“I don’t want this state that I love to become the country I left,” Steve Hilton tells the lunch meeting of South­ern California Republican Women. Knives and forks rattle on porcelain as the perfectly coiffured ladies down cutlery to clap. Remarkably, Hilton, director of strategy under former British prime minister David Cameron, has topped virtually every poll for governor of California since he launched his campaign in April last year.

Hilton has leant into the West Coast aesthetic and spirit. Once the rebel of Downing Street in T-shirts and stockinged feet, today he sports a tech-bro beard, more bracelets and beads on his wrists than Prince Harry, and has the top three buttons of his white shirt undone. British by birth, he has renounced his citizenship and become an American.

California, he tells me as I follow him on the campaign trail, is “where I’m meant to be”. Britain is now “run by socialists,” afflicted with a “bureaucratic bloat” that makes it “impossible to do anything”.

In part, he blames Britain’s Conservative party. “The real disaster for the UK that I just find inexplicable is that most of this seems to have set in in the second half of the Conservative years,” he says. “Keir Starmer has only been Prime Minister for two years – it’s not suddenly deteriorated, although he is obviously making it much worse.”

The economy of California, the home of Silicon Valley, is bigger than Britain’s. Yet the state is also in sharp decline thanks to poor leadership.

‘California reminds me of 1970s Britain – we need to elect people who are not puppets of the unions,’ Hilton told a town hall in Santa Ana

‘California reminds me of 1970s Britain – we need to elect people who are not puppets of the unions,’ Hilton told a town hall in Santa Ana

At least ten million residents have left in the past 15 years. Businesses and jobs are going, too. The Democrat Gavin Newsom, who now has his eye on the White House having served the maximum two terms as California’s governor, threw $37 billion at the homelessness problem, yet 187,000 people live on the streets. California has the highest poverty rate in the country (tied with Louisiana), the highest unemployment rate and the highest cost of living.

Hilton wants to make California “Califordable” by cutting taxes, bringing down the cost of gas, reversing green policies, boosting house building and slashing regulations and fraud.

“How can a Democrat win with this record of calamitous, total failure on every front?” he asks.........

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