Look out California – the British are coming

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The British are coming! The British are coming! As the United States celebrates 250 years of independence from the British, millions of Californians wish to put themselves under British rule. The primary is taking place tomorrow, and Steve Hilton, a British-born former adviser to David Cameron, is not only expected to make it through to the final in November, but has a good shot of winning in the ultimate competition. One doesn’t want to carry the joke too far. Hilton renounced his British citizenship in 2025 and had already become a naturalised US citizen in 2021, having lived in California since 2012. It should also be noted that California has never been under British rule. It used to be part of Mexico until it joined the United States in 1850.

Still, a reporter from the Sunday Times visited San Jose to see if Hilton’s background was an electoral obstacle.  ‘I thought it might be, but then I heard his platform and decided it doesn’t matter. Actually it’s helpful – he’s seen what single-care healthcare is like,’ one supporter replied. While British politicians might be keen to stress their support for the NHS, in America it is considered a model to be avoided.

Hilton addressed the rally with a rousing libertarian message. ‘This is what we’re dealing with in California,’ he said. ‘The total insanity, this bloated nanny state bureaucracy is trying to micro-manage every aspect of our lives, but they can’t deal with homelessness, they can’t deal with crime or balance the budget. What they can do is tell you how to cook your food.’ Promising deregulation and tax cuts, the crowd cheered and waved Make California Golden Again baseball caps.

Another curiosity for some British observers is that Hilton offers such robust tub-thumping messages, when in a previous incarnation he was at the heart of the Cameroonian modernising ‘project’ that sought to ‘detoxify’ the Conservative Party to woo moderate voters. The herbal-tea drinking PR expert Stewart Pearson in ‘The Thick Of It’ series was an entertaining portrayal of Hilton – who wandered around Downing Street not only without a tie on but without shoes either.

Yet Hilton is not without traditionalist impulses. His book ‘More Human’, a sort of personal manifesto published in 2015, had some passages that could have been written by The King. Take Hilton’s view on architecture for example:

‘There is no more iconic example of inhuman architecture than the work of Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who inspired many of France’s urban housing projects in the mid-twentieth century – high-rises that have mostly served to isolate poor individuals from the rest of the community. The very term he used to describe his buildings is exactly what’s wrong with them: ‘machines for living in.’ It’s hard to imagine a less human approach.’

If Hilton does win in November, a radical change of direction is promised. He has made clear that big tax cuts will require big spending cuts. ‘Reducing taxes, which is urgent, will require a more sensible approach to spending,’ he says. ‘Over the last decade, government spending has more than doubled in California – from $161 billion in 2015/16 to $322 billion in 2025/26. Even after taking account of inflation, the budget has gone up by 50%. And it’s still going up! My aim is to return spending to pre-pandemic levels, where it would have been if the government had grown in line with the economy. We can do this because everyone can see that higher spending hasn’t led to better outcomes.’

The inevitable retort from the Left is that such an approach is uncaring – leaving the poor and vulnerable to suffer. Hilton is keen to engage in that argument. ‘A recent audit found that over $24 billion was spent on homelessness without any idea where it went or what it did, while the problem just gets worse and worse,’ he says.

Some of the examples of wasteful spending have a familiar sound to us on this side of the Atlantic: ‘Over $30 billion was spent on ‘high speed’ rail without a single mile of track being laid.’

So is the warning that the enterprising are being driven away. He claims the Golden State is held back by no fewer than 420,000 regulations. ‘Over the years, we have allowed a completely ridiculous, sprawling bureaucracy to metastasise, making it impossible to get anything done in a timely, cost-effective manner,’ he says. ‘No wonder so many businesses are just giving up and moving to other, more welcoming states, including perhaps our most iconic industry: movie and TV production.’ Hilton pledges to ‘sunset our regulatory code, so regulations go away unless explicitly renewed. Idaho did this and managed to reduce regulation by 95%.’

California has an equivalent population to Poland or Canada. Its economy is bigger than Japan’s. So Governor Hilton would have a lot of power. The world would pay attention. But it would not be the first time Californians had embraced a free market message. Howard Jarvis’s Proposition 13 passed in California in 1978, and resulted in a cut in property taxes of 57%, greatly boosting economic growth. In 1966, we saw Ronald Reagan elected Governor. This was a challenging time for Conservative politicians. ‘Make love not war,’ a doped-up hippy shouted at one of Reagan’s campaign events. He retorted: ‘Son, looking at you right now, I don’t think you could make either.’

A great communicator with a passionate belief in individual freedom. Hilton might have been mocked and misunderstood over here. But many Californians are looking for him to be the heir to Reagan. 

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