email telling him he didn’t think he’d had to, but Cameron never replied.

Hilton with Boris Johnson. He knew supporting the Brexit leave campaign would make Cameron ‘really cross’. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

We pull up at the school, deep in Silicon Valley. He’s excited to show me round his sons’ classrooms; the school is “experimental”. It is also, nonetheless, private and highly exclusive. The cost of our journey here is never mentioned, in the way that one wouldn’t think to mention paying someone back for a bus fare. Isn’t Hilton himself a member of the very wealthy coastal elites he castigates?

“Well, technically, yes. But that’s my point about empathy. Just because you’re part of it doesn’t mean you can’t empathise or understand life outside of it, you know. That I find really surprising, that so many people just haven’t been able to do that.”

It has been a tour de force of fluent certainties, righteous passion and implacable self-belief; Hilton’s self-image as a political pirate, a free-thinking radical on the side of the little guy, is impregnable. And then I ask one simple question, and the whole story he tells about himself unravels. Do he and his family deserve their wealth? He stares at me in surprise.

“Er … I think we definitely both work really hard.” Sure, but do they deserve their level of wealth? “Well … such a good question. I’m just trying to think.” He falls silent for 11 seconds, searching his mind for an answer that doesn’t undermine everything he’s been saying.

Hilton’s wife, Rachel Whetstone, who quit her job at Uber this week. Photograph: Silverhub/Rex/Shutterstock

“I guess, funnily enough, this is what I always felt about the debate about inequality. The problem that needs to be addressed is people not having that security, just worrying so much, and therefore you can’t worry about people’s earnings at the top.”

He must surely see that at the heart of inequality – and what makes it so toxic – is the sense people aren’t getting what they deserve, at either end of the pay scale? “Yes.” So can he tell the poor he cares about that he deserves what he’s got?

“I think that’s not … because in the end, it’s not a moral … I think that’s what all this conversation that’s happening around about … that’s why … that’s the whole …” He becomes unquotably inarticulate. “I just don’t believe it makes sense to try to regulate pay, I just don’t.” But do they deserve their wealth? “I don’t even think that’s the right way to think about it.”

Does he not realise that it’s how the person who cleans his toilet thinks about it – and every person who has worked hard, played by the rules, and still can’t feed their family? Isn’t that precisely what’s fuelling populism? He thinks again.



“A lot of people asked how it is that the person who represents that populist thing in America happens to be this billionaire, right? But it’s that sense of: is it a fair and legitimate and reasonable way to make money? So when they look at Trump they say, ‘OK, well, he built buildings.’ Right, I get that, that’s a thing. And he was on TV and he did this show that lots of people enjoyed watching. That’s fair enough. That’s stuff that I can understand. Whereas with Mitt Romney’s wealth, it’s all from financial wheeler-dealing that I don’t really understand.”

Would they understand what Hilton and his wife do? He looks increasingly flustered. “I think that they understand … I just don’t know. I think that it depends on …” I say I think they’d look at the job titles of most Silicon Valley millionaires and think that these guys didn’t risk the roof over their head to build businesses; they just got corporate jobs that paid them in stock and made them super-rich. “Yes, yes,” he nods. “I get that, but how are you going to actually do anything about that? In the end, you come back to, well, there’s a market and that’s how it works.”

It seems a remarkable coincidence that the sole pillar of our economic system this radical blue-sky thinker won’t challenge is the one that has made his family super-rich. He adds: “The argument for markets is competitive markets,” but this is a tricky defence to mount in Silicon Valley, I suggest, when the economics of the internet are notorious for creating monopolies – Google, Amazon and so on. “I agree, totally, yes.”

So, I try once more: can he say that he and his family deserve their wealth? “I think that we’re maybe overstating the degree to which we’re in that economic category. We’re genuinely not.”