Last updated at 12:47 AM on 29th July 2011
Unconventional: No 10 policy guru Steve Hilton cycling to work
Three cheers for the bloke in the T-shirt and cycling shorts.
Downing Street strategist Steve Hilton, who roams No 10 dressed like a surfer dude, was attacked on the front page of yesterday's Financial Times.
Whitehall officials were appalled. Aghast. Astonished. Mr Hilton had gone beyond the pale.
Good heavens, the casual onlooker may have thought, what on earth had David Cameron's closest aide done? Plonked his cycling rucksack on the nuclear button? Pinched one of the No 10 Garden Girls' bottoms? Placed a whoopee cushion on Nick Clegg's chair?
No, it was more serious than that. Mr Hilton had (gasp) pencilled out some vague ideas which might, just possibly, have saved us the expense of thousands of state-sector jobs and reduced the regulatory burden on small businesses. Tsk tsk!
Among his innovative proposals was the scrapping of maternity leave laws. He also floated the idea of a cull of Whitehall press officers, the suspension of some of our more nannyish consumer rights regulations and the replacement of JobCentres.
Sir Humphrey and his minions were not prepared to countenance this assault on their power. And so, it seems, someone leaked the anti-Hilton story to the FT, house journal of the senior civil service – where mandarins find the job adverts for their post-retirement sinecures.
I do hope that the Hilton leak backfires. A lot of us, hearing of his ideas, will have reacted with a cry of 'Thank goodness someone is talking sense at last'.
You don't have to be a foaming loony to feel that Hilton may have been pretty spot-on in some of his suggestions. Would they not lift some of the burden from British taxpayers and reduce the size of a bloated state?
Let us consider the pros and cons in a moment. First, who is this turbulent strategy chief? Steve Hilton, 42, the son of Hungarian emigres, has been close to Mr Cameron for many years.
He is no blow-in. He was godfather to the Camerons' first-born who died. One of the distinct merits of Mr Hilton is that he has known the Prime Minister long enough to tell him when he is wrong.
Politically, Mr Hilton is a bundle of contradictions. Although slovenly in dress – he was recently spotted at No 10 in a stained T-shirt saying 'Love Me, Love My Bike' – he is an astonishingly hard worker, ardent about physical exercise. He smokes but he does not drink alcohol.
He is firmly Eurosceptic – good lad! – yet it would be hard to find someone who qualified less for the pejorative label 'little Englander'.
It is easy to see how this sort of character puts senior officials' backs up. There they are, years of boring careerism behind them, having always gone to work in shiny-bottomed suits, having for decades suppressed their opinions, played things safe, been faultlessly dull – only for this Guru of Grunge to come sauntering through the shiny black door of No 10 in his sweaty cycling gear and start bossing them around.
How Sir Humphrey must boil at his easy access to the Prime Minister!
As a shires fogey myself, I should recoil from this metropolitan sloppy-dog. I should resent his ad-man lingo and his taste for fashionable political theories such as 'the wisdom of crowds' and its related proposal for Government consultations to heed mass petitions. What a plonker, some might say. Yet I find myself rather drawn to the man.
Long-time friends: Steve Hilton films the David Cameron during a visit to the Bandra slum in central Mumbai
Every successful political organisation needs mercurial loners. Mr Hilton is not much liked by other members of Mr Cameron's entourage.
So what? He thinks in an original way. He pesters Permanent Secretaries and tells them to extract their digits and start acting in the public interest? Good!
One complaint against him concerned an encounter with Sir Jeremy Heywood, a top official at Downing Street. Mr Hilton reportedly asked why Britain had to obey every edict emerging from Brussels.
Dainty proceduralist Sir Jeremy is said to have replied that if we did not obey the law, Mr Cameron could go to prison.
What rot. The enfeebled EU is in no position to threaten elected politicians with jail, even if some judge found in its favour. What Mr Hilton had alighted on, rightly, was growing public anger about the EU.
Owners of small businesses are fed up with being told that they must provide ruinously expensive parental rights to employees.
With firms of less than, say, 30 staff, maternity and paternity leave is becoming a serious financial drag.
We need more Steve Hilton-style thinking in Downing Street. Anyone who comes up with suggestions for shrinking the state is worth listening to – even if he wears dodgy T-shirts.
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