Steve Hilton

Stephen Glenn Charles Hilton (born 25 August 1969) is a British and American political commentator, former political adviser, and contributor for Fox News Channel. He served as director of strategy for the British Prime Minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2012. Hilton hosted The Next Revolution, a weekly current affairs show for Fox News from 2017 to 2023. He is a proponent of what he calls "positive populism" and a vocal supporter of former U.S. President Donald Trump. He was a co-founder of Crowdpac, but stepped down as CEO in 2018 due to conflicting values with the company.

Early life
Hilton's parents, whose original surname was Hircsák (which some sources spell "Hircksac"), emigrated from Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. They came to Britain, initially claiming asylum, and anglicised their name to Hilton. Hilton's father, István, had been goaltender for the Hungarian national ice hockey team and was considered one of the top ice hockey players in Europe in the 1930s. After arriving in Britain, his parents initially worked in catering at Heathrow Airport. They divorced when Steve was five years old leading to what he has described as a struggle and great financial hardship; his mother worked in a shoe store but was primarily dependent on state benefits, and the two lived in a cold, damp basement apartment.

He was given a bursary to Christ's Hospital School in Horsham in Sussex, before studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at New College at Oxford University.

Career
After graduating, Hilton worked at Conservative Central Office, where he came to know David Cameron and Rachel Whetstone, who became his wife and, later, Senior Vice-President of Policy and Communications for Uber. He liaised with the party's advertising firm, Saatchi and Saatchi, and was praised by Maurice Saatchi, who remarked, "No one reminds me as much of me when young as Steve." During this time Hilton bought the "New Labour, New Danger" demon eyes poster campaign for the Conservatives' pre-general election campaign in 1996, which won an award from the advertising industry's Campaign magazine at the beginning of 1997. The Conservatives went on to experience their worst election defeat for more than half a century, with some journalists speculating that the poster contrasted unfavourably with Labour's more positive campaign. In 2005, Hilton lost out to future Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove in the selection process for the Surrey Heath constituency.

Hilton talked of the need to "replace" the traditionally minded grassroots membership of the Conservative Party, which he saw as preventing the party from embracing a more metropolitan attitude on social issues.

It is alleged that Hilton said "I voted Green" after the Labour landslide of 2001, but then worked with Cameron to re-brand the Conservative Party as green and progressive. According to The Economist Hilton "remains appallingly understood". There were reports that Hilton's 'blue sky thinking' caused conflict in Whitehall and, according to Nicholas Watt of The Guardian, Liberal Democrats around deputy prime minister Nick Clegg considered him to be a "refreshing but wacky thinker".

Hilton was satirised in the BBC comedy The Thick of It as the herbal-tea drinking spin doctor Stewart Pearson.

Hilton was director of strategy for the UK prime minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2012. His last memo concerned the advocacy of severe cuts in the number of civil servants in the United Kingdom and further welfare cuts.

Hilton is a co-founder and former CEO of Crowdpac.com, a Silicon Valley technology start-up. In April 2016, Crowdpac launched a beta service in the UK. Hilton resigned from Crowdpac in May 2018. Crowdpac also suspended fundraising for Republican candidates on its platform.

In May 2015, Hilton joined the UK think tank Policy Exchange as a visiting scholar.

He is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First, published in May 2015. It advocates smaller, human-scale organisations and is critical of large governmental and business, including factory farms and banks. With co-author Giles Gibbons, he wrote Good Business: Your World Needs You, published in 2002.

He spent a year as a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, has been a scholar at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and has taught at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

In 2023, Hilton founded Golden Together, a bipartisan think tank, with Lanhee Chen and Gloria Romero. The same year, he proposed a ballot initiative designed to reduce the housing shortage in California. The measure would prohibit private lawsuits related to the California Environmental Quality Act and cap impact fees paid by homebuilders and developers. The San Francisco Chronicle's Joe Garofoli called the ballot initiative a "developer giveaway", noting that it would give developers two of their major desires, but also that it may help stabilize construction workforces and draw more attention to housing issues in California.

Fox News
In November 2016, writing for Fox News, he announced his support for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. Starting in 2017, Hilton presented the weekly show The Next Revolution on Fox News Channel.

He was criticised for not rebutting his guest Ann Coulter when she falsely asserted that a recording of migrant children who were separated from their parents by the Trump administration crying were actors.

In March 2019, Hilton claimed that CNN, MSNBC, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as well as Democratic congress members Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell were the "real agents of Putin" for playing a role in "dividing" the United States over the myriad links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies.

On June 1, 2023, Fox News announced that The Next Revolution would be ending its run as Hilton began “to focus on his new California non-partisan policy organization….” Hilton remains with the network as a contributor.

COVID-19 pandemic
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and shortly after social distancing measures and lockdowns were implemented, Hilton called on President Donald Trump to end the measures. Hilton criticised "our ruling class and their TV mouthpieces [for] whipping up fear over this virus". Hilton suggested that "the cure could be worse than the disease"; or more specifically that the long-term public health consequences resulting from the economic damage of a lockdown would be worse than the short-term public health consequences of the virus itself. Trump later appeared to mimic what Hilton said in one of his tweets.

In January 2021, Hilton asserted that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the most likely source of the COVID-19 virus and falsely claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to the president, commissioned the work which led to virus's development. PolitiFact described Hilton's claims as "rely[ing] on a series of unsubstantiated allegations to spin a conspiracy theory about the virus being a lab creation.".

False 2020 election fraud claims
After Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, Hilton demanded an investigation into false claims of election fraud on his Fox News broadcast, clips of which were tweeted by Trump.

Personal life
Hilton is married to Rachel Whetstone, a former aide (political secretary) to Michael Howard, former head of communications at Google, former senior vice-president of policy and communications of Uber, and current chief communications officer of Netflix. The couple were godparents to David Cameron's son, Ivan, who died at the age of six. He became a U.S. citizen in May 2021.