It may not have been entirely unexpected that Sir Nick Clegg, the tech millionaire, found himself alone at a party in Madrid last weekend.
He has never been everybody’s favourite, after all. With his glasses perched on his face and a drink in his hand, Clegg appeared to be deep in thought.
Under the warm autumn sun, several hundred guests gathered in a botanical garden close to the city centre to celebrate the launch of his Spanish-born wife Miriam Gonzalez Durantez’s new political party.
As Lady Clegg addressed her supporters, perhaps her husband was reminded of his own brief period as Britain’s political sensation — the moment when he appeared to embody the future. The country had been swept up, if only temporarily, in “Cleggmania”, a term that went on to enter the Collins English Dictionary.
The former Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister is now approaching 60, with little of the youthful appeal or popularity that once defined him. Many voters still remember what they regarded as his betrayal over university tuition fees, after he abandoned his party’s pledge to oppose and abolish them.
Nor have the failed policies and political consequences of his time in the Conservative-led coalition, formed after the 2010 general election, disappeared from public memory.
Within months, Clegg had gone from being hailed as a possible political saviour to seeing effigies of himself burned in the streets. Yet one attendee at the Madrid gathering said yesterday that he now appeared “content, happy with his lot”.
His financial success is certainly hard to dispute. After his political career collapsed in humiliating fashion a decade ago — Cleggmania exposed as a fleeting illusion and the Liberal Democrats losing 49 seats at the 2015 election — he went on to build a lucrative second act.
Power couple: Sir Nick with his Spanish-born wife Miriam Gonzalez Durantez at a book launch event in London back in 2015
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pictured with Clegg in 2019. The former deputy prime minister joined Meta in 2018
His fortunes could soon rise further. Clegg is reportedly in line to make as much as £30 million from the forthcoming Wall Street listing of Nscale, the UK artificial intelligence company.
That would represent a substantial return for someone who joined the company’s board just seven months ago.
The potential payout would add to the estimated £100 million he earned during his controversial Silicon Valley career alongside Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, formerly Facebook and the parent company of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Clegg was once openly sceptical of Facebook. “I actually find the messianic California new-world-touchy-feely culture a little grating,” he said.
“Nor am I sure that companies such as Facebook really pay all the tax they could.” His position changed after Meta offered him a substantial package of salary, bonuses and shares, eventually giving him the title “Master of the Metaverse”.
Critics accused him of sacrificing his principles for Big Tech after he moved his family — he and Miriam have three sons — from their home in Putney, south-west London. They relocated to a £7 million faux Queen Anne property in Atherton, the Silicon Valley community described as having “the most expensive postcode in America”.
And despite his earlier disdain for California’s touchy-feely corporate culture, Clegg soon became immersed in it himself.
He revealed that he was expected to take part in Zuckerberg’s daily mixed martial arts sessions — an unusual bonding exercise — and was once caught in a manoeuvre known as a “Domination Mount”. Clegg said his deputy “straddled me and we grappled awkwardly in a way that was, let’s just say, a little too close for comfort”.
Until last year, Clegg served as Meta’s president of global affairs, travelling internationally as Zuckerberg’s political defender. His role included responding to criticism that the company knew its algorithms were amplifying hate and contributing to the deterioration of teenagers’ mental health.
To his detractors, however, he was little more than a highly paid figurehead, recruited to give the technology giant a reassuring liberal image while it pursued enormous profits. Clegg was repeatedly called upon to answer questions about whether Meta had done enough to police content across its platforms.
The father of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old from Harrow, north-west London, who died by suicide in 2017 after viewing images of self-harm on Instagram, said he had ‘no doubt’ that it ‘helped kill’ his daughter.
Similar graphic images still present on the platform two years after her death prompted Clegg to promise that Meta would do ‘whatever it takes’ to be safe for young people.
Such cases doubtless caused the ex-politician deep unease, but he was well rewarded for his work. His stake in the company is worth £22.8million. Regulatory filings in the US also show he has sold Meta shares worth £29million since May 2022 and retains options with a potential value of £42.4million.
Nick and Miriam Clegg pictured with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2018
During his years in government, he had decried moneyed elites and called banker bonuses ‘gratuitously offensive’. In a 2013 interview he tried, none too subtly, to project an image as a regular guy, claiming that his favourite television programme was Channel 4’s Come Dine With Me and that he ferried his kids around in a second-hand ‘slightly battered’ Ford Galaxy people carrier. How times – and principles – change.
Having sold their Californian home for £10.3million when he left Meta, the Cleggs are back in London, living in another Queen Anne-style home, which they bought from Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth for £8.2million.
Now Clegg is looking for a new role. He could simply count his money, but he has told former colleagues he still feels ‘energetic’.
One told the Daily Mail that the Cleggs were casting themselves as ‘a kind of European power couple’, adding: ‘I know it’s a bit odd, and bear in mind this is a loose concept, not a carefully judged strategy, but think the Clintons, only on a much, much less grand scale.’ Poundshop Clintons?
After Bill Clinton left office in 2001, his wife Hillary twice ran for President. Such comparisons might seem wildly fanciful but there is no denying that 58-year-old Lady Clegg, a high-powered lawyer, harbours serious political ambitions. Her new liberal centrist party, Democracia 21, will contest Spain’s general election on November 29.
Vowing to clean up politics and give voters an alternative to the dominant socialist and conservative parties, she says Democracia 21 will offer a modern, transparent kind of politics that ‘doesn’t feed on fear, insults or nostalgia’.
Not too dissimilar, then, to the stuff her husband was peddling when he was starting out. Her manifesto accuses the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ party and the Right-wing People’s Party of squandering decades of government.
No doubt Nick is helping behind the scenes, offering her the benefit of his wisdom. Whether she chooses to accept it is another matter.
During the 2010 general election campaign, Westminster-educated Clegg shone during Britain’s first-ever televised debate among party leaders. One opinion poll suggested rather hastily that he was almost as popular as Sir Winston Churchill. And ‘I agree with Nick’ – a sentence Gordon Brown used repeatedly during the debate – became a new catchphrase for the nation.
Judging by an appearance she made on Spanish television last week, it seems Lady Clegg, for one, doesn’t always agree with her husband – at least not on the thorny subject of Gibraltar’s sovereignty.
She insisted that the Rock rightly belongs to her country. Asked if her husband shared her view, Lady Clegg replied: ‘That again? Well, let’s try not to talk about Gibraltar. He’ll defend his position and I’ll defend mine.’
Clegg is estimated to have made £100million during his controversial Silicon Valley sojourn
Suffice to say Clegg is unlikely to become his wife’s foreign secretary should she sweep to power next month. After her husband lost his job as deputy prime minister in 2015, Lady Clegg, for whom being a political spouse never came easy, said: ‘Now he can do the flower arrangements.’
It is not clear how they will split their time between Chiswick and Spain, but for years they have summered in Miriam’s family home in Olmedo, 90 miles north of Madrid.
Public service, if not a return to frontline politics, looms for Clegg. For now, he will try to help Britain navigate future AI challenges. He has already dismissed recently expressed fears over AI’s ‘godlike power to exterminate humanity’, calling such discourse a sign that tech bosses were ‘breathing their own fumes’.
He said such industry titans should focus on addressing known specific threats such as cybersecurity and bioweapons rather than the ‘slightly hand-wavy view that this technology is unavoidably going to develop some godlike power which is going to turn on us and exterminate humanity’.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I think it is perhaps accidentally self-serving, because it sort of implies that we can only be made safe by having everything controlled, in effect, by an oligopoly of a small number of companies, and I think it slightly paralyses the political debate.’
In March, Clegg joined the board of one such company.
Nscale is building the country’s biggest AI data centre in Loughton, Essex, with an energy consumption projected to be equivalent to 315,000 homes. It is a key part of the Government’s ambition to make the UK a world leader in artificial intelligence.
The company’s prospectus says: ‘Clegg’s extensive experience in global public policy, international government affairs and technology industry leadership, as well as his deep relationships with governments and regulatory bodies worldwide, make him qualified to serve on our board of directors.’
Set up just two years ago, the UK-based start-up spun out of a cryptocurrency mining business and has rapidly raised billions amid surging demand for facilities to run AI.
Clegg owns more than 917,000 shares in the company, which is reportedly seeking a valuation of up to £26.3billion in the US flotation. Based on Clegg’s stake of 0.12 per cent, that could yield about £31million. And it is likely that there will be more bumper paydays to come.
As ever with big tech, though, the company has not escaped controversy. Last week, it removed references to its relationship with the Chinese technology giant ByteDance – which has long faced scrutiny from US politicians – from official filings ahead of the public listing.
A deal between Nscale and ByteDance had long been rumoured, but not acknowledged by the company, despite including details of such a deal in confidential documents it disclosed to US regulators earlier this year.
ByteDance runs TikTok but was forced to sell the site’s American arm to US investors in January due to fears the Chinese firm could use the app to surveil its 200million American users.
Last month Clegg was invited to talk about his book, How To Save The Internet: The Threat To Global Connection In The Age Of AI And Political Conflict, at the Chiswick Book Festival.
Here was a soft landing close to home, an opportunity to hold forth at St Michael & All Angels Church before an audience of mainly elderly and middle-aged locals without fear of contradiction. Or so he thought.
For as it happened, within the audience were a number of guests with a close knowledge of Facebook’s questionable practices.
One was a lawyer working on the case of Professor Meareg Amare Abrha, an Ethiopian academic who was shot dead outside his home after he was slandered on Facebook. Posts also revealed identifying information about him. A legal claim from his family alleges the company’s algorithm helped fuel the viral spread of hate and violence during Ethiopia’s civil war.
‘I don’t know the individual case,’ said Clegg after he was asked by the lawyer to apologise. ‘There are four billion people who use Facebook. It’s not reasonable to ask me to comment on it.’
Yet as The Chiswick Calendar, a news and listings website that covered the event, observed: ‘Surprising he did not recognise the case though, as it is very well known and was in the news while he was in post.’
Next came Deborah Annetts, chief executive of the Independent Society of Musicians who has co-authored a report on ‘the industrial-scale theft of the UK’s cultural riches’ by AI companies.
She asked Clegg whether he believed Meta should have to comply with UK copyright law. ‘Of course the company should abide by the law of the land,’ he replied, but rather patronisingly claimed the process was ‘more complicated’ than she suggested.
He added: ‘They don’t take a book and reproduce it as it is. They “tokenise” the data.’ Had she been given chance to respond, Ms Annetts would have told him that writers have indeed found their entire books reproduced.
On a more general point from someone else about the morality of working for Meta, Clegg said: ‘I wouldn’t have stayed seven days, much less seven years if I thought they were awful, amoral people.’
Maybe so. But his bruising experience at, of all things, a literary festival was a salutary reminder that the ‘Master of the Metaverse’ will need to tread carefully in his brave new world.
