YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Hilton

lines on the record: 146
first: 2017-04-19
most recent: 2017-04-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And that now exists as a real thing that hundreds of thousands of British youngsters are doing every year. So that's just a small example of like, wow, you can really make incredible things happen. So of course it was great from that point of view, but I found it unbelievably frustrating because in the end, as an advisor, you're not making the decisions.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Oh, there you go. Your face tells the story. If only people could see, well, there you are. And so I just found that period, of course, it was amazing to be right at the heart of power and have a chance to do things. And there are certain things that we got going, programs we got going, you know, I'm going to list them all, but there's one just really simple thing, not simple, very complicated, actually, but we got a going called National Citizen Service, which is basically kind of a non-military national service for all 16-year-olds. I spent a lot of time designing and piloting. And actually in Silicon Valley terms, we would describe as prototyping before we even got into power”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking back on it, was that I'm not particularly, you know, I had very strong views. And I thought that the platform that we had crafted together was what we were intending to do.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I will. I mean, you know, I wasn't. In a way, that's the problem for me. Anyway, because one of the things I learned about myself.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because you have the parliamentary system, so he was elected leader of the opposition basically at the end of 2005. The next election was 2010. So you have four years, very different to here where the candidate sort of comes together right. So we have four years, which is actually really good time to really think through your strategy, your platform, the policy agenda. So we spent four years doing that. And then the elections of 2010. And then he's prime minister and I'm in Downing Street as senior advisor.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was more to me, it was like what went that was like me and him and George Osborne really kind of did that all together. Right at the beginning, when we hardly had a team, and it was just right in the actual election to become the leader. And it was about, look, the position of the British Conservatives at that time was very similar to what people might think the Republicans are like now, basically seen as the party of old white people, the party of the rich, the party that just doesn't care about, doesn't understand the modern world. Hostile to environmental causes, to gender equality, to completely kind of backward looking on sexuality, all those things applied to the British conservatives. And we're basically trying to get rid of that baggage and present a modern conservative body that would apply our conservative principles of belief, you know, trusting people, sharing responsibility, decentralizing power, all of the kind of philosophical basis of conservatism to say we can apply that to the things that are problems for people today. For example, work-life balance, dealing with the causes of poverty.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“David Cameron. Yeah, exactly. Well, James Cameron, maybe that's a whole other connection. I don't even know about, but David Cameron, during that period, was working his way up in politics. He got elected to parliament. The Conservatives continued to lose elections to Tony Blair. And then by the time of 2005, which was the third or fourth time that they lost David Cameron had got quite senior. And after the election, it was that kind of moment of let's rethink this, you know, and he ran on a really aggressive platform of changing the Conservative Party, making it absolutely”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, then, what was so ridiculous about that was that completely randomly the first thing that we did was the most stupid possible thing you could do, which is open a restaurant. Let everyone said, are you crazy? Like most of these restaurants, you know, close within, yeah, exactly. And it's so complicated. And so we were literally running a consulting firm with big clients like, you know, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Nike and whatever, at the same time as a restaurant in West London that was trying to source organic sustainable food and we had a job training program for local kids from, you know, we didn't, you know, gave them literacy training and all this kind of stuff. And it was going to be cheap so that it wasn't kind of exclusive just for the rich people. You know what I mean? Incredible burdens we put on ourselves. Yeah.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Called good that would have different bit like the comparison we had with like with virgins right yeah good this good we're gonna do good books and good work and all of them would have would be obviously socially and environmentally responsible but also really big campaigners for social change sure through everything that they did and that was our big idea now i can see her”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had this obsession, which I think a lot of entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial people have, which is who perhaps work in agencies. Which is well, it's all very nice to do this stuff, which is working for other companies, and we, you know, we were making decent money. We want to do our own business. And so we had this notion of a brand.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So we were doing that in the sort of early 90s, mid 90s through till actually through till David Cameron's decision to run for leadership. So that was really what I spent most of my time on, that intersection between business, social issues, philanthropy. And all of that again was like really interesting.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we started a little company called Good Business. So that's what I did for the next kind of seven or eight years, which was and naturally kind of stumbled into this field that was then emerging.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way they make their own ads, the kind of leadership they have, you know, there's so many ways in which these brands touch. Culture and soci Just giving a few bits of airtime or even money to an anti racism campaign that's going to be not the same thing. So that really took me to my next move, which was, and actually I left Sarchus with a colleague and a good friend now from there, we created a company designed to try and Work with brands to make them vehicles for social change.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Through marketing. I just had this, I came to this view that we could do a nice campaign and they could spend money on putting it up on TV and billboards and whatever Really, that issue of fighting racism was so much deeper than a few ads would ever be able to tackle. And I just came to the view that one of the ways we might go about that would be not just kind of, and in fact what it was was that we were trying to get some of the Sarchy clients to give, you know, to donate airtime and all that kind of stuff. And then I thought, you know what? It's actually okay, that's fine, and the perfectly nice thing to do. But what really would do much more good was if we actually got into the heart of all those big clients and got them to change their behavior, their hiring practices.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not yet. There's always time. Well, actually, no, before that, there's an intervening thing. I'll try and do it quickly, which is that, and basically I was there at Sarches and they gave me... All the kind of weird stuff. That wasn't commercial, and one of them was to work with the Commission for Racial Equality. on an anti racism campaign And that's, and I was working with them on that. And actually, during that process of thinking about how we combat racism.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd go back, you know, my sort of family down in the small town in the south of Hungary couldn't believe that I was now having meetings with.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and it was amazing. We went around the world and did elections, including most of the countries of Europe. And it was a very exciting time because of the fall of communism And so we worked in most of the countries in Eastern Europe, including Hungary, which was a thrill for me”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they set up this division with this sort of hysterically grand title, I think it was called Sachi and Sachi Government Communications Worldwide.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so part of my time, I work, actually literally worked on the British Airways account and learned the sort of basics of. Right at the bottom of the ladder in the company, learning how to make ads and do marketing strategies and all of that. But the other reason they hired me was to take that experience of running election campaigns in the UK and try and leverage that through that international agency network. And bring the kind of expert from the UK.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And literally work with them every day. These incredible people, especially both of them, actually, in different ways, I just found incredibly inspiring and I just learned so much Being with them, and at the end of that experience they offered me a job. So I went off to do that”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they had, they were really associated with electing Margaret Thatcher three times in a row. And doing some of the biggest, most famous ad campaigns, British Airways, creating these amazing brands and the heyday of. British advertising. And because they were by that time, they're sitting on top of a really big company. Global company and hardly got involved in client work. Day to day basis, but because this was the election and it was the Prime Minister, they were really involved. And I had it again, this incredible opportunity to meet them.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But certainly not the company that it was then. It was still the company run by the founders Morris and Charles Sarchy. An American audience won't know them that well, but they incredibly well known.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. But then I can't remember what happened. I'm just trying to piece together the story. So then. Oh, I remember there's a big formative thing, which is that just again, pretty randomly, the role that I was assigned in the first election campaign that I was there for was to be the kind of connection between the party kind of research office and the kind of policy team. And the ad agency that did the campaign. Which was a company called Sachi and Sachi. Which is still around today in one form.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I felt that, well, I wanted to help the people that I thought were doing good. That time, and I particularly was inspired by the guy that came after Margaret Thatcher, who was Prime Minister John Major, although I now subsequently... Disagree with him on a lot of things. But at the time, I thought his story was really cool. You know, he had an incredibly humble background, very interesting. Unexpected background and sort of rose through the ranks to become Prime Minister. And it was just a great story of social mobility. And I thought he was. And the way he kind of, a little bit like, I think the intention, I don't know if the reality of the first president Bush after Reagan. Trying to kind of soften. The contours of what the right stood for. And I really loved that actually. I remember I found it really inspiring.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and then they got me back and I did an interview and I got a job. And then that was, I guess, 1990. It was the last year of Margaret Thatcher being Prime Minister. And I was there working and then there's a bunch of us that were there working together. And this is where the kind of disgusting ruling elite incestuousness argument comes from that I rail against in so much of what I say because in that group of us working there. In 1990, there was David Cameron. Who became Prime Minister George Osborne, who became the Treasury Secretary, Edward Llewellyn, who became the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff. Rachel Whetstone, who's now my wife A whole bunch of us that work together and then went off and did different things. And then ended up coming together around David Cameron's leadership campaign. Sure.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than the incredibly boring kind of washing up in restaurants that I'd been doing to earn a bit of money in previous. I thought, actually, let's try and do something interesting. Maybe they got a job. I wrote them a letter. That's how I got into it.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in fact, even before that, the whole thing was random because the reason I got the internship was that I remember seeing a political, in the UK, you don't have political ads that you can pay for as here. You have this kind of allocated time on all the channels. And I remember they're called party political broadcasts. I remember randomly watching one or seeing one before the news. And at the end of it, I remember really clearly, it must have been quite formative because it was like, no, what, 30-odd years ago? The guy who was the chairman of the party. Very plummy British. Accent saying If you agree with us, write to me Peter Brook at Conservative Party headquarters and I really remember that. And I thought, yeah, actually. And we write, maybe they have summer jobs that are more interesting”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a job in Congress working for Center SI Hayakawa, who happened to be Republican, oddly enough, and I'm not, but I would keep awake during briefings. That's what I was just hit on the thing. So I know that kind of job.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over the weekend that were not particularly political, and you know articles about science and whatever. And that was one of the jobs I had. And I literally had, you know, aged whatever, 18. I had to cut out these in the days of a photocopier and whatever, cut it out, put it together, and then literally physically walk it over to Ten Downing Street and deliver it”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Between my second and third year at university, I got a summer internship and ended up, for example, preparing the weekend reading for the Prime Minister for Mrs. Thatcher. She liked to read things.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's much more country, much more centralized. So it's a little bit, I guess, like getting a Internship for a member of Congress, something like that, except this was the party headquarters and in the very centralised UK system, that was the heart of things. And it was kind of amazing. It was in my”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in some way, I mean, that's right. That's a really interesting discussion. I think highly relevant to where we are in American politics today, actually.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the Conservatives are for working people. And the Labour Party are for people who don't want to work and get welfare. And I think that's just, you know, growing up, that's something.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think really it was much more personal and direct than that. My stepfather worked in construction. He actually fled across the border as a refugee in Hungary in 1956 when the Soviets invaded. And he and a couple of his friends literally ran across the fields and climbed over barbed wire fences and ended up as refugees. And he hadn't really been, he was from a small village in Hungary and hadn't had much of an education at all and certainly didn't, but he ended up in England in a refugee camp, didn't speak English, got a job on a construction site and made his career as a builder, as a working construction. And I remember really clearly all the way through the 1980s when Mrs. Thatcher was the Prime Minister. This pretty kind of constant drum beat that she's for us because she's for working people.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do tend to sort of confound these categories, but I think that it was a combination why the conservatives right at the beginning, I think partly it was because of this really general philosophical association that the left is bad because the left is very roughly speaking what my family are experiencing in Hungary. Of course, there's no comparison between the left in the West at the time and communism, but nevertheless, there was a sort of sense that the left is worse than the big government too much metal.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And during that period, my book came out, and quite a fair proportion of the reviews suggested that on the basis of what I'd written in the book, I ought to run for the leadership of the Labour Party. Right,”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Democrat. That's why. Well, there you go. I think that I've had that a lot. When my book came out in the UK, I wrote the book a couple of years ago called More Human. And it was right in the middle of the leadership election. British Labour Party.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then I'm just trying to remember, actually, my first job out of university was, in fact, in politics. I worked at the headquarters of the Conservative Party in the UK.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All our families there, my parents were in the, as I say, that came to the UK and I was born there. My stepfather, also as Hungarian. He was a refugee, fled across the border. So we went back to see the family, and a lot of that conversation was about the difference between life under communism and the life we were experiencing in the West and that kind of thing. So I guess from an early age, I was exposed to that kind of discussion.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting. I clearly was because the course that I took was called Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Called PPE. That's how they talk about it in the UK. There's a great piece in The Guardian recently about how disgustingly pervasive that degree is. Amongst kind of everyone basically, exactly. So I did that and then prior to that, I guess I must have been introduced. I do remember taking an interest and I think actually the Hungarian background does come into it to a certain extent. I remember visiting our family in Hungary.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, trying to exactly. Although there's a whole story about how frustrating I found that and how that informed what I now, you know, leaving and reflecting on what went wrong.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's true that that comparison, that coal rove comparison has been made. I think the difference is that when I work, the person I worked for was David Cameron. And both when he was leader of the opposition in the UK. And then later on in government. And I think the difference is that I definitely got involved in things like planning a campaign and the strategy and communications and all the things you'd expect. My real focus was policy. And in Downing Street, I really was basically head of domestic policy. So I was trying to running the implementation”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most of your career. Yeah. In terms of background, that word makes me think I need to correct something very important, which is, although in terms of being a citizen, I am British, I'm actually Hungarian. That's a very important thing.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“British. All right. So let's talk about your background before you got here because you've been living in Silicon Valley for a while and we'll explain why and various reasons. But explain your background. How you, someone called you the Carl Rove of British politics, which is, I don't think is a compliment, but I'm not clear, but you've been involved in British politics for most of your career.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm excited about all that. Yeah, it's going to be great. Where do you want to start with all that menu of a menu of options? There's so many things we can talk. Do we mention your British? So let's do that. Yeah, I can do that British, British. Really plummy, very small. I can bring British.”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you very much. Yeah, I'm excited about that. Yes, it's going to be great. Where do you want to start with all that menu of a menu”
2017-04-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steve Hilton, CEO, Crowdpac · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT