Clegg knows why we must tame Big Tech

FEW British politicians have undergone so many transformations as those experienced by the man who is now officially Sir Nicholas Clegg. From being ‘Nick’ the handsome, radical, popular leader of a Left-wing party, who everyone wanted to agree with, he became the main prop of a Tory government excoriated by many of his own supporters for breaking a specific pledge to oppose any increase in student tuition fees.

But these days Sir Nicholas has put all that behind him. The mighty multinational tech giant Facebook, now known as Meta, has lifted him far above the comparative trivia of British parliamentary politics – by choosing him as a senior executive. Seen from his spacious California home, the Liberal Democrats and his one-time Sheffield constituency (now in the hands of

Labour) must seem very far away.

So must his many embarrassing pronouncements on the tech giants, which he once said he yearned to regulate, especially on the subject of tax. He even said he was ‘not especially bedazzled by Facebook. I actually find the messianic Californian new-worldy touchy-feely culture a little grating’.

Obviously not quite grating enough to stop him accepting Meta’s lavish rewards. And yet he must surely retain some memories of who he used to be and what he used to say.

He was right to be suspicious of Facebook’s reluctance to pay a penny more tax than it legally had to. He was right to be worried by the arrogant culture of the tech giants, which seek by algorithms and sheer size to swamp competitors on the World Wide Web.

Isn’t there still a part of him which urges him to remember his origins, and allows him to see that the Government’s plans to regulate the over-mighty monsters of Silicon Valley are reasonable, necessary, liberal and democratic?