The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 87. Nick Clegg: Biden, Brexit, and kicking Trump off Facebook (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

What is the legacy of the coalition government? How do American politicians compare to British? Do the leaders of Silicon Valley have more power than the leaders in Washington and Westminster? Nick Clegg joins Rory and Alastair for the second instalment of this two part interview. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Podcast Editor: James Hodgson Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispolitics.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell, with the second part of our interview with Nick Clegg. So last week, we kind of got up to 2015. We're now going to talk about your life post-2015, Brexit referendum, and of course, this extraordinary career turn that you took when you went off to work for Mr. Zuckerberg.

And also a little bit about the general election that's just happened in our country. But just before we do, Nick, just give us a sense of an incredible job. You were deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom. Give us a little bit of a sense of what that job was like. Five years is the second most powerful person in the country. Give us a sense of the routines, the strengths, the weaknesses, the problems, the challenges. What was that job like? Brutal, I think, is probably the fair assessment.

And I think with the benefit of hindsight, I was, it's just obvious, I just, I just trying to do too much at once. I was trying to lead a party from opposition into government, you know, trying to leading a government or co-leading a government that had to steady the ship after this horrendous kind of economic collapse in 2008, trying to restore confidence in politics after the MP's expenses scandal, trying to keep my constituency, trying to lead a party that was feeling battered and bruised quite early on from the whole experience, trying to be a young dad. Miriam, quite rightly, was not going to make any concessions to the fact that I was in politics. We, as I think I mentioned in the previous episode, we didn't move into a sort of

convenient government-owned flat in central London. So I was kind of going up back and forth, if not between London and Sheffield, then between Putney, which is where we live. Well, we were raised the kids and the kids at local schools there. I would sometimes remember go back from Whitehall or Westminster at like, what, six or seven p.m. Just to be able to see the boy, I have three little boys, you know, give them the bath, put them to bed, tell them a story, and then come back to Westminster and Whitehall, then stay up to whatever it was for late votes, then go back. And then, of course, the way the coalition worked was that you had this great machine

that would produce, you know, reams of paperwork for David Cameron and myself sort of in parallel. And we would then have to churn through it. And then if we both would tick, you know, X submission about. you know, a change to some energy tariff. I'm making this up, then that would go through. And if one ticked and one crossed, then that would have to be subject to further debate. If we said both crossed, it would be.

And so there was a sense of real discipline that we both had to sort of try and churn through that homework. And I remember I'd sit on my sofa at home, just with reams and reams of paper from these wretched boxes and often sort of fall asleep and wake up. The sort of, you know... Druelling over some official submission in the middle of the night. So it was pretty sleepless,

and I hadn't looked after myself, physically. I remember at the time I was smoking a bit. I didn't do enough exercise. I remember I had I broke my toe playing with my kids. I had some bronchial infection during the local... This is a bigger misery memoir. No, I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It was a great. This is politics on the liberal Democrat. No, I'm sorry. No, no. So it was wonderful, Rory. I enjoyed every minute of it. No. No, it was a great, great privilege. It was a great honor and all the rest of it. But I did, I just as a physical... I actually often, I'm not sure if you say this, or you say this, Alistair, when people say, oh, should I go into politics, what's the thing I should learn? I just say yes. Well, there's that. And then I say to them the thing that is most underrated about politics, or at least the politics I was doing. I was a public figure. I had to constantly perform in the media, in Parliament and the nervous of it is physical resilience. It is an exceptionally physical job. And I, and I remember, actually, after the catastrophe of the local elections in 2011 and the failed AV referendum, I remember thinking, like, I've got to get my,

I got to get my shit together. Otherwise, this is going to physically overwhelm me. So I remember then I started smoking. I did some kickboxing classes at 6 a.m. in the morning, somewhere in the full of road. I got a rowing machine and put in a little cubbyhole somewhere in Whitehall. It's a very physical, physical job, and it took me a while to learn that. And this is just a route into where you are now. I mean, presumably being present to the United States is a pretty tough physical job. So just give us a sense of what Biden's day must be like and what it might. must be like being that age trying to do that kind of job. Yeah.

No, I think it is often widely underrated that politicians need to be made of very stern sort of, because you're taking most decisions, highly consequential decisions, often at very great speed based on imperfect information with very extensive consequences in a sleepless state. So, you know, in a way, we create a whole cast of... I mean, cast both with the E and without the E, of decision makers who are almost sort of in a state,

which is the worst state in which to take decisions. They're knacker. Cameron always, one of the things that struck me about Cameron, he always seemed pretty chilled. Do you think he was... No, I think I always thought, actually, fun enough, I think there were some things which were fair or unfair, which I said about camera.

I think the one thing that was unfair is that somehow he was a sort of slacker. He worked hard. But he managed to do that without ever looking. I always felt about camera. He never looked terribly stressed. Yeah. Which is quite rare for top flight politics.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. And I think it's a great, it's a great asset if you have that. It's a great quality if you have that because, you know, it cannot be, again, it cannot be sort of exaggerated. How much how someone looks is important to the electorate in terms of whether they are appropriate to the office that they are occupying. On Cameron, when Cameron announced in the run up to the 2015 election that the Conservatives would commit themselves to a referendum, Yeah. On Brexit.

Did you think then that it was a sort of moderately clever political tactic that might get him through the election and then you'd come back with another coalition government? Or did you think you have made the biggest mistake of your life? I sort of thought both. I thought, you idiot, you've now completely hoisted the white flag to the right wing in your party. You are elevating a party management issue to something. And I tell you what, actually, the thing that, again, I think has sometimes been over. overlooked is the hubris of it. Do not underestimate the link between the Scotland referendum, which, and then of course subsequently the surprise victory in 2015, I mean, Cameron went to the

European Council and said, I'm a winner, I will win. I mean, I know this from other heads of governments in the EU said to me. He would just literally go there and say, I'm a winner. You know, it's not a problem. I'm a winner. It just, I mean, it's just classic sort of Greek tragedy stuff. It just hubris, it went to their head. And it was a particular, it was a particular a misdiagnosis of their own skills because I believe the Scottish referendum would not have been won without people like Alistair, Car Michael, Michael Moore and Danny Alexander, who were prominent Liberal Democrat, Scottish cabinet ministers and MPs, who played an absolute blinder in making sure that that referendum campaign was...

I think Alastair and Gordon. Alastard, Arlesa, Arlesa, absolutely, no, sorry, I didn't mean it partisan way, but because if you, as I remember, George in particular, wanted lots of sort of clever, pokey sort of newsy things to try and sort of goad the SMP at the time. And it was, I think, both Alastair Gordon and these Liberal Democrat Scots, who said, you guys don't understand Scotland, which indeed they didn't. So I think they kind of misdiagnosed their own victory, if you like, in Scotland. And I think he, yeah, I just think he thought he was going to, I thought it was going to be a bit of a breeze. I also, but I mean, you should ask him, I know that there were a

number of things which they floated at the latter stages of the coalition where they were pretty confident that they wouldn't be able to do it because we would be in coalition with them again. And I think Brexit was probably one of them. And one thing I know for sure, because I said this to both of them, was these ludicrously regressive welfare cuts that they introduced in 2015-16, the 12 billion extra of welfare cuts, the two-bed Two-child benefit. The removal of housing benefit from young people, a whole bunch of things. Osterity, too.

Well, austerity. You weren't going to go. You weren't going to go for that. I said to them, there's no way you're going to do that. And I definitely know that they thought, oh, we'll put that in because we're never going to have to do it on our own. But look, you need to ask them. That's certainly my view. And Nick, this theme of hubris, and because we're talking at a moment where Rishi Sunak triggered an election that he thought he was going to win six months before he needed to, where Macron has just triggered an election.

I mean, what's going on? Is it that Cameron Sunak, Macron have a similar thing, that there is a form of hubris there that you sort of think you're in charge. and you can make the weather and you can make these big decisive calls and you're going to pull it off. It's a very peculiar thing to go into politics, to think that you are uniquely suited to make the big calls. To make the big calls. To channel the aspirations and wishes of the people who've voted for you to make. I mean, you by definition, almost I think are someone who arrogates to yourself, almost a sort of gamblers, a gambler's tendency to sort of take big risks. I think that's what is inherent in most politicians,

and I don't think most great politicians achieve anything of any significance without making very big, risky calls. What's your take on Brexit now? What's your... If you had to explain to somebody in, I don't know, Latin America who hasn't followed it very closely, what has Brexit done, would you say? I think it's the greatest act of self-inflicted harm

done by any country in the post-war period. I can barely think, certainly amongst developed economies, I can't think of any other instance where a country has chosen to do something which is so damaging to its own interests in such a short period of time when it didn't need to. And I defy anyone to think of anything which is even vaguely in the same category in the post-war period. Just developing this a bit. So we're now talking at a moment where Donald Trump has just survived an assassination attack. He's launched a Republican convention, which has a very unified, energized Republican Party behind him.

It feels like a type of politics in Brexit and with Donald Trump and, you know, maybe with Le Pen and France and others, which is very much against the kind of technocratic 1990s center ground that rightly or wrongly you seem to represent. What's the lesson that one draws from populism? Why is the, what, you know, obviously the three of us violently agree that Brexit was a bad thing. But how do you understand what's driving populism and how do you understand how one's supposed to counter it and deal with it? Because I guess there are lessons for the Stama government too. Yeah. I mean, this is obviously the biggest question of our age, isn't it? My own view is that

a number of things are happening simultaneously. Firstly, you're seeing this extraordinary tension between the globalisation of technology and the economy and the de-globalization of politics. And the latter is almost a reaction to the former. Because the more you, the more you're feel you're not in control of events that impinge on your life, the more you want a stronger sense of belonging and control over your own environment. And it creates an unsustainable, or rather a very unstable political mix, because you have one generation after next, one government after the next of politicians who are elected into office to sort of impose sovereignty and control over processes which they don't control and which they can't and which they can't sort of

discipline themselves. And I think that's instability. And then I think you've got another thing going on, which is obviously the traditional left-right, high-tax, low-tax, market, state is giving way to university-educated or non-university educated and old and young. So levels of education and age is becoming a much greater predictor of electoral behavior than before. So I think all of these things are piling up on top of each other. And of course, they give a great deal of fodder to populists. And I think just on populism for a minute, populism is not necessarily a bad thing. And I think, you know, amongst our centrist dads here, we need to just, you know, we just need to acknowledge that populism is a very important antidote to complacency,

to elitism, to group, group think. I mean, Gandhi was a populist of sorts, wasn't he? You know, populism is a great shock to the established order. And I, despite all sort of appearances to the country, I remain actually quite. In fact, I found myself more of an anti-establishment politician after five years in government than before. I think there's so much that needs to be shaken to the core. It's one of the things I find so disappointing about the Labour government is they don't seem to be at all interested in doing anything meaningful about changing how politics is conducted. But there's a great deal of fodder for all of the reasons that I described earlier for populists from right and left to give very simple answers to very complex problems. and so on. So what are the bits of populism that you like?

Oh, I think... I mean, Gandhi didn't go around the place lying all the time. No, he didn't. He didn't try and get people to hate each other. I think populist reactions to the status quo are essential ingredients in making sure that the status quo is constantly evolving and reforming. I think it's... I think that has to be a good thing. So when people say, oh, shock horror, there might be, and I'm making this up, I don't know what the figures are, but 15, 20% of people who might vote for a party like Farada. So so be it. Right, fine. It's okay. So we have, I mean, it's one of the terrible distortions in this country. We have a pluralist society trapped in this ludicrous system. What do we got? We've now got a parliament with what, 70% of thereabouts of sort of center-left MPs. The country self-evidently not 70% center-left. I just think we have to have confidence in your own ideas, confidence in the battle of your ideas, and confidence in the fact that it's a never-ending battle. You never stop populism in its trance. You have to argue with it. You have to address it.

You have to... The difference is that populism has become a governing thing, which it never used to be. The extremes have moved. Trump essentially is an extremist who, if he wins again, is going to take command of the most important democracy in the world. But I don't think... I sometimes think people exaggerate. They describe populism as something very new. It's not that new.

Do we have Ross Perrault? I mean, OK, it wouldn't become prime minister. No, exactly. That's my point. They operate on the extremes. It's moved into the centre. And what's happening... And what's happening is interesting is that some populists, like Maloney, if you call her a populist, seems to be very tamed by the experience.

We'll see about Wilders in my motherland in the Netherlands. I suspect that just because of the grinding effect of multi-party politics in the Netherlands. That's kind of a disciplining effect on him. Presidential politics, I mean, the United States, I say this, having now lived there for many years in my new life, is just a very, very, very different political culture to Europe. and I think some of the parallels with Europe are almost impossible to make. The level of, it's like, it's not a country, it's a continent, that the amount of sort of money sloshing around the political system is just, is just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just,

something, it's just extraordinary. And the disenchantment with, with D.C. runs right, you know, there's a right thread right to the, to the origins of the founding of America, a deep, deep hostility to the marsh, the cesspit of, of D.C. There's a sort of anti-political sentiment, which is, and by the way, a proclivity to, conspiracy theories as well, which has run through American history. None of that's new. In a sense, Trump is the latest manifestation of eruptions of populism and hostility to the political

establishment in the US, which has been around for a very long time indeed. Nick, Biden obviously came in 2020, and his clear job was to try to ensure that Trump would never be re-elected, I guess, to learn the lessons of 2016 to 2020. In your judgment as a politician, what ought he to have done between 2020 and 2024 to be in a position to absolutely guarantee that people weren't going to vote for Trump and that they would get behind the type of politics that Biden represents? So this is my, I can't stress now, this is my personal view. And I say this with some sorrow because I actually know or got to know Joe Biden really quite well when I was Deputy for prime minister. He was vice president. We spent a lot of time together. We even did a podcast together, by the way. award-winning podcast called Anger Management with Nick Clegg, which you can find on the archives, I think somewhere. Am I allowed to talk about rival podcast?

You can, you can, but you have to go so low down the charts. Oh, you have to go very low. You have to go very down on the charts, exactly. You can find my book by the way on eBay. Anyway, Rory has praised your book on this podcast. I love your book. Between the extremes. I keep talking it up.

It's beautifully written. Your great prose style. I think, you know, more books, please. Oh, well, okay, I'll take up the invitation. I think it's out of print now, but there you go. Thank you. No, but to your question, Rory, so I do say this with some sorrow because I actually like the man immensely. He was always very, very generous and kind to me. I haven't seen him much, of course. Oddly enough, the last time he and I spent any sustained time together was

about a month before I joined then Facebook. So this was in autumn 2018. He and I did a sort of platform Q&A, just the two of us on a stage, at the University of Pennsylvania, at UPenn in front of about 2,000 students. About a month later, I joined Facebook. Last time I saw him was in my capacity now in Silicon Valley in the White House briefly about a year ago. But in answer to your question, Roy, I think they have done a lot of very good things as an administration in terms of handling the pandemic.

And most importantly, they have inflated the economy with this extraordinary amount of spending, which, of course, we would not be able to do in this country because we don't have a global reserve currency. When I see people in the centre left, oh, we should spend as much as a man. We can't. We're not. We don't have the dollar. We don't have the, what de Gaulle, I think, called it. I love the way you point at me. Yes, well, of course I do. Anything. When do you can let me say that? Well, you might have been not pointed out. The American has the reserve currency. But I, but I, so I actually think, and they did it, by the way, in a way which, contrary to a lot of expectations from economists, they thought that would then lead to an unsustainable inflationary.

sort of boom and bust. They haven't. They got a soft landing in the economy. I think they've done a lot of very good things. I don't think, for what it's worth, I don't think they gripped the issue of immigration on the border as early as they should done. I think that has led to a sort of weak flank in terms of attack from the right. But in answer to your question, Roy, the biggest thing he arguably could have done is to hand that legacy on to a successor to fight the next election. And it's, I really say this with real sorrow in an odd kind of thing, the greatest thing that Biden could have done and could still do, and could still do is the most painful thing of all, which is, because he's obviously a proud man, is to say, I've done my bit,

I defeated Trump last time, we've got a really strong US economy. By the way, just parenthetically on that, one of the things that's most fascinating about America at the moment, I mean, the American economy, the strength of the American economy is astonishing. I mean, the GDP of the US is now twice as big, twice as big as Europe, including the UK. by any measure, whether it's patents, whether it's new companies, whether it's employment, whether it is just booming. We are not even the same league as the US. And yet, it's become increasingly driven by ideological dispositions.

If you're on the right, if you're a Republican, you think the economy is doing badly. Even you might be in employment and you can fill your car with gas and so on and so forth. So it's very weird what we're seeing, which might start happening, I guess, in the UK over time, is that perceptions of the economy are themselves becoming quite pleasant. litigized. That's your advice to the Democrats and Joe Biden. What advice would you give to the new Labour government vis-a-vis fixing the damage that you've talked about done by Brexit? Look, the Labour government are in a rather odd position, because I think, as far as I can make out, they're asking themselves the right question. They're posing the right question to the country,

which is that you can't just take a traditional centre-left playbook of tax and spend to boost the economy and growth and an increase in productivity is the most important thing that you need to restore to this country. And yet at the same time, they appear to have deprived themselves of any of the main levers to, you know, they don't have very many monetary leave. Well, it's not a government thing, but, you know, monetary and fiscal levers are pretty limited. You've had this bizarre election where literally no one wants to talk about Brexit. I mean, it's just, it's just astonishing. And they're now on the Europe stuff, they seem to be doing lots of perfectly fine, but rather piddling stuff on, I don't know, veterinary this and phytosanitary that and school exchanges and pop singers be able to go to travel across Europe.

And all of that's fine. I don't quite personally understand the politics of it because every time you do even those small steps, Farage and Johnson and Al, they're going to say, ah, this is the preface to, you know, they'll do it on anything. So you might as well do it on the bigger stuff, certainly on the customs union, I would argue in the long run on the single market. They've boxed themselves in on fiscal rules, which they, I'm not really sure they needed to do it. So you've got this rather odd thing where they've got an ambitious objective, and it seems to me they've only got two steps of getting there, which is building more houses and just not being mad. Now, both of those things are fine, but they're necessary, but not sufficient conditions. You still haven't said what they should do vis-a-vis Europe. Oh.

Do more of what they're doing or take a big step? I would take a big step. And what would the big step be? Well, I would now make the case for joining the customs union. That seems to be a pretty cost-free option. Which is a manifesto breach? Yeah. But this is the problem.

How long is this government going to be able to deliver what it says it's going to deliver to the British people, having oddly box itself into a corner in order to secure power in the first place? Okay, Alistair, Nick, let's just take a quick break, and afterwards we'll be back to talk about Trump and the dangers of social media. Hi, everybody. it's Dominic Zavrick here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away,

and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest Is History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few issues with the trade unions.

And we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now,

whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and we'll be talking about one of the grimest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you?

Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History, wherever you get your podcasts. Nick, I just wanted to ask you about Donald Trump. As someone who now works for a big American company and has been living in the US until recently, how dangerous do you think he is in terms of becoming a president again?

I find that quite a difficult question, in the sense that there's just this peculiar tension between what he says and what he posts and what he does. I mean, if you look at what he did during his first term, I don't think you can rationally argue that it was as, I mean, a whole bunch of things that I may disagree with personally, but was it as catastrophic or as demagogic as some of the rhetoric would imply? So I think you need to ask yourself, will his second term be significantly different to the first? I mean, I think the fact that J.D. Vance has just been nominated at his running mate as he's obviously a very, very smart guy. but if you are European, I think it poses pretty profound questions about what it means for our continent.

And regardless of whether a part of the European Union or not, because if you listen to what Vance says, he's on the very hardest of hard lines against a supporting or an ongoing support for Ukraine in the war against Russia. And for us in Europe, that's existential. For them, it's more a question of choice. And I really, really worry for Europe about what that might mean. And of course, the sort of big thing from our point of view, I think, is that Trump refused to acknowledge that he lost the election, claimed he'd won it. And J.D. Vance, and so many of these senior Republicans are buying into the big lie. I mean, that's the sort of basic thing that I think in every European country at the moment was still taking for granted, which is that you accept the result of the election. There's something profoundly disturbing about that, both for the president, the potential president and his vice presidential choice. Maybe we can use that as a bridge into your current life. Because it was it you personally that took the decision to kick Trump off meta?

Yeah, so one of the various responsibilities I have at meta is to oversee what they call the content standards. What's allowed and what's not allowed on all these different apps, Facebook, Instagram, and on messaging apps like Messenger and WhatsApp and so on. And yeah, I mean, I don't do it in a vacuum. No, sure. A whole bunch of support. And I obviously formed Mark Zuckerberg and the board and so on and so forth. But it was my, yeah, it was my role to do that, yeah. And what was the judgment?

What judgment did you make that said, you know, this guy has no place here? Well, immediately after January the 6th, we decided that we should suspend Donald Trump from using the apps altogether. And then, again, something which I, it wasn't my idea, but something which I built since I came to, Pacific Valley, which is this independent oversight board. I sort of referred it to them and said, look, is this the right judgment to make? And they came back and said, well, no, because you haven't sort of, you haven't, in a sense, they sort of said you haven't followed due process. You've sort of done it in a way that's not rooted in clear, transparent, and accountable

and published policies. So we sort of revised it quite rightly under the guidance of this, well, under the instruction of this independent oversight board. And then it mutated into a two-year suspension from Facebook. which expired some time ago. He's not going back. Yeah, no, he's posting a lot. He's posting a lot on Facebook.

Oh, is he? Yeah, yeah. I just follow his own thing. No, no, no, no, he posts quite a lot. Let's just dive into this thing about, you know, the influence, the relationship between democratic politics and the world that you're now in. Explain why it's a force for good and justify the, or hit back at the allegations that actually it's a threat to democracy. And Nick, reminders.

what Facebook does, remind us what products it has, what household names you're representing? Right. So META is the parent company, if I can read like that, of a collection of apps, which together are by far, it's the world's largest social media company, close to four billion people now around the world, use these apps. And they are Instagram, Facebook, and then on the sort of messaging side of things, Messenger and WhatsApp. And then increasingly now a whole range of new businesses in two domains, one AI and generative AI and this whole new, whole new really sort of foundationally important new technology, which is clearly going to have a very profound effect on the way we interact with the online world for generations to come.

And then immersive, what's called immersive reality, where you put headsets on your and you are augmented and virtual reality. So those, that's a thumbnail sketch of the technologies we're dealing with, and they all slightly interact because everything that you see on Facebook and Instagram is in one way or another affected by AI systems that were away in the background. So it's all slightly, at the back end, it's all very highly, highly interdependent. I've always felt, I accept unfashionably, because it's the sort of fashionable thing to say that, you know, social media is responsible for this, that and the other ill in society. I remain of the view, and actually

the longer I've been at the company, and maybe it's because I'm sort of, you know, drunk the sort of Silicon Valley Kool-Aid, but I've become more persuaded of this just because I'm lucky enough now to see a lot of research and delve into the details. I remain of the view that one of the things that is both wonderful and highly disruptive of social media is it allows people for free to express themselves and to communicate with others in a way that is unprecedented in history. I mean, we are all old enough to remember we'd have to get 10 P-coins to go to the local thing and put them into the slot and to ring people. you can now ring anyone in the world for free. You can communicate with anyone. So the empowerment that it's given to billions of human beings, regardless of whether they're rich or poor,

whether they live in Wall Street or they live in the backwaters of Bangladesh, to express themselves, to find groups and communities of people they want to sort of hang out with online, is unprecedented. And as a sort of liberal, I think anything which empowers the individual

to express themselves, particularly to communicate with family and friends, has to be a good thing. It's very disruptive, though, because what does it mean? It means a bunch of things, but amongst other things, it means that the people are in power, whether it's in politics, whether it's religion, whether it's ethnicity, whether it's in governments, or crucially, whether it's in the traditional media. It subverts them.

So if you're, I mean, candidly, it's one of the reasons why you have this rather antagonistic relationship between Silicon Valley and the, you know, and Murdoch and the traditional publishers. Because if you're a traditional publisher, it's a very paternalistic business model, you're sitting. there in the editor's chair, you decide what the great masses will read on the front page and then page two, three, four, and so you're in an environment where people make up their own front page. They say what they want. And so you get this great,

you get this sort of tension where you're subverting the sort of gatekeepers that traditionally have basically determined the flow of information and news and so on and so forth. But then other bad actors of how to exploit it. Right. So like any, literally like any communications technology. I mean, you know,

radio was once the favoured tool. of fascists as a sort of propaganda tool. You know, whether it's email, whether it's the telephor, any technology which facilitates the ability of human beings to communicate with each other is, thankfully, most of the time used for playful, innocent, uplifting, beautiful things, but it's also used for very bad people trying to do very bad things. And so, you know, I'm simplifying dramatically, but much of my time is spent trying to minimize the latter, minimize the bad, while amplifying the good.

And that then is exceptionally difficult in an environment, which is, of course, why it's been such a fascinating experience for me, where most of the time you're talking about stuff that is perfectly legal. So, you know, people often sort of shout at these social media, oh, you're allowing too much hate speech. Hate speech is perfectly legal. But one person's hate speech is another person's right to free expression. And so, because the illegal stuff is straightforward. If it's illegal, it's illegal. So you're having to, and then just to sort of give you the thumbnail sketch, what's so fascinating about doing this, on it for a global platform, is you're doing it in an environment where you have very different

standards about what is and what is not acceptable. So to take a slightly comic example, where every time I meet, almost any time I meet any ministers from Scandinavia, what's the first thing they berate me about is that we're a prurient American platform that we won't allow them to post topless pictures of their holidays in the Baltic Sea, because we have policies against nudity. Americans tend to have a greater tolerance of violence than Europeans. do. Issues around caste and ethnicity are a much bigger problem in India than they are in other places. So how do you administer policies that make sense to all these different cultural and geographically specific assumptions about what is good and what is bad language?

Nick, I guess the underlying issue here that will make people uncomfortable is that you're very senior in Facebook. I mean, which is number two effectively in the whole setup of meta. and you are paid an enormous amount of money. And so it must be pretty difficult for people to fully believe that you can be seeing this completely objectively. You're paid and employed by the company. You're not likely to come on our podcast and say, you know, this company is encouraging polarization, political disintegration, populism, sharing inappropriate adult sex and images with children affecting brain development. I mean, talk to us a little bit about that, how you handle that, how you think about that.

Because, I mean, it's a slightly unfair situation because, I mean, obviously, you know, we could spend the next half an hour with me trying to make the counter argument. But I guess we're not going to get very far. Well, no, two things. First, absolutely, you're quite right. Why, don't believe what I would I say? Absolutely. I mean, I try and be my own man, if I can put it like that. I try not just to sort of tow the corporate line.

In a sense, there's no point having someone like me in a company like that if I'm just going to become just another sort of corporate talking head. And I think, to be fair, to Zuckerberg, he understands that about me. But you're quite right. Don't believe a word. I would say two things to that, Rory. Firstly, I really would urge those who are interested, those are interested and I don't know whether I could very happily share stuff with you guys if listeners want to get into this. But it is really worth looking at the research, because the research just is a whole lot. And this is not meta research.

It's not Silicon Valley research. This is research done by independent academic. So, for instance, the research done on the link between social media and polarization is pretty categorical, that there is no causal link between the use of social media and what they call affective polarization. In fact, in many countries where the use of social media and the Internet has gone up, polarization's gone down, in many other parts of the world, polarization's gone up in precisely the parts of the population that don't use social media.

Can I just interrupt a second? Because I think the danger of this is that I'm then going to say, well, wait a second, how about the Rohingya in Myanmar and how about UN reports and amnesty reports and the Centre for Humane Technology? And people who've resigned from Facebook saying you're not doing enough to moderate and that you haven't done enough on understanding languages. And then you'll come back with a whole series of counter arguments and we'll go around round circles. We were slightly here with. Yes.

Roy, let me just jump in. On Heller, what was really interesting, I felt we did this wonderful interview with Heller-Torning-Schmidt, who's on your oversight board. And she was wonderfully open and free-flowing and frank. But I felt the one point where she became a little less was when she got into quite a defensive mode about social media. Right. And I mean, you pay them, don't you?

You do pay the oversight board. Yeah, we put the money into an independent trust, so we can't touch it. Okay. Yeah. So, but, so Rory's big point. And I'm not, you know, you're an employee. So therefore, I think you can, we can all find research.

We can go find research that says you've done this. Well, you can't. You won't be able to find much research that says there's a causal link between social media and polarisation. You really can't. Really? No, it just doesn't exist. On polarization, it doesn't. Maybe we should conduct it. No, no, no, but just to take your point, Rory, and I don't know how far you want to take this. I'm absolutely, I mean, listen, on the, on Myanmar, for instance, that that's a completely different issue. Was it, was it right that's that Facebook was available to people in Myanmar when the company had not built enough language and learned. expertise to understand how the platform was being used or indeed abused at the time, clearly, clearly wrong. And so background for listeners. And in the Myanmar case, people were posting very aggressive anti-Muslim messages,

talking about Muslims flooding the country, talking about invasions, etc. So it was contributing, or it was felt to be contributing by the UN and amnesty to the hate against Rohingya, which ultimately led to a lot of deaths. Yeah, yeah. And look, I mean, how can I put this? I wouldn't have gone to the company if a whole bunch of things didn't need to change.

I mean, to be fair to Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg at the time, I remember when Sharon Sandberg first rang me somewhat out of the blue. I was on holiday with the family in Switzerland and said, do you want to work for Facebook in California? I said, no, of course I don't want to go work for Facebook in California. And then as often there's a case in life

when you say no to someone, they sort of go to them to sort of persuade you more. And then she said, well, come out and speak to Mark me in California and I did and so. And then I remember I wrote them a great long, document saying in my view, this is my diagnosis of what's right and what's wrong and this is what you need to change. And so, you know, since I've been at the company, we've established this independent oversight board. We now have the world's largest network of fact checkers.

All the stuff that was lacking in Myanmar in the past is now there in terms of local teams. I think the company spent, what is it, $20 billion odd dollars on kind of safety and integrity online. You've got 40,000 people working on it. I could go on and on and on. But my point is, do I totally accept Rory that this explosive use of this technology in a very short space of time? Remember, this company is only what is it? 17, 18 years old. It's just like it's gone, kabum, has led to all sorts of unintended effects where the companies had to admit that it got things wrong in the first and then kind of adapts.

You bet that's why I came to the company, because it needed to change. And I think it's an utterly changed company now than what it was five or six years ago. So I'm not shy of making that case. I just worry that there is this tendency to overlook what I think is a wonderful underlying thing, which is that we now have technologies where it doesn't matter where you are, who you are, whether you're rich or poor, you're not able to express yourself in a way that is unprecedented. And I think on the whole, that is going to prove to be a good thing. You did have pretty severe doubts about taking the job, though, didn't you?

Oh, yeah. I talked to you about it. You did? You urged me to do it. So it's entirely your responsibility. No, I, what's, you actually say, what you said, would you... Don't blush, Alastica. I'm not blushing. We went for lunch very near here, Somerset House. You said, yeah. And you said, do you think it's reputational death?

Did I? Yeah. And I said, no, I think it'd be really interesting. Yeah, it's very rich. I also said, I think you need to get out the country for a bit. Yeah. All of that is true. All that is true.

Very wise advice. And what about, because you, but Silicon Valley, you didn't love it, living there? No, did you mean there? You've been there, haven't you, Rory? I've been there, yeah, yeah. I tried to see you there last night's there. Yes, that's right. He didn't snub you again, did he, right?

He did, he did. He did. He wasn't in California. I snubbed him. I kept saying, no, I'm not going to be there. It's unfortunate, Pat. I'm sorry, Roy, I was not there. It is, for those who've not been, it is,

when you say Silicon Valley, you have an image of a lovely sort of verdant valley with sort of orchards and stuff, it's not. It's a great big motorway sort of strip alongside a a great sort of salt basin between San Francisco and San Jose. It's just got these sort of sprawling industrial parks. But it is the location and the epicenter of this, you know,

this sort of gravity-defying growth in new technologies over the last, you know, 20, 30 years. And the interesting thing, I didn't, it's a very beautiful part of the world. California, of course, is. And I particularly love the outdoors. Of course, the weather's gorgeous. And Miriam and I, particularly through the pandemic, we're very lucky. We could go hiking with our kids and that whole strip of North. Californian coast right up to the Oregon border is some of the most beautiful sort of camping and

hiking and walking countryside. So anyone who's planning a holiday to that part of the world go up to it's called the Lost Coast. It's you can get lost in in redwood forests and camp on isolated beaches. It's amazing. So I miss that. But it's quite a sort of, it's quite, it's a sort of monochrome environment. Everyone's, I mean, of course, there's lots of diversity within these tech companies, but everyone's kind of doing the same thing. So there's no, one of the wonderful things about London, one of the things I found absolutely wonderful spending kind back. spending more time in London is you've got you've got a financial industry and a political culture a political centre and a cultural centre all and a legal and you know everything's cheek by

gel in Silicon Valley everyone's chasing the same you know and it's and it's also very and it's run by engineers who are remarkable people but one of the things I I never work with engineers before and I'm not an engineer myself and one of the interesting things about engineers is engineers you know they feel that they have they should have a fix and there should be an answer to everything and it's kind of a it was a you know I come from the world of politics where you're always dealing with the imperfections of the world and and trying to both guide and ride you know all the kind of changes in in society engineers can be very dogmatic about this the way things should be and one of the reasons why it's been an interesting experience for me is that

I come in there as a non-engineer saying hang on a minute what you guys are inventing you might think is entirely logical but it's going to collide with these issues these political these cultural, these moral, these ethical issues, you've got to kind of navigate that. And just to pick up Rory's earlier question, not only do I think independent research is crucial in answering these questions for yourselves, rather than listening to people like me who quite rightly point out are paid by these companies. The other thing is regulation. When I arrived, there was this feeling in Silicon Valley that any regulation was bad for the industry and should be opposed at all costs. One of the things I feel I sort of help change more generally is just to

accept that of course the power of these technologies need to be framed by laws and regulations. And I think that's clearly happened. Some of the regulations will be proved to be good. Some will prove to be unworkable. But I think it's a much more regulated industry, rightly, in the grand scheme of things, than it was even five or six years ago. Can I just develop very quickly Nick's point about engineers and engineering mindsets? I think this is really important. A lot of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world now, Elon Musk, but also many of the others in Silicon Valley, have this very particular view of the world. I notice it when we're dealing with poverty in Africa, they somehow assume that they can develop some new app, which is going to suddenly eradicate poverty in Africa or fix war.

And it creates a very strange atmosphere of kind of techno-optimism, which has got right into the heart of the way that American culture works. Is that right? Yeah, it's sort of techno-optimism and it's techno-hubris. It's this view that there is a tech. Here's the interesting thing I've found over the years I've been working there, is that the two sets of people you probably shouldn't listen to are the most ferocious critics of technology and the most ferocious proponents of technology,

because they both, oddly enough, do the same thing. They exaggerate the role of technology. Technology is tremendously important, but it doesn't oddly enough have the determining effect on how people feel and think and behave than either of those groups of people, and they sort of feed off each other. You get this hopelessly, we talked about it earlier,

polarised debate between critics who explain an election outcome or a referendum outcome and say, oh, it must be technology. It must be the algorithm. Well, I have a faint idea about what an algorithm is. By the way, we're having this similar thing now about AI. Hold on. You haven't got the faintest idea. No, they don't. Oh, they don't. They'll listen. I'll... I don't. No, no. Actually, just to give you an illustration, there are still people in this country today who believe that Cambridge Analytica played a role in determining the outcome of the Brexit referendum. Even though it doesn't. has been shown by an independent regulator in the UK that Cambridge Analytica didn't have

a single piece of UK data on it. So it would have been technically impossible for Cambridge Analytica. And yet, yet people want to think that something they don't like is ascribe to some sort of mysterious or dastardly technology they don't fully understand. And I think we're in danger, by the way, on a much bigger scale of doing the same thing on AI. I think people are starting to ascribe both very bad things and very sort of miraculous things to AI, which exaggerates what AI can do. It's a very powerful, versatile technology. It is often not

as nearly as evil or as beatific as both the critics and the proponents suggest. Alice, there's so much to come in on here. I mean, I'm very, very anxious about you doing open source AI and the way in which that could develop. But obviously, we're going to get caught up in that. Listen, do you feel more or less powerful now than you did as Deputy Prime Minister? And would you say that, Mark Zuckerberg is more or less powerful than Keir Starmer? Oh, no, no. I think this idea that sort of the tech overlords in Silicon Valley are more powerful than prime ministers and presidents is wildly overdone.

Really? Yeah, they don't decide whether you go to war or not or what history curriculum kids are going to learn or what taxes you're going to pay or how well your resource your hospitals are going to be. Of course they've got considerable amount of influence over their technology in a way that operates. But honestly, I think this is just such a sort of hackneyed thing. What about you then? As definitely right now, of course I had more power. In terms of influence over life in this country, clearly way more as Deputy Prime Minister

than in my role as President Global Affairs for Facebook. On the things that I so happen to have sort of authority over in the company, particularly some of these things we've touched on, which is how does elections play out in Facebook, how do you define or not define, hate speech, what or what do you not do with Donald Trump on Facebook? But clearly that is a, it's an influential role, but it's nothing like. And we shouldn't ever pretend that it is anyway akin to the power we vest in our elected leaders. And I think it, I think it is a disservice to them.

And oddly enough, slightly sort of over-glamorizes the power of the tech elite and Silicon Valley. So what is he like, Zuckerberg? He's remorselessly driven and competitive and energetic CEO. He, I mean, like all of these Silicon Valley pioneers, and he's one of the, you know, who were the great sort of founder, CEOs, there's obviously Steve Jobs, there was Bill Gates, there's Elon Musk, there's Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg. So there's Musk and Zuckerberg are still doing this. They have immense willpower. They have extraordinary ability to sort of focus. And oddly enough, I often think that these people would only be able to. to do what they did as far removed as they geographically are from politics. And if you go to Silicon Valley, you feel it. It's just politics is remote. But Musk is really into politics. Well, he is, absolutely. But sorry, what I meant by that is that I think it's, I cannot exaggerate enough what a change it was for me to move from an environment, Westminster, which is stuck and steeped

and suffocated in the past, where we as a country in Brexit basically had an argument with ourselves about the past, because that's what Brexit is. It's a triumph of nostalgia over a claim on the future. I then move to a place where there is no past. The place looks as if it was put up last Tuesday and where all your people are talking about is competing about the future

rather than arguing about the past. And again, that has downsides because history is actually important and place and culture. But it's odd. You can operate as if nothing existed before you because in California, nothing much did exist before you.

And it's a sort of almost unique environment which has yielded this sort of this leaping ambition that these technologies have in Silicon Valley. Porre, your final question. So my final question, Nick, and thank you very much for coming on. Give us the sense of where you might go next and how you're going to vindicate your life and give shape and meaning to the next, I guess, 10, 15 years before you might retire. What's the sense of what Nick Clegg wants to contribute to the world? I genuinely don't know. I feel incredibly lucky that, as I think I alluded to in the previous episode, I feel incredibly lucky to have had sort of three chapters to my kind of life,

10 years in Brussels, the European Commission, the European Parliament, and 12 years in the House of Commons. I've now got this, you know, very interesting and absorbing role as, well, I think probably now the sort of most senior sort of European in an exact role in one of these big American tech companies. I don't, I genuinely none of those chapters from one's the next

if I spent that much time trying to guess what the next one will be so I don't have an answer for you Rory other than the fact that I've got oodles of energy and lots of enthusiasm and curiosity which I hope will serve me well going forward. Well, thank you for being here. Thank you for so much of your time and we haven't even covered Ed Davey in his stunts.

No, we haven't. But weren't they good? You presumably, unlike Rory, thought that he fought a very good campaign. Oh, I think it's a sort of tactical campaign to extract 72 MPs from 30% of the vote is just as a sort of tactical focused campaign where you're basically running 72 almost by elections with a sort of fairly benign national overlay, which was which was, which was basically imagery rather than policy, but imagery which brought a smile to the face. I think it was just self-evidently, a tactical masterstroke. There you go, Rory. Disagreeing agreeably with Nick.

Pretty depressing as a form of politics. To discuss, Rory, next time. Anyway, thanks for all your time. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. So Rory, two hours of Nick Clegg. Enjoy it?

I did. I thought it was fascinating. I mean, he is such an interesting figure. You said in the intro that Fiona are often kind of spat at the screen and people often see him as a bit of a sellout. I agree with you. He's very charming. Obviously, I relate enormously.

his way of describing himself. Because I guess in some ways, I'm also somebody from a kind of, on the one hand, what seems to be a very traditional British background, but on the other hand, I was born in Hong Kong. I grew up in Malaysia, a much more kind of international side to me. And like him, arrived in Parliament and thought the whole thing was a disaster. One of the things I think he doesn't get into, which is probably true of both of us, is that one of the reasons we were so appalled is that probably because of our backgrounds, we went in with very romantic illusions about the whole thing. We had this idea. This was this incredibly sort of serious, public service, gentlemanly kind of demonstration of Britain at its graces, and of course found

ourselves in this horror chamber. Yeah. No, he was more negative about his experience in Parliament than I expected him to be. But I think he's come through it. And I felt on that when we got onto his modern day life and meta, I think you were right to say, look, we could go round and round in circles on this. I mean, I should apologise to Carol Cardwallader. If she's listening, the fact we didn't come back on him at Cambridge Analytica, but I thought if we did that, we're going to be here all day. Yeah. So there are three big things, I think. There's the Cambridge Analytica stuff. There's all the work around the way in which it contributes to social media contributes to polarization, which I think is, I don't think it's any way a coincidence that the beginning of the rise of

populism coincides quite closely with the founding of Twitter and Facebook in 2003-4. And of course, we saw the Facebook revolution in North Africa. And I really think it's difficult to understand Trump's triumph in 2016 without social media. So there's a lot we could have done on that. And I also think that in general, meta is a very controversial player. I mean, I've just got a lovely email from Nick Clegg saying we should sit down and have lunch and talk about why open sourcing AI is a good idea. I think it's pretty terrifying.

But also, as you said, he's employed by this company. And I think one of the things that I like about our interviews is we don't try to just bash our heads when we understand with a conservative or labor politician or an employee of Facebook that we're just going to get statistics back. But I think to say, I've read all the research. There is no research at all that suggests that social media is a contributor. to polarisation, there must be. But the fact is that we didn't have it at our fingertips.

No, I had it at the finger tips. I actually quoted three rather serious websites. I mean, there's the Amnesty Reports. There's the Centre for Humane Technology. And I quoted all of that at him before he came back coming and said there's no research at all. So anyway. I think on the experience of the coalition, it's interesting because, of course, he goes

in there. It was a very rare thing. And I was surprised at the time how quickly the country adapted to the idea of a coalition. I do think he got sucked in to be the spokesman for the hard stuff. I think he became a little bit of cover. I think Cameron used them quite schoolfully. But of course he believes it now, doesn't he? I mean, he's not, he doesn't present himself as being used.

I mean, what he's very much trying to say to you is, you're not listening to me, Alistair. I believed in those cuts. We did the right thing. You know, he's really defending. Politically, he took them from a position of considerable strength. No, the history of coalition governments is that usually the smaller party gets eaten up. Yeah. And that happened, go 57, six.

I think that's right. But oddly, his line on it is quite different to Ed Davies. So obviously, when we interviewed Ed Davy, Ed Davy basically says, Tories are horrible and, you know, anything good that they did, we did, and nothing bad they did was just them. He really is trying to own it. I mean, Nick Clegg is basically saying, I think that these cuts were right. We cut much less than you think. Alccerity was necessary. What we did in Britain was less than they did in Europe. We inherited a terrible situation in 2008. So, you know, It's, he doesn't, I mean, you may be able to be right that the Tories use him, but that's not how he perceives it. He perceives it that he did the right thing. Yeah. It was it. And I really like that. I wasn't aware of that thing he said about the papers would go to him and to Cameron. And if there was two ticks, it went through.

If it was a ticking across, they talked about it. There's two crosses. It just got dumped. Yeah. Quite a unique way of doing. And I think that underscores the fact that that's maybe an example of the fact that they weren't just a completely meaningful. partner. He genuinely had veto power over a loss of these policies. And that's why I think it's honest of him to say. He believes in what they would do. He was understood he was a junior

partner. He also made a better case actually for the coalition government than almost any of the conservatives we've interviewed. Do you remember he does this stuff about by the end of the time he had the fastest growing economy in Europe. We had the highest employment, you know, wages were beginning to rise in real terms. I'd kept my own. In some ways, actually, it would be interesting to see why the Conservatives, by the time they got into that election, were unable to say anything positive about themselves at all. I mean, he, and I remember saying this too during the election, it's completely astonishing that Rishi Sunnet's campaign,

given, for example, there are things, you know, we disagree on, but they could have said we've driven up on the PISA scales on literacy. They could have lent into that story, but they just completely gave up on talking about anything they achieved. It was all about Labor. Yeah. Yeah. I loved his brutal frankness.

about during those five days back in 2010 when the coalition was being put together of how he was. Because Gordon's big complaint at the time. Gordon, I think, I always felt that the arithmetic didn't add up. The Labour and the Lib Dems could never put anything together because the numbers weren't there. And Gordon did. And how did he think it could work? Because very weird, because as we point out on the show, put their numbers together,

they're still a long way short of a majority. So how are they going to get a majority? What a kind of supplying confidence and supplying minority government? government. That was his joke about one or two from Plied, put on some people from here. Try and keep it alive. Then you have this whole thing about, my famous spat with Adam Bolton on Sky was, we came on a day when Gordon had announced that he would definitely go by conference.

He made these big changes, a big announcement. And that was a sort of last gasp. But I can remember some of the phone calls that he was having with Nick Clegg. And every time Gordon would put the phone out, he would always say, you know, he's basically He's going with the Tories. He's just using us. He's just using us now. And it was true.

And as Dick said, that's exactly what he was doing. He was saying, look, Gordon's offering this, Gordon's offering that. He'd go off to see Cameron and get a bit more. Anyway, I think people, I hope people enjoyed it. And let me just finish with one thing. So he mentions that you took him out to lunch at Somerset House, which, for listeners, if you haven't been this really lovely way of having a cafe in this amazing traditional building,

which still, I think, until recently, had bits of the kind of tax office and inland revenue in it, as well as these kind of art galleries. And he asks you, should he go off to Facebook? And he says, you know, will it not be damaging to my reputation? And you say, go for it. I am still a little worried about this, and I'd be interested to see what listeners think. I do think quite a loss of people at the more sort of romantic, idealistic end, are a bit troubled and disappointed.

And remember, we're recording this in the week in which we've just seen, Boris Johnson and Tony Blair turn up at this extraordinary wedding in India, which is, you know, I think they spent tens of millions of dollars. They flew in the Kardashians. You have... Tony Blair and Boris Johnson didn't spend the money. But I do think the British public does have an idea that, you know, we want to believe that our politicians are quite austere, you know, take themselves very seriously, have a kind of

strong sense they're dignity and don't want to get too caught up in kind of money in Rasmataz. And so I do think there were some people who were a bit troubled by him going off to do that. Yeah. Look, I think the fact that, as I say, we'd become quite friendly by then. So I didn't ask him out for lunch. He phoned me up and said, I want to pick your brains about something. So we went to Somerset House, had lunch, and he said, I've been offered this amazing job. Told me what it was.

He said, what do you think? And I thought, gulp. But my instinct was, I thought his reputation at the time in the UK, I felt in the UK he was not going to recover from the coalition experience for a long time. He's not a Rasmataz guy.

Yes, the money's ridiculous and he's become quite wealthy. Not just quite wealthy. I mean, he'd be earned tens of millions of dollars. He's very, very wealthy. But I've never got the feeling that's what he's about. I think he still lives in the same house.

I think they still go on holiday in the same place. I think he just finds the issue is really, really interesting. So my top line advice was I think you should do it. if you're interested in the issues and I think you should accept

that to rebuild your reputation in the UK after the coalition experience probably helps to go abroad for a bit. He's now about living here. I think when he walks around the place, people don't abuse him. And he is right at the heart of something very, very interesting.

So I still think on balance. It was the correct advice. Well, thank you, Alice, for getting along. I thought it was great. Thank you. See you soon. Bye. Bye.