There is little doubt that the peak of Sir Nick Clegg’s career was being appointed the country’s deputy Prime Minister and forming the first hung parliament since February 1974. Until, that is, he was named as president for global affairs of Facebook (now Meta), last month.
It was something of a surprise appointment when Clegg first joined the tech company as vice president for global affairs and communications in 2018. Following his most recent promotion, Clegg now holds a position equal to Mark Zuckerberg himself, rendering him one of the most influential people in the tech sector.
Meta founder Zuckerberg said that his company needed “a senior leader at the level of myself… who can lead and represent us for all of our policy issues globally.”
Nonetheless, it’s a meteoric rise through the ranks for the UK’s ex-deputy PM.
How did he get there?
After the 2015 general election, the Liberal Democrats saw its number of seats in parliament shrink dramatically from 57 to 8, prompting Clegg to resign from the party leadership.
His political career remained in difficulty following his defeat in the 2017 general election and shortly afterwards, he exited British politics for good. He joined Facebook as its vice-president of global affairs and communications, stepping into the shoes of Elliot Schrage and in the process, swapping Westminster for Silicon Valley.
At the time, Clegg said that he joined the company because he was “convinced that the culture is changing” and that “lawmakers need to have a serious conversation about whether data-intensive companies allow other companies to share and use data”.
The £2.7 million a year salary probably helped too.
Facebook scandals and PR disasters
Since joining the company Clegg has seen a number of scandals rock the social media giant, including the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which saw millions of Facebook users’ data being collected without their consent.
This was the scandal which Clegg said had “rocked Facebook to its very foundations” before telling the BBC that the company “hadn’t done enough in the past” when it came to data privacy.
In May 2019, Clegg leapt to the defence of his employer when American presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes called for the disintegration of the company. In doing so, he called Facebook “a great American success story”, saying that “I don’t think it’s a very American tradition to start penalising success.”
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Perhaps his biggest clean-up job for Facebook was the defence of the Facebook Files scandal last year, undoubtedly the company’s biggest PR disaster to date. A whistle-blower called Frances Haugen leaked hundreds of internal documents which ended up in The Wall Street Journal. The files proved that the company was fully aware of the negative impact of teenagers using both Facebook and the photo-based social media channel Instagram, which was acquired by the brand in 2012.
The documents also revealed Facebook activity which had contributed to violence in developing nations. Clegg hit back at the claims saying that the company does not “profit from polarisation, in fact, just the opposite.”
Clegg later made a public statement that reporting on the files “conferred egregiously false motives to Facebook’s leadership and employees.” He continued to defend the company, asserting that it was “just plain false” that Facebook ignored its own internal research.
Clegg was fiercely criticised for his role in denying the accusations, with the Guardian’s John Harris calling him the “fall guy for Facebook’s failures.”
After his handling of the scandal, Zuckerberg promoted Clegg to the president of global affairs. The new role gives the former deputy prime minister of the UK one of the most powerful positions in one of the most dominant and influential companies in the world.
What does Clegg bring to Facebook?
When first appointed, both Zuckerberg and Meta’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg hoped that Clegg’s experience in the UK’s combative political sphere would be useful as the tech industry and its use of data began to come under more scrutiny.
Former Liberal Democrat politician Richard Allan said his real appeal centred around the fact that he would come to Silicon Valley as an outsider.
“It was really important to have somebody who could say: ‘That thing you’re doing may seem like a good thing, but when people in Europe hear about it, they’re going to think it’s terrible and slam you for it.’ Nick brings them that outsider’s voice,” Allan said.
“He’s not a tech utopian: ‘We just build this great stuff and the world’s going to be lovely.’ Nick comes from a much more typical position for European politicians: they’re rather sceptical about technology.”
The space in which Clegg now finds himself is not one in which he can put his feet up and simply relax at home – in one of the wealthiest areas of San Francisco no less. But, according to Allan, this is exactly what he wanted from his post-political career.
“He had a little thinktank going and he wrote a book. But I think he was always thinking: ‘I’d like to get my teeth into something.’ He was looking for a job where you make big and important decisions that affect a lot of people.”
American journalist and writer Steven Levy, who wrote Facebook: The Inside Story, told The Guardian’s John Harris that Clegg is working an almost impossible job.
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“Clearly, the people who are critics of Facebook aren’t going to be turned around by him saying: ‘Most of what we do is good.’ That argument doesn’t get traction,” he said.
“But people who work at Facebook need somebody going in to defend the company, because Mark and Sheryl have indicated, at least at this moment, that they do not have a taste for publicly defending the company they built.”
Clegg’s no-nonsense approach was apparently just what the two Facebook executives were looking for; his opening words to them reportedly: “Your fundamental problem is that people think you’re too powerful and you don’t care.”
“He must know that the mission is not a desirable one – not one where he’s going to change people’s minds,” Levy added.
This aside, Zuckerberg has said Clegg’s new role will give him more authority to respond to regulatory issues in the new metaverse world. He will lead the company on all policy matters, in addition to “making the case publicly” for the Facebook brand.
While Clegg may have dropped off the UK political scene in a fairly unspectacular fashion, he has since rebuilt his image on the international stage. Now seen as a valued and vitally important member of the biggest tech company in the world, there can be little doubt that Nick Clegg will have a big hand in shaping our future after all.
