87. Nick Clegg: Biden, Brexit, and kicking Trump off Facebook (Part 2)

26:41And then, again, something which I've, it wasn't my idea, but something which I built since I came to Silicon 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.

27:15And then it mutated into a two year suspension from Facebook, which expired some time ago. He's not come back. Yeah, no, he's posting a lot on Facebook. Oh, is he? Oh, yeah. I just follow his own thing. Truth social. No, no, no, he posts quite a lot. Let's just dive into this thing about 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 or hit back at the allegations that actually it's a threat to democracy. And Nick, remind us what Facebook does. Remind us what products it has, what household names you're representing.

27:56Right. So Meta is the parent company, if I can put it like that, of a collection of apps, which together are by far the world's largest social media company. Close to 4 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, 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.

28:37And then immersive, what's called immersive reality, where you put headsets on your head and you are in augmented virtual reality. So 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.

29:13I remain of the view, and actually the longer I've been at the company, and maybe it's because I'm sort of 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 10p coins to go to the local thing and put them into the slot to ring people.

29:48You 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?

30:20It 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 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.

30:53Suddenly 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 have worked out how to exploit it. Right. So like any, like literally like any communications technology, I mean, you know, radio was once the favored tool of fascists as a sort of propaganda tool. You know, whether it's email, whether it's the telephone, 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.

31:33But it's also used for very bad people trying to do very bad things. And so 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 the social media, oh, you're allowing too much hate speech. Hate speech is perfectly legal. One person's hate speech is another person's right to free expression.

32:09And 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 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? It's 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.

32:43Americans 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, which are 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.

33:28You'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, just two things. First, absolutely, you're quite right.

34:04Don't believe what 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 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, this is not Silicon Valley research, this is research done by independent academics.

34:48So 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 has gone down. In many other parts of the world, polarization has 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?

35:20And how about UN reports and amnesty reports and the center 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 around circles we were slightly here with yes hella um let me just jump in on hello what was really interesting i felt we did this wonderful interview with hella tawny right who's on your um 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 but okay yeah so but but so rory's big point and i'm not you know you're 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 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 polarization you really can't Really?

36:17No, it really 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 mean, listen, on Myanmar, for instance, that's a completely different issue. Was it right that Facebook was available to people in Myanmar when the company had not built enough language and local expertise to understand how the platform was being used or indeed abused at the time. Clearly, clearly wrong. And so background for listeners. In the Myanmar case, people were posting very aggressive anti-Muslim messages talking about Muslims flooding the country, talking about invasions, et cetera.

36:59So 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 Sheryl Sandberg at the time, I remember when Sheryl 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.

37:30And then as often as the case in life, when you say no to someone, it sort of goads them to sort of persuade you more. And then she said, well, come out and speak to Mark and me in California. And I did and so on. And 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.

37:59I think the company spent, was it$20 billion 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 kaboom. 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 adapt. So 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.

38:36So I'm not shy of making that case at all. 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 did? You urged me to do it. I said... So it's entirely your responsibility. No, no.

39:10What you actually said, what you said was you... Don't blush, Alistair Cowell. I'm not blushing. I'm not blushing. We went for lunch very near here. Someone's at house. You said, yeah. And you said, you think it's reputational death. Did I? Yeah. And I said, no, I think it'd be really interesting. Yeah, it was great. I also said, I think you need to get out of the country for a bit. Yeah. All of that is true. All of that is true. Very wise advice. And what about, because Silicon Valley, you didn't love it, did you? No, have you been there? You've been there, haven't you, Rory? I've been there, yeah.

39:38I tried to see you there last night, sir. Yeah. Yes, that's right. He didn't snub you again, did he, Rory? He did. He did. I was in your life. He wasn't in California. I snubbed him. I kept saying, no, I'm not coming in. It's an unfortunate pattern. I'm sorry, Roy, I was not there. It is, for those who have not been, 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 great sort of salt basin between San Francisco and San Jose. And it's just got these sort of sprawling industrial parks.

40:11But it is the location and the epicenter of 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. It's some of the most beautiful sort of camping and hiking and walking countryside. You can, so anyone who's planning a holiday to that part of the world, go up to, it's called the Lost Coast.

40:44It's, you can get lost in Redwood Forest and camp on isolated beaches. It's amazing. So I miss that. But it's quite 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, coming back and spending more time in London is you've got a financial industry and a political culture, a political center and a cultural center and a legal and everything's cheek by jowl. In Silicon Valley, everyone's chasing the same.

41:17And it's run by engineers who are remarkable people. But one of the things I've never worked 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 should have a fix and there should be an answer to everything. And it's kind of a, it was, you know, I come from the world of politics where you're always dealing with the imperfections of the world and trying to both guide and ride, you know, all the kind of changes 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 these these ethical issues you've got to you've got to kind of navigate that and just to just to pick up rory's earlier question not only do i think independent research is crucial in in answering these questions for yourselves rather than listening to people like me who quite rightly point out are paid by these companies.

42:19The 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 helped 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?

42:57I 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...

43:31Here'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, polarized debate between critics who explain an election outcome or a referendum outcome and say, oh, it must be technology.

44:07It must be the algorithm. Well, I have the faintest 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. 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 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.

44:41And yet people want to think that something they don't like is ascribed 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. Alasai, there's so much to come in on here. And I mean, I'm very, very anxious about you doing open source AI and the way in which that could develop.

45:22But obviously, we're going to get caught up in that. Listen, do you feel more or less powerful now than you did as a 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. 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 and the way that operates.

45:58But honestly, I think this is just such a sort of hackneyed thing. What about you then? No, 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 of 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 do 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? Clearly, it's an influential role. But it's nothing like and we shouldn't ever pretend that it is in any way 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 of of the tech elite in silicon valley so what is he like he's a remorselessly driven and competitive and energetic uh ceo he he he i mean like all of these Silicon Valley pioneers.

47:03And 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 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.

47:59It's a triumph of nostalgia over a claim on the future. I then moved 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 you kind of history is actually important in place and culture. But it's odd that 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.

48:35Prora, your final question. So my final question, Nick, and thank you very much for coming on. Give us a 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 as a European Commission, the European Parliament, and 12 years in the House of Commons.

49:15I've now got this very interesting and absorbing role as, well, I think probably now the most senior European in an exec role in one of these big American tech companies. I genuinely, none of those chapters from one to the next, have 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 giving us so much of your time. And we haven't even covered Ed Davey and his stunts.

49:49No, we haven't. But weren't they good? You presumably, unlike Rory, thought that he fought a very good campaign. Oh, I think as a sort of tactical campaign, to extract 72 MPs from 30 % of the vote is just 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 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.

50:27Anyway, 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 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 to 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, much more kind of international side to me, and like him, arrived in parliament and thought the whole thing was a disaster.

51:13One 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 serious public service, gentlemanly demonstration of Britain at its greatest, 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 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.

51:54I mean, I should apologise to Carol Cardwalader 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.

52:38So 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, 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 the statistics back. But I think to say I've read all the research and there is no research at all that suggests that social media is a contributor to polarization.

53:20There must be. But the fact is that we didn't have it in our fingertips. No, I had it at the fingertips. I actually quoted three rather serious websites. I mean, there's the Amnesty Reports. There's the Center for Humane Technology. And I quoted all of that at him before he came back to me 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.

53:51I 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 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... Yeah, but 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. And that happened, go 57 seats to 8 seats. I think that's right. But oddly, his line on it is quite different to Ed Davey's.

54:22So obviously when we interviewed Ed Davey, Ed Davey basically says Tories are horrible and anything good that they did, we did, and anything bad they did was just them. He really is trying to own it. Nick Clegg is basically saying, I think that these cuts were right. We cut much less than you think, austerity was necessary. What we did in Britain was less than they did in Europe. We inherited a terrible situation in 2008. So he doesn't – you may be right that the Tories used him, but that's not how he perceives it. He perceives it that he did the right thing. Yeah. And I really like that. I wasn't aware of that thing he said about the papers would go to him and to Cameron.

55:02And if there was two ticks, it went through. If there was a tick and a cross, they talked about it. There's two crosses, it just got dumped. Quite a unique way of doing it. And I think that underscores the fact that that's maybe an example of the fact that they weren't just a completely meaningless partner. He genuinely had veto power over a lot of these policies. And that's why I think it's honest of him to say - Yeah. He always understood he was a junior partner. Yeah. 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, we had the fastest growing economy in Europe, we had the highest employment, you know, wages were beginning to rise in real terms.

55:43I'd kept my eye on that. 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 to you during the election, it's completely astonishing that Rishi Sunak's campaign, given, for example, there There are things 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.

56:14Yeah. 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. that Labour and the Lib Dems could never put anything together because the numbers weren't there. And how did he think it could work? Because very weird, because as we point out in 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 supply and confidence and supply, minority government.

56:48That was his joke about one or two from Plaid. Try and keep it alive. And 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, big announcements. And that was the 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 down, he would always say, you know, he's basically, he's going with the Tories. He's definitely, he's just using us. He's just using us now. And it was true.

57:20And as Nick said, that's exactly what he was doing. He was trying to, 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 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 the kind of tax office and land revenue in it as well as these kind of art galleries and he asks you should he go off to facebook and you say base and he says will it not be damaging my reputation?" And you say, go for it.

58:00I am still a little worried about this and I'd be interested to see what listeners think. I do think quite a lot of people at the more romantic idealistic end are a bit troubled and disappointed. 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 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 of dignity and don't want to get too caught up in kind of money and razzmatazz.

58:42And 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 um went to somerset house had lunch and he said i've been offered this amazing job told me what it was i said what do you think and i said gulp um but i my instinct was i thought his reputation at the time in the uk well i felt in the uk he was not going to recover from the coalition experience for a long time gotcha he's he's not a razzmatazz guy yes the money's ridiculous and he's very he's become quite wealthy but not just quite not just quite well i mean he'd be very well 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're still going holiday in the same place i think he just finds the issues really really interesting so my my top line advice was uh 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 back living here i think when he walks around the place people don't abuse him so and and he is 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