Sir Nick Clegg

"There is nothing worse than having leaders who won't lead."

Nick Clegg has tested that conviction in two of the least forgiving arenas in public life. As Deputy Prime Minister, he spent five years bound to a coalition partner who could veto anything he attempted. At Facebook, he ended up the person who decided to suspend a sitting American president from the platform. He has been shouted at, by his own account, from every side, and it has never much troubled him. "That's the nature of difficult decisions," he says. "It's why politicians are given authority in the first place: not to take the easy ones."

What's striking, talking to him, is that like so many wonderful careers, none of it followed a set plan. What did carry him through was a refusal to do anything by half: he applied for a scholarship on a whim and won it, sat the same fiercely competitive European civil-service exams that tens of thousands of others were chasing too, and gave full attention to every unglamorous job that came his way long before any of them looked like the start of a career. That total commitment to “throw himself in” is what carried him from school to the front bench, and from the front bench into the engine room of Big Tech. Beneath it, one thing never moved: a loyalty to Europe that has never shaken. To understand it, you have to go back two generations.

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A Triumphant Act of Peace

Clegg's family history is a map of the twentieth century's hardest years. His mother is Dutch, born in Indonesia, and spent her earliest childhood in a brutal Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java. His paternal grandmother was Russian, her family "torn asunder" by the Revolution and two world wars and scattered across Europe, part of a diaspora that came to rest in Paris and London.

He is quick, though, to head off any picture of a sombre upbringing. His own childhood was "incredibly happy": two brothers, a sister, loving parents, and no one sitting around brooding on what the past had done to them. What the inheritance handed down instead was a conviction, half-articulated at first, that “history matters and politics matters, that ordinary lives can be remade or wrecked by the decisions of governments”. And with it came a deep respect for Britain as a country of "solidity, stability, common sense and fairness," one that, unlike so many of its neighbours, "never succumbed to the madnesses you saw elsewhere."

It also left him with a feeling about Europe he cheerfully admits is more instinct than argument. "At some very primitive level," he says, "I still see European integration as a triumphant act of peace over war and conflict." He is not of the war generation and knows it; the sentiment, he says, was simply imbued in him. It is worth holding on to, because it turns out to explain almost everything about where he has ended up.

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Dutch, in a German Accent

That European texture runs right through him, languages included. He speaks English, Spanish (his wife, Miriam, is Spanish) and Dutch, which he spoke as a toddler before he had any English. He loves French, and German, though the German has rusted; getting it back sits near the top of his bucket list.

When his schoolboy German deserted him, he discovered that the language sits close enough to Dutch that he could simply speak Dutch in a German accent and, more often than not, get away with it. What being raised between tongues really gave him, he says, was not vocabulary but nerve: "It removes any fear of trying, any embarrassment about getting it wrong." He offers a small proof from government: remembering when he opened meetings with Angela Merkel in a few sentences of German. He could hardly debate European fiscal policy in the language, he laughs, but that was never the point. "You don't need many words of someone else's language to make them feel you're making the effort," a courtesy, he adds, that Brits and Americans are notoriously reluctant to extend.

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The Sharpest Tongue in the Room

He describes his younger self, with some relish, as "an annoying little twerp": a chattery, hyperactive boy who was good at sport and drama, hopeless at music, and constitutionally unable to stop talking. When he became unbearable indoors, his mother would post him out into the garden, rain or shine, to kick a ball for an hour; he would come back, he says, "like a lamb."

The jolt that shaped him came at thirteen, when he moved from a conventional, rugby-playing prep school in the home counties (all old-fashioned hierarchy, where the currency was whether you made the first team) to Westminster School, in the middle of London. It was the late 1970s, the school gloriously chaotic, presided over with "benign neglect," full of illicit substances and preposterously clever teenagers from the smart end of Hampstead. Overnight the whole basis of status changed. "I went from a place where what counted was your physical prowess," he says, "to one where all that counted was the sharpness of your tongue and the quickness of your wit." It was, he reflects, a mind-expanding place, not one built to turn out the future CEO of IBM necessarily, but one that flung its alumni into the arts, the sciences and the media. He still keeps a handful of lifelong friends from it.

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Stop Shouting at the Television

After school he read anthropology at Cambridge, before spending a year in the "Arctic winter" of the University of Minnesota, buried in political philosophy and emerging, as students do, "in a passionately left-wing phase." That led him to the American magazine The Nation, where he talked his way into fact-checking for Christopher Hitchens, a writer whose erudition he read "in awe," and whose near-photographic memory made it, he says, "the easiest job I've ever had in my life."

A Financial Times scholarship took him next to Budapest in the heady months after the Berlin Wall came down, to write about the great privatisation programmes sweeping Central and Eastern Europe. He cannot resist the historical irony that surfaces there: the Viktor Orbán of those days led Fidesz as "a fizzingly liberal, youthful party" that barred anyone over forty from membership. This spring, sixteen years into power and by then Donald Trump's foremost nationalist ally in Europe, Orbán was voted out in a landslide. "It's extraordinary," Clegg says, "how people change their politics."

Even his entrance into public life came more or less by raffle. He sat the European civil-service exams alongside tens of thousands of others ("in serried rows of desks in Wembley Arena"), got through, and landed in the private office of Leon Brittan, then a European commissioner. He played walk-on parts in enormous dramas: the negotiations over China's accession to the World Trade Organisation, weeks in Moscow haggling over the overflight rights of European airlines crossing Siberia because the Russians kept ratcheting up the charge. "Thrilling stuff, for a young man." And he came to revere Brittan, "the most phenomenal intellect," as a mentor.

In fact, it was Brittan who lit the political fuse. The commissioner was being savaged by the right-wing press for his pro-European views (Clegg still remembers a cartoon he thought bordered on the anti-Semitic) and Clegg was ranting at the television about it. Brittan turned to him, uncharacteristically sharp, and said: "For heaven's sake, Nick, if you're so interested in politics and you want to fix it, stop shouting at the television and go into politics." He was stunned into silence. "It had genuinely never occurred to me. I didn't come from a political family. Politicians were a different species: this other breed you saw on the telly." When he later confessed he meant to stand for the Liberal Democrats, Brittan guffawed: they were, he said, "like a non-governmental organisation," and the notion that they might ever govern was absurd. He was, Clegg notes fondly, entirely gracious when it turned out otherwise.

That one exasperated sentence set off a chain reaction: the European Parliament in 1999, then Westminster, then the office of Deputy Prime Minister. Would he have jumped without it, or without Paddy Ashdown, the other great mentor of those years? He refuses to flatter himself. "Hand on heart, I don't know." Which is why, he says, he now gives his time to any young person who asks for it: the alternative is an ever-narrowing pool of people willing to go into politics at all, "which is bad for the country."

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Wood for the Trees

Ask what government taught him about power and he reaches at once for the gap between noise and consequence. His was an unusually exposed perch: a small party that had never governed, hauled into coalition; a right that resented his very presence and a left that thought he had sold his soul; a rule that nothing could happen unless he and David Cameron both agreed; a young family at home, his third boy barely a year old. The daily texture, he remembers, was "a frenzy of incoming," reacting hour by hour to events he didn't control and a press that wished him ill.

That, he came to understand, is precisely the trap. "It's the big judgements that shape the outcomes, and any fair verdict on whether you did a decent job." Forming the coalition at all; the macroeconomic decision to hold the fiscal line so the monetary authorities could "really let rip"; the reforms to pensions, apprenticeships, energy and universities. "It's a wood-for-the-trees thing. You have to ring-fence your time and your brain space for the big calls," and recognise, too, that the biggest ones often arrive without announcing themselves, indistinguishable at first from the everyday flotsam and jetsam that is most of politics. He remains, by his own reckoning, "massively proud" of most of them. A few, he allows, "haven't aged as well as others." The big calls, though? "I'd take them again."

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Four Billion People

The leap from Westminster to Facebook astonished some people; it did not astonish him. He is untroubled by the moralising it drew ("people would pompously condemn me for it; I can live with that") because the arithmetic struck him as unanswerable. "Four billion human beings use these things. You can like that or loathe it, but to pass up the chance to shape any of it?" He has always had the same reflex, he says: "You only live once. You regret what you don't do far more than what you try."

The seeds had been planted years earlier, in an unlikely nursery: Theresa May's Home Office. As Home Secretary she was being urged, as they all are, by the department's "securocrats" to push through ever more sweeping surveillance powers. One senior official, Clegg recalls with genuine disbelief, told him the British state simply needed to find a way to make encryption illegal. He blocked the bill for five years; it finally reached the statute book, christened the "Snoopers' Charter," the moment he was "elbowed aside" in 2016. But the episode had shown him something: how thoughtful the big technology firms already were about the trade-offs between privacy and security, how they were making what were, in effect, ethical judgements, and how comprehensively they and government were talking past one another. He came away convinced that "the backlash against technology can be almost as damaging as the harms it's meant to cure."

After losing his seat and the leadership, he set up a small think tank, Open Reason, in Somerset House, and began writing and convening on exactly that fault line. Word travelled. In the summer of 2018 Sheryl Sandberg rang him out of the blue, while he was on holiday, and asked whether he'd come and work for Facebook in California. "No, of course I don't want to work for Facebook in California," was his first answer. But the family kept talking (one of their sons had been ill with cancer, they were worn down by Brexit, his political career had come to a "juddering halt") and a wholesale change began to look less like a risk than a release. What clinched it was Mark Zuckerberg himself: how frankly he acknowledged the company's self-inflicted wounds over Cambridge Analytica and election interference, and how much latitude he was ready to surrender. Zuckerberg kept his word, Clegg says, for five of his seven years there: where he was given near "free rein" to rebuild the company's relations with regulators, prise open its tools to scrutiny, and help stand up an independent Oversight Board.

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No, There Isn't a Fix

Silicon Valley, as it turned out, was a job his old life had trained him for almost exactly. "By the time I got there I was completely used to taking big decisions where nobody's going to be happy. It didn't faze me. That's what the authority is for."

He had landed among engineers, and engineers, he learned, believe there is always a fix: a tweak, a system, a dataset that dissolves the problem. His job, in part, was to disabuse them of it. "No," he would say, "there isn't a fix." A social network will forever be shouted at by one camp for taking down too little and by another for taking down too much and trampling free speech; it is only the newest form of a very old argument about where safety ends and expression begins. What the company had lost (a firm invented in a dorm room and then slammed, at planetary scale, into political and cultural forces it had never reckoned with) was simply the nerve to decide.

The most famous of those decisions was his own: as the principal decision-maker, he suspended Donald Trump from the platform for two years. What he brought was less a doctrine than a temperament. "Leadership means being clear about your North Star, so that in time your teams start to intuit how you'd decide: that's how you get everyone pulling the same way. And then, simply, you have to have the willingness to decide." He sees its absence everywhere now, not least in Downing Street. "If you're lucky enough to be a decision-maker, for heaven's sake, make decisions. Some won't work. But paralysis and drift are worse, because then everyone beneath you starts drifting too."

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Divided by a Shared Language

California he loved, and says so plainly. A wonderful job, a fine house, three sons, the lockdown years spent amid some of the most spectacular wilderness on earth: camping up the northern Californian coast into Oregon, one Christmas on a ranch in Montana. "If you love nature, as I do, it is heaven. We were incredibly lucky."

And yet. "We are divided by a shared language," he says of Britain and the West Coast. "The fact that we use the same words is designed to deceive: the differences run deep." He would meet a Pole, a Belgian, a Finn and understand instinctively what made them tick, in a way he never quite managed with the American colleagues he liked and admired. The reasons to come home stacked up: two older boys now at East Coast universities that felt more legible to European eyes; a reluctance to let the youngest grow up "a Silicon Valley brat" in a place awash with abnormal money; family back in Europe; and Miriam, a formidable lawyer, writer and now politician in her own right, whose ambitions had for years yielded to his, and who is now pursuing them in Spanish politics. From London, the East Coast was no farther than California had been. "It was a very healthy break from twenty years in British politics. But it was never going to be permanent. I'm European to my core."

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Not in the Same Galaxy

He came home, by his own description, "radicalised," and the word is chosen with care. Proximity did it: "You can only really grasp the gap between our part of the world and what they're building out there by being there." He would still rather live in Europe; on quality of life, for him, there is no contest. But affection is one thing and scale is another, and on scale he is bracingly blunt. "In this fantastically capital-intensive AI moment, we're not even in the same league. We're not in the same galaxy." He rattles off the figures he has been hoarding (the total value of the New York Stock Exchange dwarfing Europe's markets many times over) and then the one that stops the conversation: the big American hyperscalers, he reckons, now spend on AI infrastructure roughly every five or six weeks what the UK spends on defence in a year.

Closing that gap has become his cause, the "North Star" he keeps returning to: using an accidental, improbable CV (the top of British and European politics, the top of Silicon Valley) to help European technology "stand on its own two feet," while the AI arms race between America and China roars overhead and the transatlantic bargain of the last seventy years quietly comes apart. The anchor on his week is Hiro Capital, where two or three days go on raising, investing and hunting out companies working where AI meets the physical world (immersive, spatial, three-dimensional computing) in Europe, and only Europe. He sits on the board of the London neocloud Nscale, and advises an Anglo-Swiss AI education company, among other things. For the first time in nearly thirty years he is not doing one all-consuming thing, and at nearly sixty he is frank about the pleasure of it. As party leader and Deputy PM, he says, he never had a weekend to himself, and in nine years never a summer holiday that stayed uninterrupted.

For all the alarm, there is real hope in his account. He is quietly proud that the reforms he and Cameron pushed through fifteen-odd years ago helped seed Britain's venture-backed startup scene, "Silicon Roundabout and all that," and reckons the country now has one of the most vibrant tech ecosystems outside the United States, with world-class university research and genuine strength in fields like quantum. The recent suggestion that London may now be home to more sizeable AI companies than Silicon Valley itself is, he agrees, a striking straw in the wind.

His fear is the familiar British one: rinse and repeat. We are ingenious, inventive, brilliant at starting things, and dismal at scaling them. Scaling demands capital of a size and a risk appetite Europe simply lacks, and it demands markets; and here he spares no one, least of all a country that "in a spectacularly self-harming way" severed itself from its natural hinterland. The Chinese and the Americans are not, he says drily, cleverer than European founders "by some innate stroke of fate, they just have vast home markets to sell into." He takes real heart from Germany, though: its surge in defence spending, which he expects to be hugely catalytic, and the labour-market reforms its coalition has just agreed, a loosening that makes it easier to hire and grow. "What our forebears understood after the war is that Europe is only ever as strong as the sum of its parts. The momentum is real now: in London, in Germany. They just have to do it together."

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The 24-Hour Friend

Having sat at the summit of both government and Big Tech, he is unsentimental about where the responsibility falls. The libertarian conceit, fashionable in parts of Silicon Valley, that any regulation of AI amounts to communist meddling was, he says, "always infantile, and was never going to survive contact with reality." Governments of every stripe will have to engage as the models grow more powerful; even the current US administration, he notes, has turned more interventionist on pre-release scrutiny than its predecessor. "It cannot be left to the companies alone. They aren't incentivised to make these calls. These are not philosopher-kings," nor, he adds pointedly, labour-market economists, for all their confident prophecies about the death of white-collar work. "How would the inventor of a technology know how human beings will actually take it up? That's an entirely different thing."

If he were still in politics, the front he would choose is a more intimate one: the emotional and psychological toll of leaning ever harder on hyper-personalised, agentic, near-human AI companions. Children, he points out, have a bottomless appetite to believe (in celebrities, in a teddy bear) and are about to be handed the most solicitous, tireless, memory-keeping friends ever devised. "I'd move far faster than governments are on guardrails," he says. He would put much of this technology off-limits to children outright and force real transparency about how it works. "There's going to be an imposter effect, emotionally and psychologically, as these machines take on an ever more human face. We ought to be getting ahead of it now."

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In Closing

For all its rich experiences and, at the time, potential detours (the fact-checking, the exams in Wembley Arena, the Menlo Park years), Nick Clegg's life makes rather more sense than its owner will admit. The boy who felt, before he had the words for it, that a united Europe was peace defeating war has become the man wagering his second act on whether that Europe can survive the age of AI on its own terms. The loyalty predates every job he ever took. You could argue it was the only plan he ever had.

He would bristle at anything so tidy: he is too alive to the flotsam and jetsam of a life to pretend any of it was designed. But strip it all away and what he is doing now sits startlingly close to where he began: making sure his children inherit a continent that builds its own future rather than importing everyone else's. He went to Silicon Valley for the job of a lifetime and came home, he says, radicalised. It might be nearer the truth to say he went to the one place on earth capable of showing a European exactly what Europe stands to lose, and came back to do something about it.