He might now be one of the most powerful men in global media, but I find whenever I see a photograph of Nick Clegg, Orwell’s quote about everyone getting the face they deserve by 50 comes to mind.
Now 54, the remnants of the boyish idealist are still just about there, but the eyes to me are ledgers of too much unhappy compromise – deadened, I always assume, by the principles he felt forced by David Cameron to sacrifice for personal advancement, and by the amazing decision to see out the remaining years of a career spent failing upwards as Mark Zuckerberg’s lavishly remunerated PR lickspittle.
For a decade and more, Clegg positioned himself as the good guy of British politics – radiating sixth form actor star power at every opportunity. Now he spins for Facebook, a megacorporation that in the UK last year paid £28 million of tax on revenues of £1.6 billion, and whose CEO, Zuckerberg, still flatly refuses to present himself for scrutiny by the UK Parliament on issues that include data harvesting.
Clegg promised to change the world by shaking up the corporate elites. Now he takes their coin. It can’t be easy – but perhaps with his successful recruitment last October to Menlo Park of Alan Rusbridger, a fellow giant of the UK’s metropolitan elite, the hypocrisies of his position feel a little less exposed.
Rusbridger, after all, was the editor of the anti-corporate, worker-championing the Guardian for two decades. Now, the great man receives a six-figure salary from Zuckerberg in return for some fifteen hours a week sitting on Facebook’s ludicrous Oversight Board – helping to decide what you and I (and a third of all humanity) can and can’t read on the site.
The Oversight Board – or Facebook’s Supreme Court, as it is being called – is an attempt at self-regulation, presumably in the hope of warding off independent regulation.
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