Guru goes to California

In the Independent, Andy McSmith wonders how the David Cameron will get along without the (immediate) help of Steve Hilton, "the man who made the tories electable". Hilton is off to California, where his wife will work for Google. At the end of the piece, McSmith wonders:

How deeply David Cameron believes in all this new-look Conservatism is another question. Some suspect that he adopted the strategy as an imaginative way to dig the party out of the hole into which it sank 15 years ago. Perhaps now that the Conservatives have their biggest opinion poll lead for a generation, he has decided he does not need to try the patience of traditional Tories any more. If that is so, Steve Hilton might just as well be living in Silicon Valley.

Hilton is said to have studied New Labour very closely. I've just been reading Francis Wheen's "How mumbo jumbo conquered the world" (it didn't), which reminds us how left-wing Tony Blair was - or claimed to be - in the 1980's. Maybe Blair didn't believe all that third way nonsense after all - or maybe he did.