After a weekend in which Donald Trump’s prospects of securing the White House increased dramatically, Labour’s appointment of Fiona Hill as one of three advisers to oversee its strategic defence review appears particularly timely. It is not that the appointment of the 58-year-old would gain the new government any favour with the Republican – the former White House Russia adviser from County Durham ended up giving evidence in Trump’s first impeachment trial, calmly delivering evidence in a brogue immediately recognisable to Britons. “A deep state stiff with a nice accent,” was how Trump once described her, but unlike other advisers to the new British administration, Hill has spent time inside the Oval Office, although on one occasion the then president mistook her for a secretary, expecting her to type up notes after a call with Vladimir Putin. Despite such slights, Hill assesses Trump coolly, locating his performatively aggressive style in the cut-throat world of New York business, precisely the kind of level-headed analysis Labour will need if he regains the White House. The former president “often set out extreme possibilities like threatening to leave Nato” if Germany, France and others didn’t increase defence spending, Hill wrote in her memoir, but if he was warned about going too far he would immediately shoot back: “You are ruining my leverage.” But she also saw at first-hand Trump’s elementary egotism, his simple, instinctive politics and his failures to prepare – he frequently wouldn’t read pre-meeting notes, or even the bullet points – all observed during a two-year stint as a national security adviser between 2017 and 2019. Hill was also at a famous press conference in Helsinki, where after a one-to-one meeting with Putin, Trump said he believed the Russian president, rather than his own intelligence agencies, over whether the Kremlin tried to meddle in US politics, particularly in the run-up to the 2016 election. Recognising immediately how the comments would be interpreted, Hill said a few years later: “I literally did have in my mind the idea of faking some kind of medical emergency and throwing myself backwards with a loud blood-curdling scream into the media.”
In another moment, Hill’s appointment as one of three advisers leading Labour’s defence review might have been accompanied with more fanfare, though perhaps not a loud scream. Though named on Tuesday, Hill gave no statement and limited attention was drawn to her by Labour in a week marked by sparring with the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, after he absurdly described Britain with the party in government as “truly Islamist”. That Hill was asked to take on the role, working alongside George Robertson, a former Nato secretary general, and Richard Barrons, who was once deputy chief of the UK’s armed forces, is not surprising, though she has not worked for the UK government before. “Can you think of anybody better qualified?” a senior Labour source said. Notably Hill and the other members of the review team will report not just to John Healey, the defence secretary, but also to the prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. They are not expected to disappear into a bunker to produce a report in less than a year; it is intended they will have regular progress meetings, presenting opportunities for discussion on immediate events. A Russia expert, who ended up, to her surprise, as Trump’s senior Kremlin adviser on the US national security council, Hill once was so physically close to Putin on a panel session in 2011 that she realised he suffered from age-related long sight. “The super large font on his notecards was a clear indication,” she wrote in her memoir, adding that she was near enough to see he refused to wear contact lenses. That she was allowed to get so close to the Russian leader, she said, was because she was, in her own word, nondescript – not enough of a presence to take any shine away from the president. It is a characteristically frank assessment – friends say despite her surprise late career fame she remains self-effacing and modest. Hill, the daughter of a coalminer and a midwife, studied Russian at first at St Andrews in Scotland, then at Harvard in the US, a country she adopted as home. For three years, between 2006 and 2009, she was national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, working for presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama. Labour insiders well appreciate that Hill is not the route to boost relations with Trump. But she brings with her not just an understanding of Trump’s decision-making dynamics, but valuable knowledge of Washington’s vast national security apparatus, as well her expertise on Russia.
Her background, however, points to another aspect of Labour’s plans. Labour wants the defence industry to form part of Britain’s regeneration, although an embrace of the arms trade may not be popular with some of the party’s traditional supporters, even allowing for helping the war in Ukraine. Hill’s memoir is titled There Is Nothing for You Here – a reference to a comment made to her by her father, Alf, about the economic reality of 1980s County Durham, an area that suffered dramatically after the collapse of coalmining from the 1960s. The book discusses, repeatedly, the impact of economic collapse on the politics of the UK, Russia and the US. In Russia, it was the crises of the 1990s that helped bring an authoritarian leader like Putin to power; in the US she argues that Trump won the presidency essentially because he appeared to understand the economic dislocation affecting large parts of post-industrial America. Its arguments repeatedly cast back to Hill’s personal and family history, and the fact that she felt she had to leave the UK to escape its class system – she was told she could not study Russian at Oxford University because she had not been able to take the subject at her local school. But in agreeing to advise Labour, a year after becoming chancellor of Durham University, she is reconnecting to a country she appeared to have left entirely behind.