In October, Facebook named the former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg to head its global policy and communications office. In the days since the New York Times detailed Facebook’s efforts to use antisemitic language to smear political opponents, one question has been whether Clegg will actually show for work in January, when his job starts. Why would someone with such a sterling résumé want to clean such a disgusting mess?
Yet Facebook executives may have chosen the perfect man for the task. That is, if their aim is to shutter their deeply troubled corporation. Clegg, after all, is the man who almost single-handedly destroyed the Liberal Democrat party, after a generation of committed liberal activists rebuilt the institution back into a major force in UK politics. Whence the moniker the British press coined long ago – Calamity Clegg.
To be sure, salvaging Facebook at this point is probably beyond the talents even of General Electric’s celebrated CEO Jack Welch in his prime. Facebook’s inability to keep socially and politically destructive disinformation off its platform poses an existential threat to the corporation. The problem is Facebook’s business model, and that’s something no public relations chief can fix.
And Clegg, despite being Facebook’s first addition in a decade to its core management team, is anything but a PR whiz.
When Clegg took over the Liberal Democrats in 2007, he inherited a party that was powerful and growing. After the second world war, the party shrank to a mere shadow of its former self, at one point holding only six seats in the House of Commons. But four decades of hard work by thousands of dedicated activists – including myself – had rebuilt the party into a major power in UK politics, with 23% of the vote and 57 seats in the 2010 general election.
But almost immediately after that vote, it all began to go wrong. Clegg’s first error was to pass up a coalition with Labour and instead strike a deal with the Conservative party of David Cameron and George Osborne. True, the Labour party of 2010, after 13 years in office, were a tired lot. But at least its members sought to serve the people, not the powerful.
Clegg then ignored decades of evidence from European parliamentary coalitions on how the junior partner must function to survive and prosper. The basic rule? Demand full and direct control over specific key ministries, then use those ministries to deliver policies that actually serve the public. Clegg, instead, spread his troops across the whole government. This made the Liberal Democrats responsible for everything the Tories did – including all their draconian budget cuts – while leaving his team with no real power anywhere.
Clegg’s third error was to betray his most important campaign pledge, which was not to increase tuition fees for universities. Not only was this good policy, it was smart politics, as many of the Liberal Democrats’ key seats were in university towns. Once in office, Clegg signed off on a Tory plan to triple the cost of a university education in Britain.
Clegg’s incompetence did not go unnoticed. In the 2015 general election, the party was defenestrated, winning only 8% of the vote and keeping only 8 seats. Clegg himself was swept away in 2017.
Now Clegg is jumping from a British frying pan into an American fire. As public affairs chief of Facebook, he faces an unfixable problem. When Russian actors used Facebook to spread division and disinformation in the run-up to the 2016 US election, they did not hack into the platform. They simply used Facebook’s advertising tools the way they were designed to be used. It’s Facebook’s business model that is broken. Only the government can fix that.
But Facebook’s executive team need not fret. Clegg may never get to really focus on the company’s problems at all.
Looming on the horizon is the prospect of a second referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union. This will create a huge personal conflict for Clegg. The UK government will want to ensure that any next vote is not subject to foreign interference, as was true of the first Brexit vote. To that end they will demand that Facebook introduce effective mechanisms to keep its platform clean.
Clegg, as Facebook’s public affairs chief, will have to defend its current business model. Clegg will probably spend his days in an almighty row with his former colleagues in parliament.
Calamity Clegg may be tempted to shrug off the dangers; after all, being demonized by the British press must now seem to him like second nature. But he should understand this time it will be different. Rather than walking the corridors of Westminster as deputy prime minister, he will be doing so as a relatively minor, at-will ambassador from the realm of the mad King Zuckerberg.
The sad irony of all this is that the Liberal Democrats are the UK party that has long stood strongest for strict control of monopoly. Had Clegg held true to his party’s principles in 2010, the UK – and America – might not be facing any Facebook crisis today.