A Trump electoral project to make Steve Hilton the next governor of California

Advance audience ratings for Wednesday night’s televised debate between the two men campaigning to become the next governor of California were not overly optimistic, but it’s likely that among the wee-hours viewers in Britain was Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton.How could he resist? The transformation of Steve Hilton, the Barnet boy and former bezzie of and strategy guru for David Cameron turned renegade Republican candidate for California guv’nor is one of the wackier stories to emerge from the Golden State in recent decades. Of course his old chums from a Britain that already seems untouchably distant would be tuning in to see how he would fare.Autumn polling does not suggest that Hilton, who moved to California in 2012 after his wife Rachel Whetstone took up a senior executive job with Google, can become the first Republican since Arnold Schwarzenegger to govern what is famously touted as the fourth-biggest economy on the planet. He trails Xavier Becerra, the steadfast if staggeringly unexciting career politician (California state legislature; congress; California attorney general; secretary for health and human services in the Biden administration) by 60 per cent to 38 per cent in aggregate polling. Wednesday night’s live showdown was billed as the only live debate between the two survivors of California’s strange and efficient “open” primary, which culled a field of 61 candidates down to the last two. READ MOREThe election campaign had, by the night of the primary, mainly distinguished itself for the ignominious downfall of Democrat candidate Eric Swalwell after a series of sexual abuse allegations, which Swalwell has denied. Hilton was the big success story of that primary, attracting 26 per cent of the overall vote, leaving him neck and neck with Becerra.Hilton offered a streak of eccentricity and a Maga-ish populist message, promising no tax on earnings at the $150,000 and under threshold, gasoline at $3.50 a gallon and other sweeteners in his manifesto such as Bring Hollywood Home and Bring Back the Starter Home in California). Electing his opponent, he argued, would offer Californians nothing but an extension of the demise of the state under Democratic governors in the years since Arnie packed up his dumbbells and left office.In an early summer radio interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, Hilton was asked, more or less, where he got the moxie to set up shop in California little over a decade ago only to stick his hand up to occupy one of the most senior political roles in the land.“Well, isn’t that the magic of America?” Hilton said, running through his years of teaching at Stanford and launching start-ups before a sit-down with Rupert Murdoch (those fingerprints are on every piece of American political furniture for the past 40 years) led to a hosting role on a minor Fox News talkshow. Hilton’s show had limited viewership but, crucially, among that audience was avid consumer of the rolling news networks, Donald J. Trump, who liked what this energetic Brit had to say about him. When Hilton decided to throw his hat in the ring for governorship, he earned the president’s endorsement. It’s a very Hollywood story: the son of Hungarian emigrants, who moved west to Greater London, seeking now to stamp his name on Lotus Land. As he explained to Remnick, though, he was always looking west, even when he was ensconced in Downing Street hatching the plan that would lead to prime minister David Cameron’s “Big Society” announcement in 2010.“Even before we moved here I had a real love affair with this state – I thought and still do think California represents the best of America. There’s a phrase I use all the time, which is: ‘California means to America what America means to the world’. And what I mean by that ...”The conversation went elsewhere, which was unfortunate, but Hilton’s old Tory buddies would recognise the trademark pedigree of the phrase, in that it could mean anything – or absolutely nothing at all. Even a basic analysis suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of the United States by Hilton. What California “means” to greater America has been a source of hot contention for decades. And what “America means to the world” is a proposition open to limitless interpretations and responses.Still, under the bright television lights, Hilton attempted to transfer his Fox experience to bear against a hesitant opponent. The debate ran along expected lines, with Hilton repeatedly portraying Becerra as a cog in the bureaucratic machine that has dulled California’s promise while the Democrat continually linked Hilton to Trump. But there was one moment, when the subject of Ice raids and immigrants was under debate, that stood out. Just five minutes into the debate, Becerra had reminded viewers that he is a classic immigrant story: the son of Mexican parents who had arrived in California with $12 to their name. Turning to Hilton, and challenging him to deny that he had said he would deport immigrant farm workers, Becerra told him: “You seem to welcome immigrants who look like you and deport immigrants who look like me.” It was Becerra’s one truly vicious line, and it landed. In some ways, Becerra and Hilton’s back-and-forth was a continuation of the political and civic problems that no 21st-century California governor has been able to solve. Here’s Michael Hiltzik, the famous LA Times columnist, bemoaning the lost opportunity bequeathed to “The Governator” when California fell for the magnificent Mitteleuropean blankness that Arnie transferred from the silver screen to elite politics: “The day he took office, Arnold Schwarzenegger commanded popularity enough to persuade California’s voters to swallow the harshest fiscal medicine. Everybody feels shortchanged in this state – rich and poor, employer and employee, student and teacher – and not without reason. This is the crisis Schwarzenegger was elected to solve, and he never laid a finger on it.” That was in 2010, two years before Steve Hilton moved to the state. He would return to his homeland periodically, popping up as a prominent and, for Cameron, disastrous proponent of Brexit.But at 57, this autumn gubernatorial election is his shot at making his own name as a politician of note. Hilton’s policies may appeal to Californians struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, housing, the statewide issue of homelessness and infrastructural crises. Six years ago, Gavin Newsom’s approval rating reached 65 per cent: as he prepares to exit office, with a likely presidential run in his future, it has fallen to 42 per cent among registered voters. The environment may be ripe for a protest candidate. But Hilton’s problem is that he is campaigning in a state in which Donald Trump is loathed, with a 72 per cent disapproval rating in recent polls. And he is regarded as one of Trump’s electoral projects.He needed to put on a spectacular show in this televised debate in Tinseltown, and he couldn’t deliver. Cameron’s famous goading of then prime minister Tony Blair over two decades ago – “I want to talk about the future. He was the future once” – might have flitted across Steve Hilton’s mind as the lights darkened in the television studio.