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How the Tories were Googled; As Tory communications chief, Andy Coulson feels the heat, David Cameron will rely even more on his power couple, strategy supremo Steve Hilton and internet queen Rachel Whetstone.

Publication: The Evening Standard (London, England)
Publication Date: 09-JUL-09 		Format: Online
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Full Article Title: How the Tories were Googled; As Tory communications chief, Andy Coulson feels the heat, David Cameron will rely even more on his power couple, strategy supremo Steve Hilton and internet queen Rachel Whetstone.(News)

Article Excerpt
Byline: Anne McElvoy

HE HAS a permanent seat at the right hand of the likely next Prime Minister: she has had a swift rise through the ranks of Google. Steve Hilton and Rachel Whetstone are running the Tory show.

Hilton is so valuable to his old friend David Cameron that he was allowed to keep his job as strategist, big-picture man and sounding board for Cameronian policy making when the couple decided to head to California for several months so that Whetstone could establish herself in the net giant's head office.

The Tory power couple have long enjoyed a special cachet. "You've just got to be on first-name terms with them," says one backbencher. "I hear people talking about 'Steve and Rachel' who barely know them at all. If you're in with them, you're in the inner circle with Dave."

But that kind of influence also brings complications and potential tensions. Hilton has just returned for good from his US stay with his wife and small son Ben. Whetstone will do her job from London from the autumn. He arrived straight back to a row about Tory plans to contract out the storage of medical and other records to companies like Google and Microsoft. Both enterprises were namechecked by Mr Cameron in a recent speech at the spring conference, which Hilton helped prepare.

Accusations followed that Mr Cameron had allowed his adviser's personal link to Google to influence the policy....

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