Unfriended: Why Nick Clegg’s departure from Meta is worse than you think...

It is easy to make fun of the Lib Dem leader-turned-tech bro, but his exit from Mark Zuckerberg’s company is an early warning of Trumpification, writes John Rentoul

You’d probably have to be older than 30 to remember Cleggmania; the brief outbreak of an innocent mass delusion that the Liberal Democrat leader was the new face the country needed.

After the first TV debate of the 2010 election campaign – the first televised leaders’ debate in British history – the Lib Dems overtook the Labour government in the opinion polls. Clegg’s party came top in three polls and overtook the Conservative opposition as well. It seemed that finally – finally – after so many decades of trying, the two-party system was breaking.

Clegg was relatively unknown, having become Lib Dem leader only three years earlier, and the format of the TV debate was a gift to him. The three-way leaders’ debate presented him as the equal of Gordon Brown and David Cameron, allowing him to strike a fresh-faced pose of utter reasonableness between the two poles of politics as usual.

The early high hopes were not sustained, however, as Brown and Cameron, sensing the danger, used subsequent debates to press Clegg on whether his well-meaning woolliness amounted to anything.

So the Lib Dems failed to break the two-party system and actually won fewer seats in that election than they had five years before – yet they still struck the gold of a hung parliament and a coalition government. Clegg became deputy prime minister, and four of his colleagues took their places around the cabinet table.

Then things started to go wrong. Going into coalition with a Tory government committed to deep public spending cuts was always going to be hard to sell, but the U-turn on student fees became an era-defining moment. Cleggmania was replaced by Clegg rage and for the Lib Dems it was “never glad confident morning again” – or, at least, not until July 2024.

Meanwhile, after doing some good work in moderating the excesses of George Osborne, the Lib Dems lost almost all their seats in 2015. Clegg himself was turfed out by the voters in 2017 and, at the age of 50, wandered into that peculiar twilight known as the afterlife of a politician.

In his case, it took him to the US, where he landed a job doing public relations for Facebook. His hand was therefore dipped in the blood of the company’s decision to suspend president Donald Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram, in response to the riot at the Capitol in January 2021, after Trump lost the election.

He was also party to the decision by the company, now named Meta, to reinstate Trump’s accounts, “with new guardrails in place to deter repeat offences”, in 2023. But you can see why Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s boss, might think that Clegg was not the right person to maintain good relations with the new Trump administration.

Hence yesterday’s statement from Clegg that he would be standing down from the “adventure of a lifetime”. He will be replaced by Joel Kaplan, a former staffer in George W Bush’s White House, a conservative who favoured free speech in the company’s internal debates about its responsibilities as a platform.

Clegg’s departure, three weeks before Trump’s inauguration for a second term, is a rather transparent gesture, though. It seems unlikely that Trump will conclude that Zuckerberg is really an ideological ally who was led astray by a British liberal – despite the $1m (£805,000) donation. He is more likely to think that Zuckerberg is weak and trying to appease him.

The trouble is that he would probably be right. Elon Musk’s extravagant support for Trump has distracted attention from a quieter scramble by Big Tech companies to ingratiate themselves with the incoming administration.

The darkening skies of the social media ecosystem will have consequences in Britain and the rest of Europe. Musk’s blatant interference in our democracy – there was another burst of posts on X (Twitter) yesterday – is already emboldening Tommy Robinson and the AfD. In Britain, his campaign against Keir Starmer has already tempted Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage to put their toes in the murky water of conspiracy theories.

If that is accompanied by the Trumpification of Facebook and Instagram, it could make the wider social media environment a hostile one for the Labour government. The best that Starmer can hope for is that Musk’s excesses divide the Conservatives and Reform – but the price may be the further toxification of our political culture.