Quango - David Cameron's Brain Has Gone Bye Bye

Knebworth, '96. Fourteen-hour queues for the toilets. A soundsystem like dishwater draining in the next room. Blokes touting the £22.50 tickets for £300 outside the gates. But all fackin' worth it, though, to hear Liam lung his way through "Digsy's Dinner" as an entire generation fell to its knees and announced that, yes, this was their high-watermark, no question.

In the crowd that day, along with every British celebrity you'd ever heard of (the guest list alone numbered 7,000), was the guy who'd masterminded the ad strategy for John Major's jaws-of-defeat victory in 1992. That guy had been 22 at the time. Now, he was 26, and reckoned he was going to do it all over again for John in '97. In aid of that, he'd just come up with a brilliant new campaign idea, and even as the Gallaghers were blasting through "It's Getting Better (Man)", he was hunched near the back of the field, spooling it off to Tory HQ on a pager.

“There's Tony Blair, right…” he no doubt said, “And he's got, like, his eyes ripped out. So you've got that grin – that 'Phoney Tony' smile. And then you've got these demon eyes in, above it. Tagline: 'New Labour. New Danger.' Bam. Labour bad. New Labour also bad. Scary eyes even worse. Bam again. What do you think?"

That Oasis-loving mastermind behind one of the most universally derided party political communiques in history was called Steve Hilton.

But his career didn't end with Johnny's catastrophic defeat in '97. He had already hitched his wagon to a jowly young Etonian he'd met while working on the first Major campaign. Also known today as "Cameron's Brain", Hilton's been the definitive Downing Street insider, aide-de-camp, theoriser and dreamweaver to Project Call Me Dave, and last week, he finally left Number 10.

The Big Society? He invented it. Huskies in the Arctic? His idea. Even Cameron standing for the Tory leadership in 2005 might not have happened had Hilton not pushed his old pal into it. He was asked to be godfather to Cameron's disabled son, and when he came to power, Cameron gave Hilton the run of Downing Street as a freewheeling "policy guru".

Hilton is famous for several things. Firstly, for dressing like this:

And barely that – he cultivated, quite deliberately, a sense of apartness from the party machine epitomised by the fact that he often goes around Downing Street barefoot. For President Obama he dressed up, mind; meeting the Commander-In-Chief in his socks. That sort of setting yourself apart will make you a lot of enemies in a place like Whitehall, and Hilton's barely concealed sense that the normal rules don't apply to him – that Daddy Dave will always have his back – has infuriated many, and led to a systematic campaign of leaks against him.

Secondly, he's an attack dog. Unlike Cameron – a genial, warm-handed bag of motherhood and apple pie if ever there was one – at heart there's little patrician about Hilton. He's permanently impatient, expecting his subordinates to have everything done yesterday. Shortly before the election he was arrested at Birmingham New Street after picking a fight with a ticket inspector. More recently, Hilton got so infuriated with one mandarin telling him that Cameron could be arrested if he broke EU law, that he paid out of his own pocket for a top lawyer to say whether it was true or not. Turns out it was.

Thirdly, he's a guru in the most guru sense – a fluent adland-speaker, who's always staring into the seven habits of blue-skies lateral-thinking while someone moves his cheeses. He recently asked civil servants to imagineer why we needed maternity benefits at all. What were the alternatives? Inevitably, this got leaked. Turns out civil servants don't much like unelected wonks inviting them to imagineer.

In the end, though, he fought the State and the State won. After one too many dullness-gassings by another Sir Humphrey with an agenda, he's shipped out to California, to teach governance at Stanford. As Hilton tries to conquer the continent Oasis never could, we'll have to wait and see what Cameron actually has by way of values underneath the exoskeleton Hilton gave him. Hilton was the one who was most aggressive about greening up (he says he voted Green in 2001). And it was Hilton who has driven the transparency agenda. And yes, he was the idea-father of the Big Society. Like most working class Tories, he's far more radical than the Etonian wing, driven by a potent anger at the State that stems in part from his Hungarian refugee roots.

Now, Dave faces life without a brain, ambling along in that happy, shiny way of his. If he is to avoid being buffeted along by the winds of fate, in some doomed triangulation of the competing voices of his ministers and coalition colleagues, he needs to find some new grey matter to stuff in his dome, and fast.

Previously: Quango - Brian May Wants to Free the Animal Slaves