Who said Facebook is 'messianic and blatantly on the wrong side'? Nick Clegg, now paid up to £15m a year by... Facebook. And that's only the start of his shameless hypocrisy, writes GUY ADAMS
- Nick Clegg on Wednesday became the president of global affairs at Meta
- Mark Zuckerberg said this will give Sir Nick responsibility for 'all policy matters'
- Sir Nick, formerly deputy PM, is currently on a reported salary of £2.8 million
Six months after he was booted out of the Commons in 2017, losing what was once one of his party's safest seats to a 30-something Corbynist publican, Sir Nick Clegg shared details of his midlife crisis with a Sunday newspaper.
In addition to such cliches as buying a drum kit, learning to surf and threatening to get a tattoo (his wife Miriam vetoed the idea), the former Lib Dem leader appeared to be spending the lion's share of his waking hours moaning about Brexit.
His existence wasn't entirely aimless, though. When the interviewer asked, in late 2017, about the (then) 50-year-old Clegg's future career plans, she got what was dubbed an 'unexpected' response.
Mark Zuckerberg leaving The Merrion Hotel in Dublin with Nick Clegg after a meeting with politicians to discuss regulation of social media and harmful content
Britain's one-time deputy prime minister said he was planning to explore a new vocation: campaigning against the ugly excesses of Silicon Valley.
'In the past two years, he has become very interested in big tech and how we should regulate it,' read the article.
'He thinks that companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook are 'flagrantly, blatantly on the wrong side' on tax and should pay up.
'He speaks rapidly and passionately about tech, almost as passionately as he does about Brexit.
'He would like to play a role in regulating these fast-moving technologies.' Her conclusion?
'It looks as though Clegg is set to remain a campaigner, but from a different vantage point.'
That, of course, was then. Today, a little more than four years down the line, we all know how things played out.
Sir Nick was enthroned on Wednesday as the all-powerful president of global affairs at Meta, the $560 billion [£412 billion] company formerly known as Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the firm that also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and the virtual reality headset maker Oculus, said he would become a 'senior leader at the level of myself', with responsibility for 'all policy matters' at the social media behemoth. That makes him, as one headline put it, 'Master of the Metaverse'.
The new job will make him very rich indeed. Currently on a reported salary of £2.8 million, his move to the top of the tax-avoiding firm he joined just over three years ago places him on an identical corporate rung to Sheryl Sandberg, Meta's chief operating officer, who last year trousered $20 million (£14.7 million) in salary, bonus and share awards.
Not bad for a man who in office dubbed banker bonuses 'gratuitously offensive' and in a newspaper column around the time of the aforementioned interview said: 'I'm not especially bedazzled by Facebook.
Nick Clegg's luxurious home in America's 'most expensive postcode'. In 2018, the year he moved to Silicon Valley, Facebook's UK arm paid £28.5 million in tax on £97 million of profit, according to its annual report
'I actually find the messianic Californian new-worldy-touchy-feely culture a little grating. Nor am I sure that companies such as Facebook really pay all the tax they could.'
Money can do strange things to principles, though. On the tax front, the company, which Clegg said was 'flagrantly, blatantly on the wrong side', hasn't exactly ploughed a different furrow since he joined.
In 2018, the year he moved to Silicon Valley, Facebook's UK arm paid £28.5 million in tax on £97 million of profit, according to its annual report.
That's a rate of 29 per cent. In 2019 that fell to 28.6 per cent, and by 2020, the most recent year for which records are available, it paid just £36.8 million on £190 million of profits — a rate of 19 per cent.
Globally the picture is little better. The Fair Tax Foundation published research last year saying the firm paid $16.8 billion income tax in the previous decade, despite revenues of $328 billion.
It achieved this, the lobby group claimed, by legally funnelling profits — against which taxes are generally levied — into offshore tax havens.
The foundation placed Facebook second from the top on the 'worst tax practice' league table of six Silicon Valley giants, saying that only Amazon was worse at contributing to public coffers.
Google, Apple, Netflix and Microsoft were slightly better at paying a fair share than Facebook, it said, but added: 'None of the six is an exemplar of responsible tax conduct.'
Where does Clegg stand on this? In 2019, he met in California with lawmakers from Ireland, the haven where Facebook was funnelling much of its loot (and had the previous year paid just £75 million in tax against £10 billion in profit, a rate of 0.8 per cent).
Nick Clegg speaking at Facebook's annual AR/VR conference with CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg
Leaked minutes of the meeting later revealed that the firm had used it to lobby against efforts to increase its tax burden.
Facebook later insisted that members of its finance team, rather than Sir Nick, had raised tax during the meeting and said the former Lib Dem leader remained convinced of the need for tech firms to reform their tax arrangements.
But old colleagues weren't so sure. Contrasting the incident with Clegg's use of the terms 'flagrantly' and 'blatantly' just two years earlier, the former Cabinet minister David Jones noted: 'Clegg should explain why what was wrong in 2017 was OK just two short years later.'
The master of the Metaverse's hypocrisy isn't limited to taxation, either.
Since joining Facebook, he's travelled the world defending the firm's questionable practices to lawmakers, bending the ears of old chums from his days in politics.
For example, it emerged last summer that he'd been granted no fewer than 12 meetings with EU commissioners — the body's most powerful officials — during his reign.
Keeping on the right side of the European Commission, where Clegg once worked (and is fondly regarded for lobbying against Brexit), is essential if big tech firms wish to continue being allowed to wield enormous power with virtual impunity.
Wind the clock back a few years and the same Nick Clegg was very much in favour of stringent regulation of large media organisations, regardless of the effect on free speech.
Indeed, the Lib Dem leader vociferously supported attempts to end 300 years of Press freedom in the UK by introducing a state-backed newspaper regulator. His rationale?
'When concentrations of power or power as wielded unaccountably occurs, you need to try and find some remedies and safeguards against that.'
As recently as 2016, he was using a memoir — Politics: Between the Extremes — to wax lyrical about the dangers of 'self-selecting networks on Twitter and Facebook' that create 'millions of online echo chambers'.
He also said he was 'immensely grateful' that social media hadn't been around to record the 'misdemeanours' of his 'wild twenties' (an era when, he once boasted to a men's magazine, he slept with 'no more than 30' women).
Now he's running the corporation responsible for a hefty proportion of those echo chambers.
Little wonder that former colleagues — who lived through his notorious political U-turn on tuition fees, which condemned the Lib Dems to electoral annihilation — are now withering about Clegg's recent career choices.
'He will no doubt make a lot of money,' the party's former business secretary Vince Cable told a radio interviewer last year.
'But he will have to live with the issues around conscience working for a questionable company.'
Selling one's soul to big tech does of course have its benefits. Starting with the chance to live in considerable luxury.
Sir Nick and Lady Clegg are residents of Atherton, a Silicon Valley town rightly known as 'the most expensive postcode in America'.
Home is a £7 million two-storey faux Queen Anne house on an acre of land, which was described by estate agents as a 'jewel' with 'timeless and classic' features alongside 'luxurious amenities'.
Inside, there are five bedrooms, six bathrooms, a roomy kitchen with marble worktops and an island seating area plus a separate library and dining room, with space for 16 at its gargantuan table.
An airy study fitted with wooden shelves looks on to the garden, which boasts a vegetable patch created during lockdown by Miriam and a guesthouse with its own kitchen and lounge.
Like all good environmentalists, the Cleggs, who have three sons, enjoy the use of a swimming pool, outdoor hot tub and 'patio fireplace'.
Since moving to California, the couple have taken up fashionable outdoor pursuits such as kayaking and hiking, with Nick in particular appearing to buy heavily into the Silicon Valley lifestyle.
![Sir Nick was enthroned on Wednesday as the all-powerful president of global affairs at Meta, the $560 billion [£412 billion] company formerly known as Facebook (stock photo used)](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/02/18/21/54378931-10528983-image-a-8_1645218117415.jpg)
Sir Nick was enthroned on Wednesday as the all-powerful president of global affairs at Meta, the $560 billion [£412 billion] company formerly known as Facebook (stock photo used)
Before Covid, he was often seen cycling the three miles from his McMansion to Facebook's Menlo Park HQ wearing workout clothes and flip-flops, and in 2019 talked one magazine through the work culture of his adoptive home.
'There's lots of sleeveless Patagonia puffa things and shoes like I've got on now with no socks.
'I never wear a suit and there's micro-kitchens everywhere with a mix of healthy foods.
'The work rhythm is very different: I get up at six, then take the kids to school and then it's pretty full-on.
You don't have any of the Westminster lunching culture here. Lunch is basically broccoli with some suspect sauce while you're in a meeting.'
Miriam, for her part, appears a touch less enthusiastic, once telling an interviewer Silicon Valley was 'a bit like living in the Vatican', adding: 'It's slightly insular, massively wealthy. It's not so diversified and is mostly run by men.'
During the Black Lives Matter protests, the Spanish-born lawyer wrote of her discomfort at the ethnic make-up of Atherton, saying: 'You can go for days without seeing a single black face on the street…The inequality between Mexicans and white Americans is visible and pervasive everywhere.
'And I'll spare you my views on the opportunities for women or lack thereof in this land of strong alpha males.'
On Instagram, she has also light-heartedly complained about the local weather, pleaded for America to start importing 'proper coffee' and expressed outrage at a local supermarket selling Spanish omelette mixture in a jar.
'There should be an international convention forbidding treating tortillas like this.'
Living on the West Coast of the U.S. but working in very different time zones can also be gruelling.
She is employed by the Washington law firm Cohen & Gresser but, according to its website, is licensed only as a solicitor in England, Wales and Spain, while a bar licence in the District of Columbia remains 'pending'.
'Having been up since 5am in conference calls, my life does not feel 'star quality' at all,' she once remarked.
Quite what this proud feminist makes of Facebook's facilitation of misogyny or Instagram's effect on the mental health of young women is difficult to establish.
But it's hard not to wonder whether she is entirely comfortable with her husband being the 'face' of the firm.
For Clegg has made something of a speciality, recently, of being wheeled out to defend Facebook at times of scandal, leveraging the fact that a public school-educated Brit (his banker dad sent him to Westminster, where documentary maker Louis Theroux was his 'fag') plays better on America's airwaves than a local.
Back in October, to cite one example, it was Clegg rather than Zuckerberg who was wheeled out on U.S. networks to defend the firm after a former employee turned whistleblower named Frances Haugen testified to the Senate that Facebook had ignored its own research into the harms caused by some of its products, instead seeking 'astronomical profits'.
'With a third of the world's population on our platforms, of course you're going to see the good, the bad and the ugly of human nature,' was how Clegg smoothly explained it away in the TV studios. 'Our job is to mitigate and reduce the bad and amplify the good.'
Meanwhile, after the 2021 storming of the Capitol, he told CNN it was 'ludicrous' to blame Facebook for the insurrection, saying: 'The responsibility for the violence of January 6 lies squarely with the people who inflicted the violence and those who encouraged them, including President Trump.'
The studio anchor's take? 'A part of me feels like I'm interviewing the head of a tobacco company right now.'
Just before Christmas, Sir Nick dialled into the comically scripted PR conference where Zuckerberg (pictured in 2018) announced his firm's rebranding as Meta
Aside from spin doctoring, Clegg is also responsible for creating an 'oversight board' that will allegedly keep Facebook in check, stuffing it with old chums such as Alan Rusbridger, the former Guardian editor, and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former Danish premier and daughter-in-law of top Eurocrats Lord and Lady Kinnock. But old colleagues in the British Parliament are less than convinced.
'Nick Clegg's main innovation at Facebook — the so-called 'Oversight Board' — has been a total failure, unable to access the company's own research,' says Damian Collins, who chairs the committee drafting the Government's Online Safety Bill, to which Clegg has refused to give evidence.
'Between that and his refusal to provide testimony to the Parliament he was once a member of, I have zero confidence that this promotion will lead to any meaningful, positive changes at Meta.'
Who cares what former colleagues in Westminster think, however, when you've successfully gained the trust and affection of one of the world's most powerful men.
At times, his wooing of Zuckerberg has seemed a trifle obsequious. 'The guy is much maligned but I find him unbelievably thoughtful,' Clegg told an interviewer in 2019.
'He hasn't got to where he is at 35 by being a dunce. He's seriously smart, he's got an ability to look several moves ahead.'
Meanwhile, just before Christmas, Sir Nick dialled into the comically scripted PR conference where Zuckerberg announced his firm's rebranding as Meta.
'Hey Mark! Hope I'm not interrupting,' he declared. 'I just love the presentation so far. It's such visionary stuff!'
Yet the charm offensive has paid off in spades: thanks to Zuckerberg's patronage, and his own ability to lobby for some of the very things he once opposed, Clegg is now responsible for online platforms that 3.59 billion people — or around 45 per cent of the world's population — use every month.
Or to put things another way, he's gained wealth and power beyond any elected politician's dreams.
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2022-02-18 22:02:43Z
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