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Nicholas Peter Clegg, CBE (born 24 May 1936) is a former managing trustee and chairman of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. Life. Clegg is the son of Hugh Clegg, CBE, and his wife (married 1932) Kira von Engelhardt (1909–2005), a Russian émigré and daughter of Baltic-German aristocrat Arthur von Engelhardt.
- Businessman
- Nick Clegg
Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg (born 7 January 1967) is a British media executive and former politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015 and as Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2007 to 2015.
Sir Nick Clegg joined Facebook in October 2018 as Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications after almost two decades in British and European public life.
- President, Global Affairs
- Overview
- Early life and political career
- Leadership of the Liberal Democrats and deputy premiership
- Role with Facebook
Nick Clegg (born January 7, 1967, Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, England) British politician and corporate executive who served as leader of the Liberal Democrats (2007–15), deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom (2010–15), and vice president of global affairs and communications at Facebook (2018–22). Since February 2022, he has served a...
Clegg, who had a Dutch mother and a half-Russian father (whose aristocratic mother fled to Britain after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution), grew up bilingual, speaking English and Dutch; he later became fluent in French, German, and Spanish. He was educated at Westminster School, London, and he studied anthropology (M.A., 1989) at the University of Cambridge, political philosophy (1989–90) at the University of Minnesota, and European affairs (M.A., 1992) at the College of Europe in Brugge, Belgium. He traveled extensively and worked at various jobs in Germany, Austria, Finland, the United States, Belgium, and Hungary.
In 1994, having briefly tried his hand at journalism, Clegg became an official at the European Commission in Brussels, where he progressed to become adviser to Sir Leon Brittan, a European Union (EU) commissioner and a cabinet minister in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Clegg helped negotiate the admission of China to the World Trade Organization, in addition to aiding Russia in its bid for membership. Brittan regarded his young adviser as one of the brightest future politicians of his generation and urged him to pursue a career as a Conservative member of Parliament (MP). Clegg, however, felt that the Liberal Democrats far better reflected his own internationalist outlook. In 1999 he was elected as a Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament.
After taking office, Clegg sought to streamline the Liberal Democrats’ process of decision-making and policy formulation; previous leaders had expressed frustration because they were required to consult members more widely than leaders of other major British parties. He was also challenged with maintaining the relevancy of the Liberal Democrats, the smallest of the three main British parties. In the lead-up to the May 2010 general election, Clegg’s popularity surged, particularly because of his widely praised performances in Britain’s first-ever televised party-leader debates; in some polls the Liberal Democrats challenged the Conservatives for first place. In the event, however, the Liberal Democrats finished a disappointing third and won 57 seats, a loss of five from the 2005 election. Clegg, however, was a key figure in the subsequent negotiations as both the Conservative and Labour parties—neither of which had secured a majority—sought to form a coalition government. The Liberal Democrats ultimately joined the Conservatives in a coalition government with David Cameron as prime minister and Clegg as deputy prime minister.
Clegg and Cameron seemed to develop an easy rapport, partly because of their similar backgrounds and shared age (both were 43 upon ascent to governing). Moreover, their parties were quick in negotiating the compromises necessary to govern together. The deficit-reduction program rolled out by the government in June and enhanced in October called for deep spending cuts that proved extremely unpopular with Liberal Democrat voters, resulting in the party’s worst showing since the merger of Liberal and Social Democratic parties in local council elections in England in May 2011. Although there were scattered calls for Clegg’s resignation as leader, support for him within the party in general remained strong. Already disgruntled over the government’s raising of university tuition in December—an action the party had opposed during the 2010 election campaign—many Liberal Democrats were upset at the Conservatives’ active opposition to the referendum to replace the first-past-the-post electoral system with the alternative vote, which had been put forward by the Liberal Democrats and was soundly rejected by British voters. In the wake of those developments, the Cameron-Clegg partnership continued on noticeably more businesslike footing.
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It grew tenser in July 2012 after the government’s failure to engineer the transformation of the House of Lords into a more democratic chamber, which had been a priority for the Liberal Democrats. Rebellious Conservatives joined Labour in stifling a bill that proposed shifting the partly appointed, partly hereditary body to one with 80 percent of its members elected to single 15-year terms and 20 percent appointed. Frustrated by Cameron’s failure to marshal enough Conservative support to ensure that the bill became law, Clegg retaliated by withdrawing the Liberal Democrats’ support for a Conservative-advocated constitutional measure to reduce the number of members of the House of Commons from 650 to 600.
In local elections held in much of the United Kingdom in May 2013, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats lost considerable ground to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which argued for British withdrawal from the EU. The rising tide of Euroskepticism among a significant portion of the British electorate had even greater consequences for the internationalist Clegg a year later, when the Liberal Democrats not only foundered badly in May 2014 elections for local councils but fell from 11 seats to 1 in elections to the European Parliament that were won by the UKIP. Again, some Liberal Democrats called for Clegg’s replacement as party leader.
Out of office, Clegg, long an internationalist, actively opposed Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit). Besides authoring a guide to reversing that decision, How to Stop Brexit (and Make Britain Great Again), in 2017, Clegg played an active role in the People’s Vote, an effort to compel the government to hold a second referendum on Brexit. He was awarded a knighthood in the 2017 New Year Honours.
In 2018 Clegg became vice president of global affairs and communications at Facebook, at a time when it faced intense scrutiny and criticism for the way its platform had been used to spread false information and target voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He was instrumental in the formation of Facebook’s external oversight board, which was tasked with reviewing the company’s decisions on what content to take down from or leave on the platform. Clegg also led the company to engage more openly with its critics and the media.
16 feb 2022 · Former UK deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg has been promoted to a new senior role at Facebook's owner Meta. A Facebook post from the company's boss Mark Zuckerberg said Sir Nick would become...
Sir Nick Clegg is President, Global Affairs at Meta. He joined the company, then called Facebook, in 2018 after almost two decades in British and European public life.
Nick Clegg is president of global affairs at Meta. Clegg joined the company, then called Facebook, in October of 2018 after twenty years in British and European public life.
