Throughout the Tory leadership contest last October, David Cameron went everywhere with a shaven-headed man of 5ft 6in glued to his hip. Scruffier than other Cameroonians, observers remarked how good he made Dave look in comparison — so patrician, so soigné.
The man was Steve Hilton, the 36-year-old marketing dynamo credited with securing his boss — and friend — the party leadership. Today his official title is director of strategy, but from his desk in the House of Commons he is Cameron’s ideas man, his trusted data analyst, his big picture guy and his reality check when Cameron gets carried away.
This arrangement would have continued quietly if it had not emerged last week that Hilton earns £276,000 a year, making him one of the highest paid consultants in British political history.
Hilton’s girlfriend is well acquainted with power, too. Rachel Whetstone, 38, worked as chief of staff to Michael Howard during his reign as party leader. She and Hilton have known one another for more than 15 years and both are godparents to David and Samantha Cameron’s son Ivan. Key members of the Notting Hill set (until recently Whetstone was known as their queen), they are young, business-minded and live the life that Cameron has come to embody — bicycles, iPods, hip trainers and Euroscepticism.
It was thought that Whetstone would join Hilton in taking a key role in Cameron’s office, but an ill-judged affair — more of which later — appears to have scuppered that. In November, instead, she became European head of communications for Google, the internet giant. As Alastair Campbell and Fiona Millar evaporate into history, have Hilton and Whetstone become Britain’s new power couple?
In some respects they are chalk and cheese, he “classless”, she “the kind of person who might say ‘yah’ when drunk”. Hilton is the son of Hungarian immigrants who came to Britain after the 1956 revolution. There is a rumour that his surname is taken from the hotel they stayed in on their first night. That, sadly, is untrue. “The upbringing was very humble,” says a friend. “I think they were genuinely poor.” He was clever, though, securing a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital school in West Sussex and later a place at Oxford to read philosophy, politics and economics.
While working at a holiday job he saw a party political broadcast and reasoned that a volunteer job at Tory HQ could not be any less boring than stuffing envelopes. “He was deeply Conservative,” remembers a friend, “but he wasn’t one of those geeks reading Hansard in bed.” He impressed Robin Harris, the director of research, so much that he was offered a job, joining Conservative Central Office three months after Whetstone in 1990.
She had grown up in a manor house in East Sussex, her parents active in the local Tory party. After Benenden school, she embraced politics at Bristol University. “She talks fast, she’s bright and she doesn’t mince her words,” says one observer. “She’s Margaret Thatcher reincarnated,” says another, “a Tory MP’s wet dream.”
A friend says: “The three of them were highly precocious. David Cameron was made head of the political unit at 24, Rachel was very quickly headhunted to become Virginia Bottomley’s special adviser and Steve became indispensable to Peter Lilley.”
“Hyperactive” is how another describes Hilton. “Rachel was more ballsy, but both of them were so confident.” For the 1992 election Hilton (at 22) was made chief liaison with the party’s advertising agency. “He was in charge of explaining policy to Saatchi & Saatchi. Maurice (Saatchi) thought so highly of him that he hired him after the election.” The Tory peer would later say, “No one reminds me as much of me when young as Steve.”
Although Whetstone spent the mid-1990s as an adviser to Michael Howard, then home secretary (as well as being linked to Tory MP David Faber around the time of his divorce), both she and Hilton chose to further their careers in the corporate sector. Hilton moved from Saatchi & Saatchi to M&C; Saatchi, including a stint advising Boris Yeltsin in the Russian elections. Later he gave Tony Blair demon eyes for the “New Labour, new danger” campaign in 1997, before setting up his own company, Good Business, to advise multinationals on ethical practice.
He lives the life he preached. He stays modestly on the ground floor of his house in Kentish Town, north London, renting out the rest of the Victorian property to an assortment of student types. He cycles to work and most likely shops at the organic vegetables seller at the end of the road.
After stints at One2One and Portland PR, Whetstone was persuaded back to Westminster in 2003 by Howard. Several months later, gossip of an affair with a Tory grandee became uncomfortably loud. The man in question was Viscount Astor, a former government whip and opposition spokesman in the House of Lords. Disastrously, he was also Samantha Cameron’s stepfather.
Whetstone offered to resign, but was persuaded to stay on through the election. Her relationship with Hilton solidified but when Howard lost at the polls and Cameron won the leadership her political career was as good as over. By helping Howard through an election she had made a lot of enemies. “Men have fragile egos and lots of people didn’t take kindly to her,” says a friend. The Camerons, naturally, no longer saw her socially.
Meanwhile, her relatively new boyfriend (he comforted her after the Astor affair) took his place at Cameron’s side. Predictably, Hilton is likened to Campbell: a king-making string-puller, knee deep in the dark art of spin. The pillow talk in the Hilton/Whetstone household must be quite something.
