No one agrees with Nick. Not anymore. Cleggmania ended not with an assassination, but by self-slaughter. When the great enabler first graced the national stage at the 2010 election, he seemed clean in so many ways, but untainted, most crucially, by Iraqi bloodshed. Before long, he was celebrating a shotgun marriage with David Cameron in Downing Street’s Rose Garden. Five years later, he left, spoiled by the violation of a promise from page 33 of his manifesto. Window-smashing students demonstrating against tuition fees chanted “Tory scum”, but held banners saying “Clegg, you sellout.”
For Nick, though, it all came off pretty easily. As his country embarked on Brexit, and then a decade of agony, Clegg was off to California to make his millions at Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. During last year’s election campaign, I expressed some sympathy about Clegg to one Lib Dem campaigner. After all, with him as deputy prime minister, the party had passed a fair bit of its programmes on the environment and taxation as a junior partner in difficult times. She told me not to feel too bad for him: she had heard that he was making “serious seven figures”.
That all dried up four months ago, when Trump won the White House and Zuck went Maga. Clegg was out, along with the fact-checkers and what Zuckerberg called excess “feminine energy”. Now, Clegg is back in Britain with much to say. Last month, he gave his views on the EU in the Observer (“reinvent… or die”). Today (20 May) he went full media blitz: Radio 4 at 8:10am; Institute for Government chit-chat at 10, with apparently another talk planned for this evening. I headed along for the mid-morning brunch option, where the croissants were powdered and the talk was of “six-party politics”.
This was Clegg’s home crowd. The first attendee I spoke to was “in AI” and didn’t blame Clegg for moving to California. “He was being shat on all over. I would’ve said ‘fuck you all’ too!” The economist Tim Leunig agreed. Clegg and the Lib Dems got “an absolute shalacking in 2015” and that today was about “defend[ing] the parts [of their government] that were good”. Shaffaq Mohammed, who was a councillor in Sheffield when Clegg was the MP, and came second in the race for Clegg’s old seat in 2024, said: “As time passes, the coalition doesn’t seem so bad.”
Clegg was speaking for the 15th anniversary of the coalition’s formation, to reflect on that moment. History is written by the victors, but Clegg is trying to spray his tag on it. The “central facts” of his government, he said, are “that it was a coalition and that it was born at a time of economic and political turmoil”. Clegg’s time in office is periodised between “two momentous shocks”: the financial crash and Brexit. Now, “what is striking from our vantage is that the coalition was a five-year haven of stability between these two seismic events”. He made it all sound rather balmy: asserting that there has been no growth since 2010, “as ministers are still wont to do is, in technical jargon, a great big porky pie”. GDP growth “surged among the highest in the G7” right through to the end of 2016. That “remains an unusual feat, for which the Lib Dems in the coalition deserve a great deal of credit”.
Not to mention what came next, or what’s happening now, when decimal growth rates are cause for celebration. But if Clegg sees his legacy in sunnier terms than most, he does regret that “we fell short on our central mission of political reform”. The Lib Dems knew the Tories would oppose alternative voting in the referendum, but counted too much on support from Labour, the other half of the “duopoly”, because it was in their manifesto. In the event, “Ed Miliband as Labour leader barely lifted a finger, so we lost a once-in-a-generation chance to prize open the suffocating grip of first-past-the-post politics.”
Today, Labour is hardly more impressive. It “seems to think growth is administered in Whitehall”. Instead, growth comes when private entrepreneurs “have confidence in the future”. In general, Clegg is baffled at the absence of a private-sector champion in politics, given that it provides the majority of employment and funds the public spending. Labour, having been so “insufferably sanctimonious” while in opposition, is now trapped with the “crazy” commitment not to touch any taxes and “inflict it all on business”. The Tories, to whom the role used to naturally fall, “have forfeited the right to speak for business after the calamity of Brexit”.
Clegg wants a “full-throated” return to Europe. The government should be under “no illusion that Britain is now reduced to the negotiating status of a mid-sized state with far less leverage over the US and Europe than at any time in the last 150 years”. Trump is not just a “kooky incumbent of the White House for a few years”, but instead represents a “fundamental breach with the way our country has situated itself in the world for 80 years. It really is big bananas.” We cannot play both sides and should commit to Europe; otherwise we will become “stranded as a bridge to nowhere”.
Chatting afterwards, Clegg is tall, sonorous, and charming. He remembers allies’ children’s names and how impressive they were. You can imagine him getting on with opponents in a coalition. But he is preaching a lost consensus: the two great economic foes of his time, George Osborne and Ed Balls, now share a podcast. Today’s poles are harsher and more various than Clegg ever knew. It is his right to tinker with the past, but also his luxury. Most of Britain is full up with terror at the present and the future. His message for me when I tried to speak to him after the event could have been to the whole of Britain. “I’m not going to help you, but good luck,” he said, then walked off.
[See also: The Lib Dems’ Middle England revolution]
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