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Minister’s “blue skies thinker” and remains one of his closest friends, said Cameron often opposes the measures his own ministers put forward.
He told students in California that it was “horrific” to find out that the coalition only spent about 30 percent of its time implementing its own reform programme, with the rest of its time going on EU regulations and “random things”.
Mr Hilton left No. 10 last May. At the time it was reported Mr Hilton, architect of Cameron’s “Big Society”, was quitting Downing Street following a series of personality clashes and tension over policy retreats.
He is currently on a sabbatical in California where his wife, Rachel Whetstone, is a senior executive at Google.
He made his remarks to students in an hour-long seminar at Stanford University called “How to Make Change Happen in Government”, The Sunday Times reported.
Mr Hilton, famed in Westminster for his dishevelled appearance and refusal to wear shoes, said: “Very often you’ll wake up in the morning and hear on the radio or in the news or see something in the newspapers about something the government is doing.
“And you think, well, just hang on a second — it’s not just that we didn’t know it was happening, but we don’t even agree with it.”
He told the students that the “bureaucracy masters the politicians”, before adding that he did not mean that in a hostile way, it was just a fact.
Mr Hilton said when the coalition first came to power in May 2010, he was amazed to find out that most government activity was administrative action such as changes to the health and safety rules and not linked to legislation.
He found that about 40 percent of daily government business related to implementing EU regulations, and 30 percent to “random things”.
The 43-year-old said many changes — both “quite serious” and “quite trivial” — were simply “nodded through”.
He said the mountain of paperwork which came with every day decisions was “impossible to wade through” and said Number 10. was often left out of the loop by “paper shuffling mandarins” in Whitehall.
He said just 30 percent of the government is actually delivering what it was supposed to be doing, which he said showed the “scale of what you are up against”.
He added: “When I found that out it was pretty horrific. It’s a brilliant system for paper-shuffling people to be in control.”
Officially Mr Hilton has not given up his job, but there is no set date for returning.
It is not yet known whether he will play any part in the Tories’ preparations for the 2015 election. — Daily Mail.
Online Reporter