The foreign secretary of Facebook
Nick Clegg, the former Liberal Democrat leader who led his party into a coalition government with the Tories in 2010, is a curious creature, says The Economist.
He is both very successful (“he has his own dictionary entry”) and not that successful at all (“read it”). He charms many; irritates others. He was once, in the runup to the election that made him deputy prime minister, the subject of a popular cult. Just a few short years later his political career ended with his party being all-but wiped out in the 2015 general election.
But like his former boss David Cameron, who was similarly humiliated in the Brexit vote a year later and is now foreign secretary, Clegg bounced back. He went “from political has-been to one of the most powerful executives at one of the world’s biggest tech firms”, says Tom McTague on Unherd, and is now “president of global affairs”, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s “most trusted consiglieri”.
He reportedly earns more than $15m a year, lives in an $8m house in Chiswick, spends most of his life on planes, and is greeted like a visiting dignitary wherever he goes. As Facebook’s “foreign secretary”, he is tasked with dealing with the political issues that arise from the social-media giant’s “extraordinary global wealth and power”, and with ensuring that Zuckerberg is not exposed to political scandal.
Clegg has his work cut out. A senior minister in Britain claims that 10% of all crime happens on a Meta platform, says McTague – that’s not 10% of online crime, but of all crime. And the problem is getting worse. Online fraud has exploded on Facebook Marketplace, and Meta’s refusal to cooperate with law enforcement has enabled child exploitation and abuse. Clegg’s supporters say he has moved the company away from its libertarian instincts towards a more “mature, sensible place”. His critics allege his job is simply to launder Zuckerberg’s reputation by selling his own.
Cameron and Clegg’s success represents the triumph of style over substance, says Adrian Wooldridge in The Japan Times. Both are what the Texans call “all hat and no cattle”, and yet are self-confident and adept at engineering their own revival. The global elite has learned nothing from the populist revolt, and “continues to pursue its old policies” as if nothing had happened.