Whatever happened to that nice Nick Clegg?
Remember the heady days of 2010, when bell-bottomed high fives and the free love of ideas were the talk of the campaign trail? The old New Labour order was creaking under the strain of a “bigoted woman” and a dour Scot with a smile as warm as a deep-space penguin. We were told that politics would be changed forever. A new generation of sexy politicos with friendly names like Andy and Anna were waiting at the door. “[C]onsumers who are used to a significant level of choice […] are demanding the same in the political realm,” wrote Mark Penn about this new political reality for The Times shortly before that general election. That choice was embodied by fresh-faced youth who wore breezy suits of brighter hues and were happy to shake things up with a friendly bob of their post-Blair quiffs.
Had we spoken back then about the state of democracy in 2021, we would have made obvious predictions about the role the media would play in the rise of the demagogues. “TV performance [in the UK] has never been the key criterion when candidates are chosen. It seems certain that parties will come to place greater importance on this,” Penn astutely added, though perhaps not anticipating how the Shallowest Prime Minister of All Time would shirk TV in favour of social media. Had we tried to name the dangers, we’d have been naming the familiar gatekeepers of information: Murdoch, Jobs, Gates, maybe Zuckerberg. The name we most certainly wouldn’t have mentioned was that of a certain Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg.
Back before he was ennobled, Nick Clegg could do no wrong. Everybody and their grandmothers loved “Nick”, to the extent that, on the eve of the election, journalists were asking him about the practicalities of moving a young family into Downing Street. Odds of his succeeding Brown had tumbled from 100-1 to 10-1. Cleggmania appeared unstoppable.
It was David Cameron, during one of the leaders’ debates, who displayed some rare perspicacity when he remarked that the Liberal Democrat leader displayed “a slight danger of holier than thou” and so it proved. The moment the idealist revealed himself to be a calculating pragmatist, Clegg doomed his party to a place east of the electoral wastelands.
What followed was strange voodoo by which the pins aimed at the Tory Party were felt in the shins of the orange doll with the friendly handshake. It wasn’t that the Lib Dems were more “toxic” than the Tories. They had been perceived as being uncompromising in their liberalism. Tories were just being Tories. The Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, had been seen as something better and now, therefore, something much worse: enablers of austerity in the name of one wild punt on electoral reform. Even there it looked like they were outmanoeuvred by the Tories, with the date for the AV referendum set just six short days (one of which was a bank holiday) after Prince William’s wedding. They were destined to lose.
If the 80s remain the era of Margaret Thatcher more than they are the era of free-market capitalism and the 00s more Tony Blair than New Labour, then the years of the coalition government are memorable for the demise of Nick Clegg whose political career was derailed by the necessities of practical government. If Cleggmania remains the high-water mark for a better kind of politics, then the man himself is now an indicator of how far the tide has receded.
It is difficult to think of a modern British politician who has fallen further. Ed Balls was never Chancellor so his emergence on the dance floor was never too shocking. David Miliband disappeared into a US-based charity, preserving his reputation should he ever re-emerge. If Michael Heseltine had ever appeared on our screens selling car insurance, then that might have been equivalent to our former Deputy Prime Minister joining Facebook in October 2018 to become their Vice-President in charge of Global Affairs and Communications.
The spectacle has not been dignifying; neither for Clegg nor the entire political class. Witness “Nick” in a memo to Facebook employees recently. “Social media turns traditional top-down control of information on its head,” he wrote with the same breezy confidence he had in 2010. The “old” has had its day and is merely being reactionary about the “new”. “Social media has enabled people to decide for themselves – posting and sharing content directly. This is both empowering for individuals – and disruptive to those who hanker after the top-down controls of the past, especially if they are finding the transition to the online world a struggle for their own businesses.”
It’s painful to read because it’s a reminder that the optimism of 2010 was the result of a cheap trick rendered by a particularly gifted mercenary who just happened to turn his skills towards his own ambitions. Now he presents himself as a truth-teller to Facebook executives but is nothing more than an apologist for an algorithm; an advocate on behalf of a complex piece of dumb code that elevates the risible over the reasonable.
It really is one of the saddest spectacles of recent political history.