"They Haven’t Got a Clue How Remorseless the Pressure Is", Former Meta President Nick Clegg on His Life Lessons

0:00You are subject to a level of scrutiny that people in business have no clue, no clue at all. I mean, I'm amazed when you meet business, senior business people who are getting their knickers in a twist because there's a disobliging adjective about them on page six of the Financial Times.

0:15Nick Clegg:Welcome back to Giant Ideas. Last week, we had former UK Deputy Prime Minister and former President of Meta, Nick Clegg, talking about the fractious relationship between business, society and technology. We're going to talk to Nick about the different models of leadership he's seen right up close in politics and business. We'll also talk to him about getting the balance right between work and home, the secrets of a happy marriage, and what money does to happiness and drive. Nick, welcome back to John Ideas. We ask every guest in this second episode to think about their life in just three photographs.

0:48Nick Clegg:If you could look back at your life, what would be the three photographs that would define it? Well, two-thirds of them would be family. I mean, I'm like, I'm sure most of your guests tell you this, but I'm deeply shaped, steeped in, invested in and in love with my family in the wider sense and the nuclear sense. So I suppose the first photograph would be me. My mum's Dutch and I spent pretty well, me and I've got two brothers and a sister, we spent pretty well every minute of every holiday at my grandmother's quite sort of large rambling house in the Netherlands with a horde of cousins. My mum comes from a sort of matriarchy of four sisters who all had kids.

1:31And yeah, so there's a sort of photograph of my grandmother and all my aunts and all my uncles and hordes of cousins. And I think I did have a wonderful childhood, but the epitome of the sort of happiness that defined me as a kid was in a very large, loud, rowdy, quite, yeah, quite sort of active, sporty, outward bound sort of family. And it very much focused around my grandmother, my maternal grandmother. So that would be the first photograph.

2:00Nick Clegg:And a very international family, which is fair to say is very important to who you are as a person. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Much to the chagrin of, I remember, I remember once there was a double page spread in the Daily Mail with a very unfathlettering, rather jowly photograph of me with a huge banner headline saying, is there anything British about this man? which I suppose biologically, I suppose they had a point because my, as I said, my mum is Dutch. She's now elderly, but I speak Dutch and I was raised bilingually. Pity it was Dutch. I mean, it's next to useless language to learn because they all speak English better than we do.

2:37But anyway, and my dad is half Russian by birth. My paternal grandmother was Russian, was part of that, what you call sort of what they call white Russian diaspora that left Russia at the time of the revolution.

2:54Nick Clegg:Same as my wife's family. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, I don't know what route your wife's family took, but my grandmother, we were through the Baltic states and then quite a lot of that community of, in effect, dissidents of the revolutions and turbulence in the early part of the 20th century in Russia settled in Paris and London, and then many of them congregated around the Orthodox churches. So my grandmother used to take us to the incense-filled Orthodox, Russian Orthodox Church in central London. And the war, I mean, like every family, like yours know that as well, the war, of course, looms large.

3:30My mother was born in Indonesia prior to the war and then spent the war, unfortunately, in a Japanese prison of war camp in Indonesia before then going to the Netherlands.

3:43Nick Clegg:Anyway, yeah, so very international. But first photograph would be just immensely happy memories and oodles of cousins I'm still very, very close to. Okay. Tell us about your second. And the second one I think would be my sort of nuclear family. If I had Miriam and me, and we got our three lovely boys, Antonio, Alberto, and Miguel. Of course, I could pick endless photos, but one that I probably would pick is I remember during the – God, we were lucky – during the lockdown pandemic when we were living in the US. I don't know how we managed this, but we ended up, I mean, Christmas, pretty well on our own in a remote ranch in the wilds of Montana.

4:22I mean, how lucky are we? I'm not, I'm acutely aware of how lucky we were to do that. But it was, and who knows, maybe my memory's playing tricks. I keep saying to Miriam, I honestly being locked up with Miriam and the three boys in actually quite nice circumstances and being able to go to the beautiful wilderness of Montana, That was honestly one of the happiest times of my life. Was it really? Oh, I, well, she says, yeah, but you don't remember you were actually much more anxious about your parents. And so maybe, maybe I'm, maybe my sort of glass half full tendencies are, but my memory, I really, really, and particularly for someone who obviously spent a lot of time in politics and constantly feeling guilty as a young dad that I wasn't spending enough time when the kids were small.

5:05Maybe that was one of the reasons, but the sort of joy and relish, which I think back to the time we spent as a family of five together. It's certainly my memory. Yeah, it fills me with just, I just felt glowing with, I just loved it. I actually loved it.

5:21Nick Clegg:Was there an element for someone who is constantly having to be on, constantly performing out there, dinner after event, after, you know, just was there an element of relief of just being able to, you know that you're not allowed to? Yeah, well, I think everyone had that, didn't they? I mean, it did have, and again, of course, I'm very conscious that for many people it has much more tragic and agonizing and heartbreaking connotations. But I think that for a family like us, yeah, it just had such a simplifying effect. Everything was just suddenly totally slowed down, made a start. It just simplifies everything.

5:59And in our case, we were still, our kids, I mean, our two oldest boys now, you know, left home and one's about to leave university, the other one's working and so on. But, you know, then our kids were still at home. So we were lucky enough that we were all under one roof. And so, and, you know, we were still in that adventure phase of the United States. And anyone who's lived and traveled in the United States who's not American, and particularly if you're European, it's the great open spaces that, of course, is so special about that country. And so that would be my second photograph.

6:30Nick Clegg:Before you move on to your third, I want to ask you about Miriam. Yeah. And we need some Nick marriage guidance. So you - What does that mean? You are in a marriage with two extremely successful people who write at the top of their game. Mira is a fantastic lawyer and is helping to run UBS and is tipped to be a future star of Spanish politics. How have you figured out the kind of rhythm and the ebbs and flows with two really successful people of giving one person a go for a bit and then the next in terms of, you know, one person's going to spend maybe more time at home with the kids and then the other one will take a bit of time.

7:03Nick Clegg:Have you planned that out or has it just happened? Totally unplanned. Okay. Totally unplanned. Oh, no, I listened. The last thing I'm going to do, I don't know anything Miriam's going to do, we're going to somehow pretend that we've got it all sorted. Of course not. We're like any couple. You go through your ups and downs and you go through the stresses and strains of life. And gosh, having small kids when I was in this mad world of politics, when I was a party leader, trying to sustain a coalition, traveling up and down to Sheffield. Miriam quite rightly didn't want to give up her work. and honestly when I look back on it, I don't quite know how we did it.

7:40Probably because we were just young and had a lot of physical energy. So I know this sounds trite. I actually think when couples and families are under a lot of pressure, particularly with young kids and at the same time you're trying to build careers, physical resilience is actually an underestimated thing. I think the other thing perhaps is I think Miriam and I in different ways are not bad at just like leaving it outside the front door, just kind of not bringing it too much home. I think, is that conscious? I certainly went into politics. I was very, very conscious. I didn't want to constantly sort of pollute my home life.

8:18I mean, if you come to my home, you won't see a single cartoon or picture or anything. You know, I admire it and I'm not criticizing. I've never understood politicians who adorn their whole home with their politics. Why would you do that? So I think we always have a quite a separable thing. Probably a little bit more, particularly when the kids are small, a lot more antisocial than you might imagine. We just wouldn't. So I think if you're trying to do the career thing and the small kids, and then you're trying to spend all the time at dinner parties, you have to build time. So I think a little smidgen of antisocial-ness is not a bad thing.

8:53Nick Clegg:It's quite surprising to hear that. And what about the physical endurance? How do you foster that resilience and physical endurance? Yeah. Did you have a moment where you said, I'm trying to get fitter or I'm going to... Oh boy, I certainly remember. So this is in the spring of 2011. So a year, roughly a year after the coalition was formed and sort of my political career went, you know, there's all the excitement of 2010 and the absolute hammer blows within about a year and, you know, sort of goes from being hero to villain sort of thing. Yeah, as Deputy Prime Minister this is. As Deputy Prime Minister and all the controversies around the fiscal decisions we had to take post-2008, the controversies around university tuition fees.

9:33And I remember in the spring of 2011, I'd put on a little weight, smoking. I was exhausted. I would come home in the evening because, you see, we didn't live in Downing Street. When I became Deputy Prime Minister, I remember some perfectly dutiful person from the Home Office said, well, can we show you the apartments that you will occupy for your own security in Downing, it was behind Downing Street in that complex of buildings. Off I trotted to see some vast, cavernous, slightly sort of soulless place. And I went back to Miriam that evening and I said, so darling, you know, we've been, it's been suggested we move with the boys to, she just went, nope.

10:18I said, no, no, no, no, but surely, nope. And so I went back the next day, I said, I'm sorry, the answer is no. Surely, Deputy Private, I said, no, you don't understand. It's no. And then they retrofitted some security in our home and we had obviously a police presence outside our home. It turned out actually that that obduracy from Miriam was the best possible thing that could have happened to us as a family because it meant the kids who all went to the local state school pretty well at the end of the primary school at the end of the road.

10:44Nick Clegg:Yeah. Could continue to do that. We had a very nice community around us. They could do their, you know, their football, their swimming, all those sort of middle class things that little kids do. certainly in our neighbourhood, could all do that unmolested by politics. And I was doing all the mad sort of crisscrossing London. What was the question? You had a moment of realising you needed to get fit. Oh, sorry, sorry. That's right. I digress. And then in the spring of 2011, there were local elections, I think, maybe I'm misremembering this, but also this ill-starred referendum on changing the electoral system, which I sort of insisted on.

11:25And I remember crisscrossing the country with pneumonia. I literally had pneumonia and I was just popping antibiotics and pills. And I felt absolutely shockingly bad. And I remember at that point, I mean, I'm being a little melodramatic for effect, but I did remember thinking, wow, I've got to be careful here. I'm in my kind of forties and, you know, this kind of jobs, this is going to just knock me down physically. I'm either going to get very ill or worse. so that i i literally installed bought a rowing machine and put it in a sort of white hole cupboard and literally in the middle of the day would do that in the office yeah yeah fantastic like i was like some cubby hole upstairs in in and then i just i just try and go and i remember that i'd go to some sort of kickboxing classes uh very like six in the morning near so i yeah i definitely remember i definitely remember in the spring of 2011 thinking you know god i've got another four years of this, whatever it was, it's either going to kill me or I'm going to get my shit together.

12:23So I tried to get my shit together.

12:24Nick Clegg:Very good. Tell us about your third photo. Well, actually related to this, it might surprise you, but I actually think a photograph of my, of the, we can take your pick, either of the sort of huge loss of the election in 2015, or if you want to, you know, another version of the same thing, which is political failure or loss, the loss of my seat in 2017. And the reason I say that is I do, I've certainly found, and I'm sure this is some Chinese proverb and it's a perfectly trite and commonplace observation, but I've personally found that I've learned a lot more from failure than success. I just think it's taught me much more.

13:10If you just keep succeeding, you don't actually ask yourself a whole bunch of searching questions. You know, I was the leader of the tribe and I was extremely and remain exceptionally proud. I think we were, honestly, I think the government between 2010 and 15 was the best government this country's had in the last decade and a half, if not more, in very difficult circumstances.

13:30Nick Clegg:We'll need to bring you back for a whole episode on that. Well, yeah, okay. But no, I really do. I think it's just remarkable what we achieved in that five-year period, in the ruins of the 2008 financial crisis. And in a sense, if you look back on it in history, you've had 2008, body blow to the British economy, in 2016, this mad self-inflicted wound of Brexit, which is still bleeding. And in a sense, that government, which no one expected was going to last more than a few months, I think did a remarkable job to steady the ship and more. But my point is, political, certainly in my case, and if you're a party leader and if you're in government and if you then lose an election, there's nowhere to hide.

14:10I mean, it's so public. It's an excoriatingly public form. sure um and yeah it was interesting i i i um i remember going to speak to john major shortly after the election i was slightly sort of dazed about because you literally go from one moment to that i mean one moment every millisecond of your day yeah is taken up and is organized by other people then suddenly you're sitting there thinking well you know what's next yeah and um i remember john saying he's just a lovely guy and he was so thoughtful and he said Nick it's going to take you it's going to take you up to two years for you to really rewire your

14:46Nick Clegg:system and I remember we had my drink together I remember leaving and sort of thinking I'm sure but it does take a while and part of the process of sort of dealing with something where you feel you've done great things and then it sort of comes to a crashing halt um I found at least was that I just I think it's really important if something goes wrong you've got to you mustn't deny it you've got to face it you've got almost weirdly embrace it and say no i that it's you know one i i take the rap i screwed up or whatever maybe it was your fault not your fault maybe it's in your control not in your control but certainly in politics you'll find a lot of politicians since most political careers end famously in failure uh as enoch powell i think once said sort of almost denying the end point and then constantly trying to re-mitigate history and rewrite history and so on.

15:39Nick Clegg:Yeah. So I found that very useful. And I think, I think I developed much greater resilience out of it and much greater, yeah, probably a level of self-knowledge. Yeah. And it led you to have this amazing new act in right at the top of Silicon Valley. Yeah. How lucky was I? Yeah. Which is very unusual. And I think you are very unusual in having been right at the top of, top of government and right at the top of Silicon Valley. What do you think, if you're a modest for a minute, what, what is, what is it about you do you think has allowed you to achieve that? Because it is unusual. That's a nice leading question.

16:14Well, I think partly, but only partly, I think I was quite disciplined and not trying to sort of hanker after being a sort of bad smell and the sort of, you know, the parameters of the penumbra of politics. I never wanted to go to the House of Lords. I tried to abolish the place and replace it.

16:36Nick Clegg:and elected, you know, unfashionable idea of a little democracy in the place. But anyway, still not happened amazingly after sort of 150 years of discussion. But, and I certainly didn't want to do that. And I was too young to kind of just hang out on advisory boards. So I thought, and I think I was quite disciplined myself. When I arrived in Silicon Valley, I literally remember making a mental note saying, I'm never going to talk ever about what I've done before unless someone asked me. And I knew instantly I was only as good as what I was doing that day. And by the way, I mean, much though, much I admire about Mark Zuckerberg, these are very unsentimental places.

17:14They don't give a shit what you did before. You can do as fancy as you like. You either do the day job well. So I immersed myself in the day.

17:21Nick Clegg:So I think I had a willingness not to stand on ceremony, not to be proud of myself, not to cling on to past glories. I think I was quite good at just like letting go. It's a new chapter. I've got to throw myself into the new chapter. And anyway, I mean, that was the only way I could do that job. It was such an all immersive job. But I think maybe that's something I was able to do. Just let go. Just roll the punches. That's one thing. And then the only other thing I would say, which I found striking when I went to Silicon Valley, it's an odd thing to say, given how, in a sense, sort of ruthless and efficient these organizations look like, is if you've ever been in government, and particularly as I was, if you've been in a very senior role in government, and as I was if you're in government at a very difficult time, country was going through a financial and fiscal crisis and so on, you learn very quickly, you just have to take decisions.

18:15You just have to take them. And they might not, none of them might be good. Just take a decision. And I think that's one thing I've always been relatively unafraid of doing. And I'll pay the consequences. And if those decisions people don't like them, then I'll get, you know, beaten around the head and neck and so on. And boy, did that happen. But I've never, ever shirked from just taking a decision. And I think that's always served me relatively well. Whether I took the right ones or the wrong ones, you can debate. But I've always never, I've always accepted if you're in a senior position, whether it's in the private, take bloody decisions.

18:47That's what you're there for. You're there to make judgments and arrive at judgments. And the decisions come to you precisely because other people can't take them. So take them.

18:56Nick Clegg:Okay. And if you can compare the leaders that you came across in Silicon Valley, tech versus the leaders in government, not just David Cameron, but others around the world. You met all of them. What are the differences between what makes a really good prime minister and a really excellent CEO? I think they're more different than I might have imagined. Really? Yeah. I mean, as you know, people in tech, particularly Silicon Valley, love to denigrate politicians and all politicians are venal and all politics is ridiculous and so on. I actually will stand up for the political class. I think taking political decisions and carrying the country and making the excruciating trade-offs you have to do is way, way harder than running a business on the whole.

19:36Way harder. Because there's just so much. And you're subject to a level of scrutiny that people in business have no clue of. No clue at all. I mean, I'm amazed when you meet senior business people who are getting their knickers in a twist because there's a disobliging adjective about them on page six of the financial tie. Right.

19:53Nick Clegg:Quite thin-skinned. Oh, so thin-skinned. So that's the thing. I've, I've, I've, I've, one of the things I really learned was just like, boy, have I been subject to it. You know, endless people in Silicon Valley pontificate, as if they would find it very easy to become president of the United States or prime minister of the United Kingdom. They haven't got a clue, I don't think, quite how remorseless the pressure is. How unforgiving it is, how you can't hide anywhere. where most CEOs are, honestly, they're cloistered in cotton wool compared to certainly British politics, where you are exposed to a very, very aggressive newspaper industry, perhaps outside Australia, the most aggressive political press on the planet.

20:34You've also got this very levelling effect of being a constituency MP. Whether you like it or not, you can be as senior as you want. You have to turn up on a Thursday evening and listen to Mrs Smith complaining about the overgrown Llanda of their neighbor's garden and stuff. So I actually think senior politicians who get there and then make good decisions, I think it's a skill. I think a lot of CEOs often exaggerate their own. But having said that, certainly when I went to Silicon Valley, what I discovered was I moved from a world in Westminster which is all about cajoling and persuading. It's about language.

21:14You're losing language often in a disingenuous way or in a poetic way or a lofty way or a brutal way, but you're constantly communicating. Love or loathe Trump, he's an extraordinary communicator. I mean, absolutely astonishing, demotic communicator. It doesn't matter whether you're a 12-year-old kid with no education or a 65-year-old parent, the directness of his... Whereas in Silicon Valley, of course, I realized you're dealing with engineers who want systems and statistics. And it's just a much more data-driven, often acronym-driven world compared to the world of language, which politics is.