Since arguably two of these factors were the fault of the Lib Dems under Clegg’s leadership, this is a bold gambit indeed. But the good news for anyone in the UK economically or psychologically crushed by the legacy of the Lib Dems in power is that, according to Clegg, life can get much better. The naysayers about the internet are mostly scaremongering. Regulated correctly in order to keep the flow of information suitably open, transparent, and globalized, new technologies have the power to “empower ordinary people in many ways”.

But who does the public-school-educated multimillionaire Clegg think of as ordinary people? In one section of the new book, he gives us a glimpse. He imagines an ordinary couple with the ordinary names of Clarice and Matteo, and with school-age children called Laura and Pietro. And what such ordinary people allegedly long for is the sort of obsequious daily hand-holding normally afforded only to multimillionaires like him.

First thing in the morning, Matteo asks his personal AI assistant for a “quick and easy breakfast recipe” he can prepare for Clarice and the kids, while Clarice brainstorms the most efficient driving route to work with her own bot. Once at the office, the couple each uses their personal helpers to write emails and presentations, giving Matteo more “time” and freeing Clarice up for the more “creative” bits of her job. Later, Clarice attends a doctor’s appointment, getting AI-powered tips about nutrition, and telling her assistant to “incorporate [them] into her weekly shop” as well as to pass them on to Matteo’s AI assistant too.

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Back at home after work, Matteo gets his assistant to help make Pietro’s boring history homework more interesting; while Clarice uses hers to draft a message for a new nutrition-focused chat group she has just joined, “since she feels uncertain about what to say”. She is pleased when the result gets her some friend requests and likes in the group. At the end of the day, the AI helps smooth out one of the pitfalls of modern marriage: “Matteo, sick of the song Clarice has chosen for the morning alarm, instructs his assistant to liaise with hers and pick a new song based on their joint preferences.”

This, then, is the family of the future: they don’t know how to cook, navigate, or communicate in written form; they are obsessed with health as the central goal in life; they have limited powers of concentration, and find traditional forms of information boring; they are delighted with the validation of faceless strangers for things they didn’t accomplish themselves. They passively outsource many decisions, and are good at following instructions issued by a screen. If this is digital empowerment, then I’m not sure I want to see enslavement.

There’s also the question of what Clarice and Matteo — and by extension, us — will do with all that extra time, when they have dispensed with unnecessary tasks and become so much more efficient. One possible answer thrown up by Clegg’s book is “look for another job”, as bosses realize that, thanks to new technologies, they don’t need warm bodies to come to work at all. Clegg is enthusiastic about the opportunities AI affords for increased productivity, and sanguine about the likely resulting job cuts: they will mostly happen quite slowly, he says, and mainly only in white-collar sectors, where people should be offered “flexicurity” and helped to retrain. What role members of the laptop classes might retrain for in an AI-dominated world is left disconcertingly vague: presumably, we can’t all become Lib Dem councillors.

Perhaps, instead, our ordinary couple will be turning their minds to higher things. Clegg is keen to talk about the new possibilities for “creativity” afforded by technology, but it turns out that here too, he means typing commands: creating text, images, and music “without the sort of specialist skills required to do so in the recent past”, so we too can become “writers, graphic designers, filmmakers and musicians”. So whether it’s AI pushpin or poetry, it seems it won’t be taking up a lot of brain cells — even leaving aside the question of what satisfaction there could really be in a life spent spawning generic bits of art-slop by hitting return.

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A more realistic answer looks tempting: there will be more time to talk to bots. In the world Clegg approves of, there’s always a therapy bot or a virtual friend available to companion you throughout any life transition (including, one assumes, redundancy). You don’t have to spend a week waiting for your next appointment; you can get all that consoling attention and validation on tap, anytime. And if Clarisse gets into an unhealthily co-dependent state with an AI and starts preferring it romantically to Matteo, that’s cool too. “Ultimately, in a free society, if mature adults want to spend their time hanging out with human-like AI agents, in the full knowledge that they are machines and not people, we should find ways to accommodate these relationships”, says Clegg.

He would no doubt argue that I’ve offered a caricature. If people wish to switch the screens off and do something ambitious and scary instead — read Proust, climb K2, talk to a human, or whatever it is — they still can and will. Skeptical of claims that societies are being inadvertently shaped by smartphone technology as much as they are shaping it, he clearly allows that new preferences can come into being as a result of prolonged contact with the internet — as is obvious from the fact that, by his own admission, advertising is the thing it mainly sells. Yet, he also seems to place a great deal of faith in the abilities of consumers to scrutinize their first-order preferences with second-order rational attitudes of approval or disapproval, and to act on the result.

That is, he thinks people can refuse to act on any more basic preferences or impulses of theirs, which they ultimately do not think worth having. It seems to be this conviction that allows him to brush off worries about Big Tech’s responsibility for people falling prey to algorithmic-induced rages, conspiracy theories, or screen addictions. As long as we are talking about adults, it can be assumed that those concerned ultimately rationally endorse their own behavior in such matters, and Big Tech cannot really be blamed for facilitating it.

All of this is classical liberal fare, as you might expect. It is also deeply unsatisfying, when dressed up as critique. Without a theory of what human life is for, or what makes for a flourishing life, it leaves a person’s second-order preferences no more reliable than the first-order ones they supposedly police. It means Clegg is not going to spend much time worrying about the wider consequences of AI turning us into puzzled, cackhanded strangers to the world, unable to deal with the simplest of chores without prompts. And nor is he going to think much about what else we might be losing along the way, as we move towards what he calls “hyper-personalization”; things like conviviality, patience, self-denial, or even just a sense of achievement for getting out of the house. At one point, he asks: “Why would one take a time-consuming trip to a Blockbuster video store… when Netflix or Amazon Prime had vastly more movies available, which were never out of stock, and which you could stream directly to your television?”. He doesn’t seem to know why nostalgia for the Blockbusters era is even a thing.

Equally, as long as it does not pertain to kids, Clegg scrupulously abstains from substantive judgment about the content of what people are consuming online. For on what grounds could he convincingly criticize them, assuming it is what rational people want? This means that in a book about the ethics of the internet, there is only one mention of adult pornography; and that gestures towards what other people think of it, not him.

Time and again, he raises ethical issues about internet content, or patterns of use, which he says we should “consider”; but then draws no conclusion at all, or else downplays them as overblown. Instead, all of Clegg’s manifestly aerated moral judgments are about how fast or slow, open or closed the internet will turn out to be; for a slower, more fragmented network means the people can’t get what they want. While he sounds intensely relaxed about AI-derived unemployment and consequent fundamental changes of ways of life, he sounds positively panicky about the prospect of a balkanized “European internet” versus an “American internet”, each rival system differently regulated and resourced:

“…there won’t be one great watershed moment when we wake up one day and find the internet has changed beyond recognition… Rather, like the proverbial frog in the pan of boiling water, we will probably barely notice the small, gradual changes, but by the time we do it will be too late.”

In short, Clegg represents the sort of person in charge of the virtual world these days, and his book is an instructive, terrifying read because of it. “What do we want the internet to be?” he asks early on; but his implied conclusion is that there couldn’t possibly be an interesting answer, because there is no “we”. Individual preferences radically differ, and the only thing that binds people stuck on screens together is their collective hunger to have their preferences satisfied, as quickly and smoothly and effortlessly as possible. And in that matter, Zuckerberg or his metaverse equivalent is here to help.

To understand Sheffield Hallam, you first need to forget everything you thought you knew about Sheffield. Unlike the city’s industrial east, Hallam’s neighbourhoods are invariably described as “leafy”, and its houses – stacking up the hills in sometimes alarming angles – climb up into the Peak District.

Its politics are similarly at odds with the rest of Sheffield. While Margaret Thatcher was reviled across the rest of South Yorkshire, the constituency gave her its strong backing. Then, as the country at large swung towards New Labour in 1997, Hallam’s Labour vote actually dropped. Previous Tory and Labour voters both threw themselves behind a new loyalty — the Lib Dems, who kept a tight grip on the area, with more than 50% of the vote, for several elections; first with Richard Allan, and then Nick Clegg. 

But at the end of the coalition years, Labour support soared, with (the now metro mayor of South Yorkshire) Oliver Coppard contesting the seat in 2015. He didn’t quite manage it, but two years later Nick Clegg was ejected anyway. In the most recent election, Labour’s majority was wafer-thin: just 712 votes, or 1.2% of the vote. It’s now the only Labour/Lib Dem marginal in the country.

Here’s another statistic that tells you just how unusual Sheffield Hallam is: Labour’s current candidate and until recently local MP Olivia Blake won in 2019 with just 34.6% of the vote. That was the lowest vote share for a winner anywhere in Britain, as the Conservatives still took a big chunk of the votes. In fact, looking at the numbers, Hallam should still be a Tory seat.

Sheffield-based geographer Alasdair Rae has produced a fascinating chart from the 2019 election (see below), showing how constituencies voted by their level of deprivation. At the top left is the UK’s most deprived constituency, Liverpool Walton. And at the bottom right is the UK’s least deprived constituency, Wokingham. There’s a clear blue/red pattern, as more deprived constituencies generally voted Labour (though Johnson’s Tories made some big inroads), while less deprived constituencies generally voted Conservative, or occasionally Lib Dem.

Hallam (circled), however, bucks the national trend. It’s the ninth least deprived constituency in the country — its children are well-educated, its people are relatively healthy, its crime rates are low. And despite all that, it elected a Labour MP.

Blake’s theory is that Hallam is not immune to the problems faced by the country, rather the constituency embodies them. “It’s definitely been trending Left,” she tells me, which she thinks is related to an influx of groups like young families: “The demographics have shifted quite considerably in our favour.” She also argues that Hallam’s apparent affluence can be misleading. “On paper, you might look at Hallam and think ‘it’s the wealthiest seat in South Yorkshire, they’ll be isolated from the cost-of-living crisis,’ but that’s certainly not what I’ve been picking up.”

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Data on constituencies can be a bit patchy, but it’s not clear that age is a big factor in this Left shift. It’s true that the number of people in their 20s has gone up. But among people in their 30s, it’s pretty flat, while there are now far more 70-somethings. Perhaps there’s some truth, though, in the notion that the younger middle classes now tend to be more Left-leaning than in previous generations, and maybe the broader Left-wing bent of the city has seeped into this wealthier outpost. Brexit is also likely to be a factor — Hallam voted strongly for Remain.

But national trends can only tell us so much, particularly when a race is as neck-and-neck as it is in Hallam. So much for the parties then, what of the personalities of the two people in with a chance? 

I’ve spent time with both, and there’s quite a clear difference in style between Blake and Shaffaq Mohammed, the Lib Dem contender. Where Blake is bubbly, Mohammed is more sedate. Mohammed lives in industrial Tinsley, has a family background in steel, and speaks with an accent that blends his Kashmiri heritage and a Sheffield inflection. Blake’s middle-class background, meanwhile, hews closer to most Hallam constituents; her Yorkshire accent is nearer to what some describe as “Northern RP” — clean consonants, flat vowels. Mohammed is only ever seen wearing a suit and tie, Blake is a bit more dressed down. The snap election has been awkwardly timed for them both: Mohammed is in the midst of renovations on his house, while one of Blake’s dogs needs to have an eye operation.

When I join them, the gathering of Labour activists for Blake’s round of canvassing includes a few local councillors and a student who has been out every day since his exams finished  Despite being elevated to the House of Lords a few years ago, Baroness Blake of Leeds clearly still relishes street politics. 

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There’s an odd mix of houses along the canvassing route near Endcliffe Park — palatial Victorian villas, more modest bungalows, and low-rise blocks of flats. The voters are similarly eclectic. One describes himself as “apolitical” and refuses to buzz Blake into his block of flats so she can post her leaflets. Another is delighted when he clocks who Blake is: “The animal lover!” he cries. “Yes!” agrees Blake. He goes on to talk to her in quite some detail about recent happenings among the local badger populations — before confirming he will indeed vote Labour. 

At another home, a crisp voice over the intercom is apologetic, but firm. “Ok, I’m going to stop you right there,” she instructs Blake. She would vote for Labour, were it not for one issue: their policy of levying VAT on private school fees. “Under no circumstances whatsoever will I ever vote Labour unless that policy changes,” she tells Blake, explaining that she works for a private school that may have to close. “I would not send any child of mine to the state schools in the area,” she avers. As we walk away, Blake says that she believes claims of school closures are a bit “overblown”, and that this isn’t the aim of the policy.

Blake herself is on the Left of the Labour Party, having served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and being less in tune with the current Starmer leadership. I ask her how concerned she’s been about the way figures on the Left, such as Diane Abbott, have been treated. “Everyone was a bit concerned about Diane, but I’m pleased we got to the right decision about that,” she says.

The following week, Shaffaq Mohammed suggests a meeting outside at Endcliffe Park café, meaning right next to the funfair. It feels very on brand for the Lib Dems, whose national campaign has been themed around Ed Davey doing various silly stunts. Mohammed discloses that he was invited along to Thorpe Park with Davey, but “me and rides don’t get on”.

Mohammed — or “Shaff” as his team call him — is also the leader of the Lib Dem group on the council. On the doorstep, he explains that voters’ biggest issues are the NHS and the environment, in that order. He draws particular attention to dentistry, explaining that he, like many, has been waiting for an appointment at the Charles Clifford Dental Hospital to have a tooth fixed.

On the environment, he talks at length about sewage dumping, describing the number of spills in Hallam as unacceptable. He’s tried to create a wedge with Labour on this — one of Mohammed’s recent leaflets claimed that “our Labour MP voted with the government to let [Yorkshire Water] off the hook”. The vote he’s referring to is an amendment to bring Ofwat, the water regulator, under the Growth Duty — which requires regulators to have regard for promoting economic growth. Mohammed claims this could allow water companies to escape fines for polluting rivers. Blake doesn’t comment on the specifics of that piece of legislation, but her spokesperson told me: “This is a feeble attempt by the Lib Dems to claim credit for the hard work through which campaigners and the Labour frontbench raised the issue to the top of the political agenda.”

Despite losing his seat more than five years ago, Nick Clegg still looms large over Hallam. As revealed by the Financial Times, Clegg has donated to the local Liberal Democrats — though how much exactly is unclear. Mohammed tells me that they’re occasionally in touch. He admits that the student fees issue — which did so much to put some voters off Clegg — still comes up on the doorstep. Whether that’s fair or not is one thing (Mohammed points out none of the parties are now proposing to cut tuition fees), but it might still linger with some of those late 20-somethings who have moved to Hallam.

So who will win come 4 July? On one reading, Labour should have it sewn up. In 2019, “Peak Corbyn” was well and truly over, while Sheffield Hallam’s Labour MP in the previous parliament, Jared O’Mara, was booted out of the party for making misogynistic and homophobic comments, and was later convicted of fraud. If the Lib Dems couldn’t take the seat even then, surely an ascendant Labour Party will do so comfortably? Most bookies are currently backing Labour to hold it — offering only 1/5 on this outcome, vs 3/1 on the Lib Dems. 

But things aren’t quite so straightforward. Not least because 2024 may well see a collapse in Conservative support as their campaign continues to falter. The party only chose its Hallam candidate a few weeks ago — Isaac Howarth, currently a student at Sheffield University — and there’s no sign of Tory leaflets in the constituency. It’s fair to say they’re not looking to put up a big fight here.

If the Tory vote crumbles, things become unpredictable. Should those supporters break for the Lib Dems, as in 1997, then they could yet snatch Hallam back. And Mohammed points out that if you tot up the votes from this year’s local elections across all of Sheffield Hallam’s five wards, the Lib Dems come out comfortably on top — with 13,133 votes to Labour’s 9,814. 

But the momentum Labour has at the national level will be hard to overcome. Blake describes herself as “pretty confident” about winning. “[In 2019] we had to go back three or four times, just to our voters… this time we’re trying to persuade other people to vote for us.” For those of us staying up to report on the election, a long night is likely. The smart money is on a recount — but as ever in Hallam, I wouldn’t bet on it.

***

A version of this piece appeared in The Sheffield Tribune.

1. The reincarnation of Nick Clegg
2. The escape from California
3. Clegg battles Britain
4. The rise of Facebook fraud
5. How Clegg wields his superpower

1. The reincarnation of Nick Clegg

In July 2018, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was a mid-tier guest speaker at Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s inaugural “Democracy Summit” in Copenhagen. No longer an MP after being unceremoniously dumped from parliament in 2017 by a bar manager now in jail for fraud, Clegg was one of a number of former politicians who, having lost power, believed democracy was in trouble. Also appearing with the former Lib Dem leader were the two headliners that day: Joe Biden and Tony Blair.

The themes of that summit reflected the zeitgeist of the moment: the dangers of fake news and technology, particularly on social media platforms. For much of that year, Facebook had been under intense public scrutiny following revelations that people’s private data had been secretly collected and sold to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The “Cambridge Analytica scandal” had seen Facebook’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg, dragged before Congress where he had given a hesitant and unconvincing performance in front of the world’s media, becoming a lightning rod for all the anxieties of the moment.

Rasmussen’s Democracy Summit was, then, another potential PR problem for Facebook. Yet, as one of the key sponsors, it also offered an opportunity to show how seriously it was now taking its responsibilities. Facebook’s Vice President of Global Policy Solutions at the time, Richard Allan, headed up the company’s delegation. Allan was the former Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam who gave up his seat for Clegg in 2005, acted as his campaign manager, and was then granted a peerage by the Coalition in 2010. Also in attendance was Facebook’s former vice president, Joanna Shields, who had also been given a peerage under the Coalition, becoming a minister under David Cameron and then Theresa May’s “special representative on internet crime and harms”.

So, while Clegg was a rather bruised former politician, he remained a very well-connected one. When the conference ended, he did not even have to sort his own travel home: Blair offered him a lift back to London in his private jet. Here was a taste of the gilded life he might aspire to in his political retirement, the life of a former politician no longer constrained by democracy.

But Clegg, thanks to that summit, has taken quite a different path from almost any previous British politician. He had never been that interested in technology, according to those who know him. But as Allan told me recently: “The event was one of those moments which helped Nick understand how politically significant all this was.” Within a few months, Clegg had joined Facebook, and relocated to the US. He has since risen to become one of the most senior executives at its parent group, Meta — no longer merely deputy prime minister of the UK, but, according to those I spoke to in Whitehall, effectively “Foreign Secretary of Facebook”.

Clegg’s importance at Meta was revealed last year when he negotiated both his return to London and promotion to “President of Global Affairs”; a position which reportedly earns him upwards of $15 million a year. Six years after his career low-point, Clegg is now Zuckerberg’s trusted consigliere, the political representative for a $1 trillion corporate behemoth. He is the man paid to ensure Zuckerberg is not exposed to the sort of political scandal that dragged his name through the mud in 2018.

In short, Clegg has it all: not only the kind of power, wealth and settled family life back in London that few former politicians could ever dream of, but also his reputation repaired and even enhanced. No longer a humiliated political loser, he is now the man tasked with making the world’s most important media company more socially responsible and saving democracy from the populists in the process.

While Clegg remains relatively guarded about this new life — he would not agree to be interviewed for this piece — his wife Miriam González Durántez’s Instagram page is like a show reel for what it all looks like. There he is with his wife one moment, hiking in Africa, smiling for the camera, soaked in the mists of Victoria Falls; then in the United States; and then back in England walking in the countryside. “Happy birthday Nick Clegg!” Miriam writes below one image of the pair of them. “Life with you is an incredible journey.”

“Y’all shooting Clarkson’s farm?” one of Miriam’s friends jokes in reply to her birthday post, the rolling English countryside clearly visible behind them. “I’ve watched two episodes and I’m hooked!” Miriam replies. “At least it’s anti-Brexit!!” For Miriam the nature of her husband’s departure from politics — and what came soon after — remains a source of bitterness. Under a news story that she posted on her Instagram feed about David Cameron returning to frontline politics as foreign secretary, she remarks, “Clearly getting bored at home,” before adding, acidly: “And yet home is where he truly belongs.” When a friend replies, “I thought it was George O you really hated”, Miriam posts a laughing emoji. When another adds, “what a joke of a man”, Miriam responds with a heart.

But is her husband really so different from Cameron? “The only difference,” one senior government minister said to me, “is that David is back in government trying to launder his reputation — whereas Nick is selling his to launder somebody else’s.”

This is central to any consideration of Clegg’s new life: is he really the liberal constraining influence on Meta that his defenders claim, the man making Facebook that little bit more responsible for the good of us all? Or is he, actually, an enabling force, giving a veneer of respectability to a company that is so big it has moved beyond the control of mere national governments and remains just as socially irresponsible as ever? For, according to those I have spoken to in the British Government and law enforcement over the past few months, Meta’s influence is not becoming more benign under Clegg — quite the opposite.

I was told by a senior minister that, in the UK today, 10% of all crime happens on a Meta platform. “That’s not online crime,” he said, “but all crime.” And it is getting worse. Not only has online fraud exploded on Facebook marketplace, but child exploitation is being made easier by Meta’s decision to ignore pleas from law enforcement agencies and government ministers not to roll out “end-to-end encryption” across its platforms, in effect making it much easier for paedophiles to groom and abuse children without anyone knowing. “They are responsible for an awful lot of harm in this country,” another minister told me.

And yet what is being done about it? According to those I spoke to in government, Britain has become a global soft touch for online criminals, attracted to the country by the ease of operating in English, our economic openness, speed of online payments — and, crucially, the utter inability of the state to do anything about it.

2. The escape from California

Clegg’s time in California was important, say those who know him, because it allowed him to get close to Facebook’s “C-suite” executives — in particular, Zuckerberg himself. For much of this time, his boss was Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s all-powerful number two. When she stepped down in the summer of 2022, Zuckerberg relied instead on a team of lieutenants, one of whom was Clegg. With this direct relationship established, Clegg felt secure enough to move back to Britain.

According to Meta, he only occasionally interacts directly with the British Government — his job is now too important for that. “He spends most of his life on a plane,” I was told. In January, he was in Switzerland for meetings about AI; in December, in Brussels to talk to the EU; in October, Greece for another summit about democracy; and over the summer, India, where he was greeted like a visiting head of state.

Clegg’s job at Meta is to set overall strategy for dealing with the world’s most powerful regulators, oversee Meta’s own governance strategy and manage the politics that inevitably come with its extraordinary global influence and wealth. In total, there are now 3 billion “monthly active users” on Facebook, 2 billion on WhatsApp and 1 billion on Instagram. If Meta is now the size of a country, Clegg is both its cabinet secretary and its chief diplomat.

As such, Meta is not just another social media company, but a monster of global proportions: an international news platform, publisher, marketplace and advertising giant all rolled into one, used not just by ordinary people, but also by criminal gangs, sexual predators, authoritarian governments and terrorists. Indeed, one of Meta’s own lines of defence is that its very size is the reason why so much crime happens on its platforms.

Clegg’s defenders argue that, since joining Meta in 2018, he has moved the company away from its more libertarian instincts towards a more “mature, sensible place”, where it apparently acts more proactively in addressing public concerns about its role in things such as deep fakes, sexual exploitation and fraud. He has, they say, been instrumental in making Meta less hostile to regulation while creating new layers of governance for the platforms. He created the independent “Oversight Board” which now makes decisions on free speech and content on Facebook and Instagram, and which has been filled with unimpeachably liberal bigwigs such as the former Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who lives in London, and the former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. These are Clegg’s people.

The Oversight Board has certainly helped to reduce the kind of political controversy over Facebook censorship which dogged the company during Clegg’s early years, when Donald Trump was removed from the site. Yet this innovation also points to the question about Clegg’s influence. “I mean, come on,” said one of the senior UK government figures I spoke to. “Does anyone really believe the ethics board is anything more than a rubber stamp for the same old West Coast liberal politics the company has always had?” To Clegg’s critics, in other words, it’s all just window dressing for the same corporate interest.

Over the past months, I have spoken to more than a dozen figures in government, finance, tech and police, as well as those who know Clegg personally, to try to understand how much he has really managed to achieve at Meta. Those who have come across him at work describe the same figure who burst into the public consciousness in 2010: fluent, charming, persuasive, normal.

One British minister who had dealt with Clegg in government told me he was the same as ever, only now with the air of corporate power behind him. Another MP said he was “charming but defensive” when representing Meta. Another who met him in California told me that while he was thriving professionally in the US, he was clearly out of place in Silicon Valley’s deracinated suburbia, too far removed from the Victorian warmth of south-west London where the family had made their home and to which they have now returned — albeit to a new £8 million home in Chiswick.

Clegg and his wife disliked the scale of urban poverty in California that sat alongside the kind of extraordinary tech wealth that they were benefiting from. Both felt that their time in the US had confirmed how European they were and, while they might hate Brexit and the Conservative Government, London was nevertheless home. While they were there, Miriam lectured on international trade policy at Stanford University, but she has her own political ambitions in Europe. Since returning, she has created a new political movement — or “nascent political party” as one friend described it — called España Mejor, or “Better Spain”.

It was always the pair’s Europeanness that made Clegg such an attractive prospect for Zuckerberg. He is, explains one friend, fluent in European in a way Zuckerberg is not.

3. Clegg battles Britain

“The tech industry needs to work together to fight predatory adults online,” Clegg tweeted in November. “That’s why Meta is a founding member of the Tech Coalition’s new Lantern programme, which will allow companies to share signals about predatory behaviour & take action on their respective platforms.”

A month later, Meta announced that it was rolling out end-to-end encryption for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook, meaning, as it boasted at the time, “the content of your messages and calls with friends and family are protected from the moment they leave your device to the moment they reach the receiver’s device”. As a result, “nobody, including Meta, can see what’s sent or said”.

For years the British Government had been lobbying Meta not to go through with this plan. Today, Britain receives around 800 referrals every month from the US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), an organisation which trawls the internet looking for evidence of child exploitation. When NCMEC finds evidence of wrongdoing it passes it on to national crime agencies around the world who then go to arrest the abusers operating in their country. As a result of these 800 referrals, around 1,200 children are protected from predatory adults every month. By rolling out end-to-end encryption, the UK Government believes this number will collapse overnight.

In 2022, there were around 32 million reports of online child sexual exploitation made to NCMEC — 21 million of which came from Meta. When I put this to Meta, they pointed to comments by the NCMEC executive John Shehan, who recently praised the company for going “above and beyond” in their search for online child sexual exploitation while other companies did not, and there seems to be some truth in this. While Facebook referred 21 million reports to NCMEC in 2022, Google reported 2.2 million, TikTok 290,000 and X just under 100,000. Apple reported just 234. And yet, by rolling out end-to-end encryption, Meta has, in effect, wilfully blinded itself to at least some of what is happening on its platforms, even if it insists there is still much they can do to combat child sexual exploitation.

A Meta spokesman told me: “We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent and combat abuse while maintaining online security.” Here is classic Cleggite third-wayism. Meta points to things such as enforcing age limits, using technology to scour for suspicious behaviour and stopping adults contacting children they don’t know. The company says, for instance, that it can block anyone over 19 from starting a direct conversation on Instagram with children they don’t follow. Meta also says it has developed technology to identify “suspicious adults” — for example, if they’ve recently been reported or blocked by a teen — which would prevent them from finding, following and interacting with teen accounts. But if adults are this suspect why aren’t they just thrown off Facebook altogether?

Another safety feature Meta boasts about are the “safety notices” it sends to teenagers if they are talking to suspicious adults. In just one month last year, 85 million users apparently saw such safety notices. And yet, as a parent, it is hard to feel reassured by such statistics rather than simply terrified at the scale of potential abuse. Other defenders of Meta argue that end-to-end encryption does not disempower the police. Encrypting messages does not stop undercover police entering WhatsApp groups or seizing mobile phones. Meta insists that overall, even with end-to-end encryption, it expects to continue providing more reports of potential child sexual exploitation than other social media companies. We shall see.

The British Government, at least, is far from convinced. In the autumn of 2022, the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, held a video call with Clegg about the issue. In this meeting, Clegg claimed Meta was being unfairly targeted because it was making the majority of referrals to NCMEC. From the British Government’s perspective, though, this was exactly the point — it is making so many referrals because there is so much abuse happening, which will now be harder to do anything about. The discussion ultimately ended without agreement: the UK Government insisted that it was possible to protect privacy and child safety by developing new technology to sit alongside end-to-end encryption. Clegg insisted that it was not.

It looks, to those in government, like Clegg has absorbed the prevailing libertarian orthodoxy of California: an orthodoxy which places privacy above all else. In Silicon Valley, there is an arms race to offer customers total privacy in their private communications, no matter the cost. For the British Government, the cost of such unbreakable privacy is simply too high. Instead, it believes technological solutions are possible that allow social media companies to scan for illegal material on encrypted platforms, while also maintaining privacy. “We know it’s possible, because GCHQ says it is,” one government figure told me. The British state, in other words, had developed the technology itself. Meta says most experts disagree.

After Braverman and Clegg’s discussion in 2022, the pair did not meet until 2023. In the meantime Braverman ordered the Home Office to produce a public campaign directed against Meta’s planned roll out of end-to-end encryption which would target Zuckerberg directly, pleading with him “as a father” to change course. The plan, in effect, was to launch a coordinated government attack on the Facebook founder to shame him into action by turning public opinion against him. But, then, Rishi Sunak ordered Braverman to pull the campaign.

Why would he do this? On this point there remains a fierce dispute between ministers. Some see something nefarious — Sunak eyeing a future career like Clegg’s — others the power of the Treasury, others mere political tactics or Sunak’s weakness. What is certainly true is that there was a campaign and then there was not.

It was also at this time that the Government began trying to reassure Meta about the measures contained within its then-controversial Online Safety Bill, which was making its way through parliament. Under the Bill’s provisions, social media companies such as Meta would be responsible for the content on their platforms and would have a new duty to “identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm” from illegal content and “activity that is harmful to children”. The legislation also gave the powers to enforce this to Ofcom, the media regulator. Ofcom, the act states, could order Meta to use “accredited technology” to look for and take down child sexual abuse material on its platforms, and also to levy fines up to 10% of a company’s global annual revenue.

Facing this threat, in March 2023, Meta warned it would pull WhatsApp from the UK if the proposed measures in the Bill were not removed. But, then, in September — just as the row between Braverman and Clegg was reaching its climax — the Government moved to reassure Meta and the other social media companies that Ofcom would only be able to force them to scan WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook for illegal content if that was “technically feasible”, which Meta insists it is not. In the end, the Bill received royal assent in October without the changes once demanded by Meta, but with responsibility for dealing with the problem kicked over to Ofcom.

No one knows how Ofcom will use its new powers — or how powerful the new law will actually be. One thing we do know is that since the passage of the Online Safety Act in September, Meta has not only not pulled WhatsApp from the UK but has felt free to push ahead with the roll out of end-to-end encryption across its other services. “The truth is we’re too scared and timid,” said one government figure involved at the time. “As ever.”

When I opened my phone this weekend, I noticed a little message on WhatsApp. “We’re updating our Terms of Service and making relevant changes to our Privacy Policies for UK users, effective 11 April 2024,” the note read. The changes are necessary, it went on, “to reflect that the minimum age to use WhatsApp in the UK will be changed from 16 to 13″.

4. The rise of Facebook fraud

Alongside the Online Safety Act, the principal challenge for Meta over the past year has been the growing anger over the explosion of fraud on its platforms, particularly Facebook. According to the Government, fraud now accounts for 40% of all crime in England and Wales, 70% of which comes from abroad with as much as 80%  happening online — the vast majority on social media. In recent evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, the TSB’s Financial Crime Prevention Director, Paul Davis, said 80% of the fraud they saw originated on social media, before adding: “Let’s not walk past the fact that when I say ‘social media’, the majority of them start from the channels owned by one company in particular, which is Meta.” Baroness Nicky Morgan, chair of the House of Lords Fraud Act Committee, told Meta that she had received written evidence from high-street banks that in one three month period alone, 70% of all cases of investment fraud started on Facebook or Instagram, either through adverts or victims being directly messaged.

The police are seeing the use of social media and “encrypted messaging services” like WhatsApp by criminals “increasing throughout all aspects of fraud”.

While Clegg sets Meta’s overall political strategy, he tends to defer the job of defending Meta’s interests in the UK to the team he has assembled in London, most of whom also used to work in Whitehall.

Meta’s director of public policy in London is Chris Yiu, a former No. 10 adviser and Treasury official who went on to become one of the most influential figures at the Tony Blair Institute (TBI). Yiu is credited within the TBI as being the man who convinced Blair of the revolutionary potential of technology, setting him off on his journey towards Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who now funds most of his work calling for much greater use of technology by government. Yiu remains close to Blair, becoming one of the TBI’s board members in 2022, a position he still holds, alongside his job at Meta.

Alongside Yiu, there’s Rebecca Stimson, who was in the Cabinet Office during the Coalition as a senior EU policy advisor to Cameron. Then there’s Richard Earley, Meta’s “Head of UK Content Regulation Policy”, who also worked in the Cabinet Office with Clegg during the Coalition, and Philip Milton, who does much of the direct interaction with the Government on the issue of online fraud. Before joining Meta, Milton previously worked at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, “with responsibility for e-Privacy, Data Protection and Net Neutrality policy”, and before that at the Serious Fraud Office. For Meta, Whitehall is less a revolving door than a one-stop shop from which to poach its lobbyists.

When Milton appeared before the House of Lords in 2022, he claimed that dealing with online fraud was Meta’s “number one priority”. “Without our users, our platforms cease to exist, it is as simple as that,” he said. “Even if they do not necessarily fall victim to fraud, the very presence of it degrades users’ experience, and it makes it an unattractive place for advertisers to use as well.”

Yet, according to those I spoke to within the British Government, Facebook has been the slowest and least effective of all the Big Tech companies in reducing fraud on its platforms. When Google changed its algorithm so that it would only take adverts from investment products regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, the amount of online fraud coming from the site collapsed to almost zero. Meta, in contrast, dragged its feet and is only now doing something similar.

Far from being motivated to act, one senior government insider told me, Meta’s business model and sheer size meant it was, in fact, incentivised to move much more slowly than other companies. “If you are eBay or Gumtree, then fraud on your marketplace is a real problem because it’s your bread and butter,” they explained. “For Meta, they are ultimately an advertising company, so eyeballs on site is what they need, so the incentives are completely different.”

Meta’s principle strategy was to avoid any new legal obligations imposed upon it to deal with the fraud — or, more specifically, any new legal liabilities to recompense those who had been defrauded through its sites.

Today, pressure for the Government to do something is not just coming from consumers who have been ripped off online, but from Britain’s powerful banking sector, which has become incensed at the amount of money it is having to pay out in compensation to those defrauded on social media. The issue has become more acute because of a new regulatory regime coming into force in October this year, which will mean almost everyone who is defrauded online will be entitled to a full reimbursement. At the moment, most banks voluntarily reimburse their customers, covering around two-thirds of all fraud cases. Under the Government’s new rules, however, almost all claims up to £415,000 will be covered — some 99% of all cases — with the cost of the compensation split 50/50 between the bank of the fraud victim and the bank of the fraud thief. The social media platform on which the fraud took place will not have to pay a penny.

To deal with this discrepancy, there has been a growing push inside the Government for tighter rules on tech companies — Meta in particular — to force them to clamp down on the fraud on their sites. The Government has had two “anti-fraud champions” over the past year or so — Anthony Browne and then Simon Fell. Both have publicly backed calls for the burden of compensation to be shared between the banks and social media companies. For Meta, this is not just a financial irritation but also a potential legal principle that could become a new gold standard across the world.

Before the party conference season last year, formal proposals went into No. 10 that included a recommendation that the Government look again at “burden-sharing” as part of a new Online Fraud Charter. According to one minister, two of the Prime Minister’s closest advisers — James Nation, deputy head of the policy unit, and Will Tanner, deputy chief of staff — were demanding the Government “push hard in this space”.

And yet, when the Charter was eventually published in November, there was no mention of it. Instead, the Charter was a kind of voluntary compact between the Government and tech firms to do more to deal with fraud, with a review to take place in six months to see how they are getting on. The tech companies — and Meta — had dodged a bullet. “The lack of anything in the Fraud Strategy caused quite a stir from the financial services sector,” the minister told me.

Even getting Meta to accept some responsibility for the content on its platforms took an enormous effort and the direct lobbying of Clegg to get it over the line. “It is the first time they have ever accepted responsibility for what is on their platforms,” one insider said, “so it’s a big mental boundary that they’ve crossed, which we shouldn’t overlook.”

In the run-up to this turning point last year, Clegg spoke to Bob Wigley, Chair of UK Finance, after which he ordered a number of his juniors to engage directly with Anthony Browne, the Government’s then anti-fraud champion. Following one such meeting, Browne wrote to Clegg directly to say he was “very pleased with the new identification measures that Meta is taking to combat fraud on your platforms” and that he was “confident they will have a real impact, and benefit millions of your users in the UK”. He concluded: “Thank you for your constructive approach and taking the issue with the seriousness it deserves.”

Meta says that while the Government has not made it financially liable for site fraud, the Online Safety Act does list fraud among the harms social media companies have a duty to combat — with fines of up to 10% of its global turnover if it does not. Meta also insists that the commitments it has made in the Online Fraud Charter are significant. For instance, it will soon be rolling out “increased verification” on Facebook Marketplace, introducing warning messages to encourage users never to pay for an item without seeing it first. But why has it taken so long to get here? And if it takes the threat of government action to do it, why aren’t we demanding more laws with more bite all over again?

According to a number of insiders involved in the process, the real brake on imposing burden sharing was the Treasury and Jeremy Hunt in particular. “It was a combination of the two of them,” said one government figure. The Treasury does not want to impose financial burdens that make Britain less attractive for inward investment, particularly from tech companies. A second figure confirmed that the reason the social companies had escaped without any new liabilities for the fraud was because of “competitiveness issues”. A third said: “As ever, the Treasury is reluctant to choke off any potential UK investors with what they see as punitive measures.”

For Hunt, personally, one of his central objectives as Chancellor is to make London and “the triangle” with Oxford and Cambridge “the Silicon Valley of Europe”. In his Autumn Statement, he boasted that Britain already had the “third largest technology sector in the world, double the size of Germany and three times the size of France”, but wanted to go further. Meta has already invested heavily in London, with a big new campus at King’s Cross, one on Rathbone Place and another on Warren Street. It is from Warren Street in particular that Clegg is able to “hot desk” whenever he goes into the office. Hunt’s vision has also been embraced by Sunak, the tech bro with a place and a former career in California.

And so, what is the result? Next month the UK Government is hosting the first ever Global Fraud Summit in London, attended by interior ministers and figures from Interpol, the EU Commission and the UN. And who has been asked to give a presentation on how to share intelligence? Meta.

5. How Clegg wields his superpower

If Nick Clegg has a superpower, it is surely the illusion of normality. He is the public schoolboy in an M&S pullover helping to run one of the world’s great hegemons. It was this ordinariness that once made him politically popular, but which also contributed to the ferocity of the backlash when it came. The country had briefly fallen in love with this new Blair, only for him to let them down, just like the old one.

His skill as a politician was to always adopt the demeanour of the most sensible person in the room, neither irresponsibly libertarian nor hysterically conservative. It is the same trick he plays today. When Clegg bemoans those fixated on “speculative future risks about AI models that currently do not exist”, this may sound like third-way centrism, but it is also no coincidence that this reflects Meta’s corporate interest in maintaining a light-touch regulatory system for as long as possible.

Again and again, Clegg has adopted the same strategy: shepherding Meta into a place where it can say it is already regulating itself — and so does not need sweeping new regulations imposed upon it. But all the while, things are getting worse online, not better, and Clegg is the man ultimately responsible for Meta’s overall political strategy — a strategy which, I was told by four separate figures from within the UK Government, was self-interested, slow and resistant to any real democratic challenge, reticent to do anything which affects its corporate bottom line or sets damaging regulatory precedents which could be adopted elsewhere.

“There’s no question in my mind that he is an enabler,” one former colleague at Meta told me. “The only question is whether he realises it or not.”

Far from a burnt-out politician, Clegg is now a private citizen with extraordinary power and responsibility, paid a fortune to promote the interests of a company whose policies affect the lives of billions. If the US Congress can hold Zuckerberg to account, why isn’t the British Parliament doing the same to Clegg?

But it is also true that when trying to piece together his influence, the British Government has also shown itself to be as full of contradictions as Meta. During my conversations I heard how unimportant Clegg was to Zuckerberg, a figure to be held in contempt for selling his reputation for money. But I was also told how instrumental he was in dragging Meta over the line to sign the Online Fraud Charter. Meanwhile, some ministers boasted about how the Government had refused to give in to threats from Meta, while others lamented how ineffective they had been. Some blamed the Treasury, others No. 10 and others still a general mindset of British state weakness, made worse by splits within the Cabinet between security-conscious departments such as the Home Office and rivals such as the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

For all this pointless squabbling, a simple reality remains: Clegg might be an influential figure in a giant corporation, but the British Government is responsible for the laws which apply in Britain. If Britain is a soft touch, that is the Government’s fault. The question of whether he is a restrainer or an enabler is, then, moot: he is, inevitably, both. The real question is one of power. Clegg and the British Government have it. And we should be angrier with both for how they use it.

For those of us who had been attending protests for years, usually against austerity, this one felt different. It was exhilarating, and a far cry from the institutionally organised marches where we forced ourselves through the streets holding the prescribed banners and drearily chanting the prescribed slogans. At Millbank and in the weeks that followed, we were transformed into subjects with our own agency, and the chaos and uncertainty of those days was experienced as the opening of possibilities that extended beyond the protests themselves.

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher wrote that, “the tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again,” and this felt like one such event. The next day, NUS President Aaron Porter wrote an article in the Sun in which he described the disorder as “despicable” and that sharpened our swords against the ranks of careerist New Labour bureaucrats (a look at his subsequent CV is dispiriting; this class is still disappointingly employable).

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The leftist magazine Tribune describes Millbank as “one of the most important demonstrations in British political history”, striking a blow at “the nerve centre of the British establishment”. They are certainly right that it has taken on “mythic significance”, judging by the numbers who claim to have been there compared to the relatively small number of people who actually stormed the Tower.

For the few weeks following, protests and occupations spread over the country, culminating on December 9 when the bill was passed and we were kettled on Westminster Bridge until gone midnight. There was no food, no water, no toilet, and the rallying cries passed from joy, through defiance and anger, to desperation. As we were finally released into the night, including school-aged children hundreds of miles from home, we had to walk one-by-one through a tunnel of riot police shining a light on our faces and taking our photo. Any face coverings, worn to protect anonymity, were forcibly removed. We had lost, and the government and police had won. We had been humiliated and it felt like the end.

But it was not. Tribune argues, rather meekly, that Millbank’s legacy lives on through its participants: “Many took on important roles as trade unionists, climate activists, Palestine and Kurdish solidarity workers, disseminators of alternative media, organisers of migrant and refugee campaigns, and senior officials in the Labour Party.” This is another way of saying that Millbank did nothing but reproduce the ranks of the professionally ineffective Left. Tribune should be more ambitious: Millbank’s real significance was much more serious. Though we couldn’t see it at the time, it marked the emergence in politics of a class faction that was just coming into view and is even now transforming our country: the graduate without a future.

During the dead period of the noughties, protests stuck to a tried and tested formula. We would march through central London, before gathering in Trafalgar Square to hear from Left-wing veterans like Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn while Trotskyist parties competed to sell papers and sign up the uninitiated. It was all pretty harmless, an alternative to a trip to a National Trust property for a different subset of the middle classes.

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How Noël Coward made me a Marxist

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There was the odd exception. A year before the Millbank protests, in Spring 2009, I remember skipping school and protesting against the G20 summit in London. A window was smashed and a police officer pushed a bystander, the newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson, to his death. But this was on the way out; the tired tail-end of 1990s radicalism temporarily given a new lease of life by the recession, and it marked the last moment when the Left was defined by its opposition to globalisation. For the most part, rallies conformed to our cynical characterisation of them: not so much A to B, as A to Benn.

Millbank changed all that. We were no longer content to participate in ritualistic set pieces that achieved nothing. And it was also something new for many of its participants. This wasn’t another protest about Middle Eastern conflict, instead it related directly to our material conditions.

In the months and years that followed, a new class consciousness was born. Not among the idealised proletariat but among the immiserated sons and daughters of the middle class. Of this new set, the Deterritorial Support Group were the sharpest. They pranked the world media into believing Slavoj Žižek and Lady Gaga were close friends. They exposed Johann Hari’s plagiarism and accused him of “policing the boundaries of acceptable thought” and the liberal-left as representing the “left wing of capital.” One of their members explained to the Guardian that “without the specific historical and economic conditions I live under, I don’t feel I would be involved in this sort of thing.” Instead, he would “probably have a mortgage or something”. More often than not their agitprop stung because it was accurate.

And it spoke to the depths of our radicalisation and disillusionment with mainstream politics. The coalition government implemented the reforms but in truth they were coming even if New Labour had clung on in the 2010 general election. This was a bipartisan reform implemented by a generation who had paid nothing for their education. To top it off, the Liberal Democrats broke their pledge to oppose any increase in tuition fees. This had a prolonged effect on a generation’s trust in mainstream politics and Nick Clegg’s disappearance from the UK scene and new career as Silicon Valley executive can be understood as a form of exile – if not a particularly painful one.

Millbank was our year zero. Some of the DSG had voted for the Lib Dems in 2010, and one had even been a member. It was the disenchanted demographic to which they belonged that propelled Jeremy Corbyn to his leadership of the Labour Party and without it he may never have won in 2015. Instead it would have been Yvette Cooper or Andy Burnham managing Labour’s decline.

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Yet 10 years on, the movement Millbank gave birth to has crumpled. Its predictions – that scrapping EMA and trebling university fees would put off poor kids from college and university respectively – have been proved wrong. The Left has descended into internecine conflict and the policing of individual behaviour. The collective joy and mutual self-interest of those early days has gone. There is a distinct irony that this radical energy was assimilated by the electoral project of Benn’s most loyal acolyte. With that comprehensively crushed in December and Jeremy Corbyn suspended from the party he led, it is hard to see how the fragments of the new Left can pick themselves up again.

The old Left is back to where it started, too, with a few thousand members spread across a few dozen organisations. Were it not for the coronavirus restrictions, I have no doubt that they would be organising their next ‘march against pandemic austerity’, the placards would be out calling for ‘the people’s vaccine’, and the paper sellers of the Socialist Workers’ Party would be setting up their stalls in Trafalgar Square in search of new recruits…

And yet, though the more interesting elements have dissipated, something has changed. The Left is formally defeated but it remains – in its cultural form – more influential than ever. Many of those radicalised at Millbank have graduated from higher education institutions and are reshaping our national political discourse. At the expense of a playful politics of collective self-interest, however, has come the importing and regurgitating of the life-draining successor ideology from the United States, an ideology which every power we claimed to be protesting against 10 years ago has embraced wholesale.

In 2010, we felt as though we were at the precipice of something real. History was re-emerging from its long slumber and it was finally possible once again to imagine radical futures, as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams attempted to do in the briefly influential Inventing the Future. Their book, published in 2015, seemed at the time like the beginning of a newly ambitious Left modernism. We can see now it marked the end of a short chapter. Today, the Left is shattered and poses no serious alternative to liberal, capitalist modernity. That challenge comes from the Right, while the Left is reduced to dragging cultural institutions ever further down the rabbit hole of intersectionality. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Spool forward to the present day and the contrast in politics can look almost head-spinning. Since polls closed in the EU referendum in June 2016, Britain has had three prime ministers and two general elections, in a span of time that might otherwise have seen Prime Minister Cameron in office until the May 2020 election.

Cameron, like Clegg, is a blurred memory. Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage, who might interest future historians almost as much, are fading from view. Theresa May, who will not trouble posterity, is already gone.

There’s a lot to learn by looking back to that moment in the Rose Garden. The garden isn’t called that that, of course, but does that matter? It is, after all, how people have chosen to remember it. Perhaps that’s what really matters in the end.

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But I wonder if we’re learning the right lessons by looking back on the Rose Garden and the coalition.  I don’t often disagree with UnHerd’s own Peter Franklin, but I have to quibble with his assessment of the Coalition years  as “unusually — almost freakishly — disconnected from what happened next. It’s almost as if they didn’t happen at all.”

Of the main players, Peter offers this enviably sharp verdict:

“Though they were the big beasts of their era, Cameron and Clegg can be seen as an evolutionary dead-end — the last of a line wiped out by a series of cataclysmic events.”

I understand the argument, the narrative it supports, even if I don’t entirely agree with it. More of that in a moment. First, that narrative, which goes something like this: the Rose Garden moment marked a high tide for technocrat centrist elite politicians and their bloodless “new politics”.

Cameron and Clegg, public school and Oxbridge-educated fortysomethings with no real careers outside politics, were able to work together happily because they had more in common than they admitted to voters, and had few ideological convictions to impede their partnership. Together, they oversaw five years of stable government driven its very DNA towards the political centre: a bit socially liberal (gay marriage) and a bit economically conservative (austerity).

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Why did Boris Johnson survive?

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The same narrative says that all those things have now been swept away by a tide of partisan vitriol, culture-wars dividing lines and politicians intent on consolidating their electoral base, not winning over opponents. Boris Johnson, you might think, is the embodied repudiation of the Coalition years. Unlike Cameron and Clegg, this narrative suggests, the current PM has no willingness to compromise with opponents or critics. Far from technocratic centrism, he’s a gut-feel guy who won his majority last year on the tub-thumping populist simplicity of “Get Brexit Done” and leads a government whose illiberalism is captured in a home secretary who used to be quite keen on hanging; the new politics has given way to the old.

Or has it? Looking back, I can’t help but feel that the drama and turmoil that has swept away many familiar characters, terminally changing their career trajectories, hasn’t really changed the fundamentals of politics quite so much.

Vitriol? Well, there’s no disputing that the tone of politics has changed, but only in degree, not nature. The idea that Politics 2010 was a Socratic debate among patricians is for the birds; the happy smiles of the Rose Garden followed the Brown years, when it was commonplace for enemies of Labour’s then leader to debate his mental health, and MPs’ expenses, which made it acceptable to address MPs as thieving toerags. Political twitter may have been a friendly clique in 2010, but wider political discourse was often toxic.

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A change of personnel? We’re governed by different people, but not a different type of person.  You can only think that David Cameron (Eton and Brasenose, Oxford) and Boris Johnson (Eton and Balliol, Oxford) are fundamentally different sorts if you go in for Freud’s narcissism of small differences. Perhaps you think Brexit is a tectonic gulf between the two, but it’s easy to imagine (as he himself did) the world where Boris was for Remain, and equally possible to imagine the world where Cameron supported leaving. After all, DC was willing to be pushed by his party into a referendum he didn’t want; a bit more pushing might well have seen him saunter across another red line.

On the other side of the House, Sir Keir Starmer is a bit different from Ed Miliband, but they’re not members of different species; after the genuine divergence of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leadership is reverting to the (north London professional) mean. More broadly, the House of Commons has changed a bit since 2010, but not dramatically: there are more women, more BAME MPs and fewer privately-educated MPs. But the place is still heavy with the sort of people whose CVs look a lot like that of Cameron and Clegg.

Twitter might have changed, but politics itself is still done by much the same sort of people who were in charge a decade ago, and often done in a similar way to the same people. Many of those ‘Red Wall’ seats Johnson claimed in 2019 were also Tory targets in 2010. I spent the 2010 campaign tracking Cameron around the country; most of my days were spent in the north-west watching the man try to win over Labour voters who watched football and rugby league. On election night in 2010, a Tory friend said she knew they’d missed the majority because Gedling had stayed red. Cameron may have felt comfortable with Nick Clegg, but it’s not what he wanted. He had to form a coalition with the Lib Dems because he was unable to form a coalition of voters within the Conservative Party big enough to reach from Guildford to Gedling.

What about policy? Surely here we find support for the idea of an essential rupture between the Coalition what came after? Again, I’m not so sure. Cameron and Clegg may have looked good in the garden, but they weren’t entirely the compromising centrists that jolly press conference promised and some people now recall. In part this is because history is written by the former incumbents, several of whom are keen to play up the idea of the Coalition as driven by compassion and moderation.

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In Cameron’s own book about his premiership, he describes his political approach as “compassionate” more than 30 times and calls himself “a genuine, moderate and liberally-minded One Nation Conservative.”

That would be the compassionate, moderate Coalition that reduced taxes for people earning £150,000 at the same time as making cuts in welfare payments including tax credits and housing benefit. The compassionate, moderate Coalition whose welfare policies led to claims that they would result in in the Kosovo-style ethnic cleansing of the poor. Those claims were made by one Boris Johnson, of course.

What about liberal internationalism?  Cameron in his book says: “My idea was to mark us out as the most open, globalised, free-trading anti-protectionist nation on Earth”. Which sounds nice, but was hardly the reality of Coalition policy.  

As for liberal internationalism, that might have been an accurate description of Nick Clegg’s personal outlook, but it was hardly the reality of coalition policy. David Cameron and his Home Secretary (remember her?) spent five years tweaking immigration rules, promising yet more crackdowns and generally blaming foreigners for stuff that wasn’t their fault.

Even George Osborne now concedes that he and his friend Dave “didn’t make enough of the value of immigration”.

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Cameron banged on about immigration even though his own inclinations on the issue were fairly liberal; he just thought he had to talk tough on the subject to keep party and public happy. Draw your own comparisons with the current PM.

A pro-European coalition? Pull the other one. One of the reasons Cameron lost his referendum was that he asked people to vote for the EU membership he’d spent the previous six years slagging off as an undemocratic fetter on the UK economy. Far from “not happening all”, the Coalition years and Cameron’s European policy were the linear precursor of Brexit. That’s not just my verdict either: Osborne has said the referendum was lost because Cameron and Co were too negative about Europe.

Boris Johnson is routinely described, in Brussels and elsewhere, as a Little England Tory brute with no regard for European history or solidarity. But that’s hardly unprecedented. Rewind to Friday, 11 December 2011, and savour the opening paragraphs of the Guardian’s lead story that morning:

David Cameron plunged Britain’s position in Europe into the greatest uncertainty in a generation as he used his veto to block a new EU-wide treaty and left at least 23 other countries to forge a pact to salvage the single currency.

With the apparent blessing of the pro-European deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg — and the subsequent delight of Tory backbenchers — Cameron deployed the ultimate weapon in European summitry at about 2.30am yesterday.

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The 'green crap' lessons of 2013

By James Kirkup

What about economics? It’s early days and the Coronavirus has obviously scrambled the compass, but there are credible signs that the Johnson administration will end up being even closer to the centre-ground of economic policy than the Coalition. Johnson won his election by junking corporate tax cuts put in train by George Osborne and promising to spend more on the NHS. “Levelling up”, meanwhile, is strongly reminiscent of the agenda pursued by the Coalition’s Vince Cable when he was Business Secretary, and often blocked by the Coalition’s higher-ups. Cameron eventually came around to a more interventionist approach to markets, adopting the Ed Miliband energy price cap he once derided. These days some Tory free marketeers (quietly) grumble that Boris’ big-state economics are not a million miles away from the “reheated Milibandism” that Theresa May tried to serve up.

Then there’s climate change. Husky-hugging Cameron and his yellow-green partner talked a good game on environmental policy, but who was it who ended up promising to “get rid of the green crap” on energy bills and effectively banning onshore wind?

By contrast, consider the environmental stance of Boris Johnson. So far, he’s upheld a legal commitment to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050 even though most voters don’t even know what net zero means (Government polling shows only 35% recognise the term) and certainly don’t know the disruptions that hitting that target will bring to their lives. (Just google “hydrogen boiler”.) Oh, and he’s restarted onshore wind, too. So who is the populist driven by public opinion, and who is the know-all technocrat driving through policies that lack obvious public approval?

I am not denying that things have changed since 2010 — that would be foolish. But the differences between the days of the Coalition and now are easy to overplay, while their similarities are easy to overlook. We should be wary of the idea of historic rupture between then and now, not least because the changes that lie ahead for post-Covid Britain may yet make the differences between the worlds of Dave and Boris look like minor details. Sometimes, the present is more like the past than the future.

The key figures in the history lesson are none other than David Cameron and Ed Milliband.  From here, it looks as if history will remember Cameron as the gentleman amateur who bet  — and lost — Britain’s EU membership on his own charm, and Miliband — if it remembers him at all — as the Labour leader who buried Blairism and helped keep his party out of office for a decade.

In fact, both men did things in 2013 that tell us a lot about how the politics and economics of “Net Zero” would play out. Net Zero has, with remarkably little debate, moved from a fringe demand to a mainstream and almost universal political commitment. But the story of 2013 should raise questions about how durable the new consensus will be.

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The rise of the hippie conservatives

By Freddie Sayers

Start with Cameron and his environmental journey. Possibly the first thing Cameron did as Conservative leader in opposition was go to the Arctic and pose with sledge-dogs. The hapless huskies were part of his “vote blue, go green” schtick, using environmentalism to “decontaminate” a Conservative brand that a certain T May had described as “nasty”. But that was 2006. What about 2013?

Well, 2013 was the year that a “senior Conservative source” told a couple of newspaper reporters over a nice lunch in Westminster that Prime Minister Cameron had given a clear order to his ministers regarding energy bills: “Get rid of all that green crap.”

To be clear, I was not one of the reporters at lunch that day, so I cannot swear to the accuracy of that quote. But I don’t know if anyone has asked Sir Michael Fallon, then the energy minister, where he was at the time that nice lunch was taking place; perhaps he has an alibi. Perhaps.

Anyway, let’s assume — and this isn’t much of a stretch, trust me — that Cameron had indeed said something about “green crap” to his colleagues. That remark signals the end of Cameron’s environmental journey — which covered a lot of ground, but came to its conclusion rapidly.

Back in the happy, almost innocent days of 2006, greenery was, Cameron fairly calculated, a nice-to-have add-on to a politician’s offer. Saying you cared about huskies and icecaps was a way to say you were generous and decent. And that was about it. Greenery didn’t obviously entail any actual policies that would directly affect voters’ lives.

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Why the Greens should stop playing God

By John Gray

Of course, even before Cameron took office in 2010, he had started to learn that it wasn’t that simple. Greenery then meant onshore wind: turbines, often in places where Conservative voters really didn’t want them to be.

Still, that didn’t bother everyone. What bothered just about everyone in the early years of the decade was the cost of living: after the financial crisis, real wages were falling and household bills were political. Bills for things such as gas and electricity.

And one reason those bills were as high as they were was the range of environmental tariffs that the Cameron coalition and its Labour predecessor had added on. The rationale here had seemed clear enough: there were many things that governments wanted to achieve and someone had to pay for them. General taxation wasn’t an attractive option — initially too visible, and then simply impossible given the state of the public finances. So consumers had to foot the bill.

Or rather, the bills: the energy company obligation, to support energy efficiency in poorer households; the warm homes discount, meant to help with the costs of fuel bills, again for poorer households; the renewable obligation, the EU’s emissions trading scheme; the carbon price floor; the feed-in tariffs; the smart meters. All told, the Cameron government reckoned, they added £114 to the typical bill.

And in 2013, with people feeling the pinch, £114 was all it took to turn David Cameron, husky-hugging vote-blue go-green David Cameron, into a potty-mouthed pocket-book politician, intent on saving voters money not saving the planet.

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Why men should be banned

By James Kirkup

So the first part of the environmental policy lesson of 2013 is that green promises sound good when they’re first made, but sticking with them when they turn into financial pain for the electorate is far from easy. Remember Cameron’s “green crap” when you hear his successors talking about when they’ll take the country to Net Zero, and ask: who’s going to pay for that, and who’s going to tell them they’re going to pay?

The Miliband of 2013 completes the lesson about energy policy, populism and policy. At the Labour conference in September of that year, he announced that if he were made PM in 2015, he would enact a legal freeze on domestic energy prices.

For all the excitement the announcement caused — more on that in a moment — the plan wasn’t really so radical or startling. The year before, that notorious radical socialist Sir John Major had called for a windfall tax on the profits of the energy industry.

The Miliband promise caused something approaching chaos inside the Conservative Party. I was the Telegraph’s political editor at the time and at the Tory conference the following week I did my rounds of breakfasts, lunches, dinners and drinks with Cabinet ministers. I found precisely no unity on how to respond to the price freeze promise. Some were outraged by the idea of the state trying to “fix” markets. Some thought the energy firms were a bad advertisement for capitalism and making profits that were not economically justified. And some just thought the Miliband policy would be popular so the Tories should match it.

In the end, Cameron came out against a price freeze — it was simply not something a Conservative could ever do, he thought. But nothing is forever in politics, and less than four years later, another Conservative leader, May, decided that Toryism was flexible enough to accommodate a price cap for energy.

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In 2010, David Cameron first fooled the country

By James Bloodworth

Remember, in all this, that some of the bills Miliband — and May — promised to limit were driven upwards, in some part, by the environmental policies they pursued and decided that customers should fund.

The year 2013 matters so much because it offers several connected lessons for the politicians promising to lead us on the journey to Net Zero. The first is that few political promises survive first contact with voters’ falling incomes. The second is that if you’re going to do things that cost voters money, best to get their permission first — because they’ll find out in the end, and when they do, they won’t be happy. And the third is that anyone who hopes to rely politically on “market forces” to allocate the resources needed to address big issues like climate change is taking a very big gamble indeed.

Now that he’s settled into Downing Street for five years — or, who knows, 10 — it will fall to Boris Johnson to learn these lessons; getting to Net Zero by the middle of the decade will require the 2020s to be a decade of genuine transformation. So far on the environment, Johnson has belied the charges of cheap populism levelled at him elsewhere, sticking with Net Zero as a promised goal. But right now, the politics of the environment are still relatively easy: commit to a goal still many years away and if in doubt, talk about photogenic distractions like turtles and pangolins.

But if he goes the distance and approaches a decade in office, he will either have to find a way to solve the green political riddle that defied Cameron, or admit defeat, just as his old school chum did.

Many of the stories that dominated the news agenda early that year, though, seem quaint in retrospect. The then-chancellor Alistair Darling cut stamp duty for first-time buyers and increased taxes for the better off. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was recorded disparaging a member of the public who ranted to him about Eastern Europeans “flocking” to Britain as a “bigoted woman”. Volcanic ash closed British airspace for a few days.

At May’s general election there was a change of government after 13 years; yet it hardly seemed a seismic event at the time. A tired Labour administration was replaced by a coalition government headed by two slick television performers who promised a “new politics” in which “compromise, give and take, reasonable, civilised, grown-up behaviour is not a sign of weakness but of strength”. Asked what he thought of new Prime Minister David Cameron, the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens replied: “He doesn’t make me think.” This summed up the mood of many, who felt that Cameron was, as Hitchens put it, “content free”.

Indeed, many were fooled by Cameron’s — and to a lesser extent Clegg’s — presentation as leaders of a moderate liberal reforming government, including many former Labour voters, who failed to anticipate just how radical the coalition would be. Cameron was a “new kind of Conservative” alright, but largely in the sense that his conservatism was inextricably wedded to a flavour of economic liberalism which had very little to do with traditional conservatism at all.

By September 2010 the chancellor, George Osborne, was ready to “wield the axe”, as the BBC put it at the time. Funding for the police was to be cut by 20% over four years, the budget for new social housing reduced by 60% over the same period and the justice department faced cuts of 6%, with 3,000 fewer prison places.

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What's David Cameron hiding?

By James Hanning

Significant in terms of what would transpire during the Brexit referendum was the unprecedented rolling-back of the public realm. The austerity programme introduced by the Coalition government was made up of 89% spending cuts and 11% net tax rises. In the end the Coalition reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP by as much in five years as Margaret Thatcher managed in 11.

The impact in many parts of Britain was severe. There were a million requests for emergency food aid in the last year of the Coalition Government. Morbid online jokes about deceased individuals being declared “fit for work” by the Department of Work and Pensions functioned as a coping mechanism for a society in which people really did drop dead after being declared fit for work. The DWP was run at the time by the severe figure of Iain Duncan Smith, who might as well have been lifted straight from the bureaucratic apparatus of one of Charles Dickens’ workhouses or boarding schools.

Of course, austerity didn’t cause Brexit. But it did contribute to the disillusionment many felt with the Westminster establishment — disillusionment based on feelings of abandonment by the powers that be. In working-class towns such as Blackpool, Rugeley and Ebbw Vale — towns I spent time in in 2016 during my six-month trip around the country to research my book Hired — Brussels functioned as a lightning rod for the disillusionment caused by economic decline and deindustrialisation.

All around there were reasons to want to ‘take back control’, as the anti-EU slogan had urged people to do. “Look at this country and look at how it was thriving in the Fifties, Sixties, even up to the Seventies, but since we joined the EU it’s just gone down,” a former miner at the shuttered Bryn Colliery in Port Talbot told me.

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Imagine David Cameron had won his referendum

By Peter Franklin

Austerity made life harder still, reducing peoples’ benefits at a time when zero-hours contacts and insecure work required a comprehensive social safety net rather than one deliberately riddled with holes. Homelessness was so bad in some of the places I visited that it felt as if there were a person under a pile of corrugated cardboard in nearly every shop and restaurant doorway. A study from Sheffield Hallam University from published in 2015, shortly before I embarked on my journey, found that 21% of people who had their benefits sanctioned became homeless as a result.

There was much speculation following the referendum as to the cause of the result. London journalists were sent off to explore working-class communities that were said to have been ‘left behind’ by capitalism — and which had consequently rebelled against the status quo as represented by Brussels. Other liberal commentators damned their fellow countrymen as spluttering racists and unreconstructed bigots. The EU — for these intolerant champions of tolerance at least — was synonymous with contemporary bohemian affluence: the free movement of cheap labour and capital, free trade, rule by avocado-eating technocrats etc.

Few of them expected the referendum vote to favour Brexit at any rate. Moreover, the palpable shock of that summer morning in 2016 led many to lose their intellectual footing. Newspaper columns were filled with histrionic pronouncements of ‘creeping fascism’ and impending economic collapse; 2016 was dubbed liberal democracy’s annus horribilis.

Had Gordon Brown scraped through in 2010 a Labour government would undoubtedly have made cuts. But they would have been nowhere near as deep as Osborne’s. This takes on some significance when we are talking about a narrow vote to Leave in the referendum of 2016, a referendum that Labour would never have called in the first place. To say that these two decisions have reverberated across the decades since is an understatement.

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Where would the Left be without Brexit?

By James Bloodworth

The Labour administration that was thrown out in 2010 was certainly exhausted after 13 years in power. It was assailed on all sides by a corporate media which, apart from the Daily Mirror and, curiously, the Daily Mail, had never taken to Gordon Brown, whom it unceasingly mocked as gaffe prone and ‘dour’. By contrast, Cameron and Clegg were politicians well-suited to the television and social media age. Their vacuous soundbites, sharply pressed suits and phosphorescent smiles captured the mood of a country that was tired of Brown’s bureaucratic profligacy and had grown suspicious that the undeserving were taking advantage. As the British Social Attitudes survey reports, “The level of agreement with spending more on welfare benefits for the poor fell from 61% in 1989 to 27% in 2009.”

And so the British public voted for a PR man to be their Prime Minister. Eventually it would become apparent that Cameron’s peculiar self-confidence came not from any exceptional political skill but from a sense of entitlement drummed into him by a traditional upper-class upbringing. But not before the fateful decision had been made to vote him in a second time, this time with a majority. Incredulity ensues among the young when I tell them that Cameron was once considered a safe pair of hands by the British establishment. Looking back through the archives, I am pleased to report that in 2015 I described this widespread misconception as a “façade”.

The British establishment of the late 20th and early 21st century resembles a curiously incestuous beast. Cameron got his first job in politics because Lord Lexden, who was deputy director of the Conservative Research Department at the time, received an anonymous telephone call from Buckingham Palace tipping him off about “an outstanding young man”.

Britain has been paying the price for this lack of judgment by the palace (Was it Prince Andrew who made the call perhaps?) ever since. But then who are we to judge when, as a country, we voted Cameron into office — not once but twice?

The trouble started before Cameron of course. There was a colossal loss of public trust in politicians over the Iraq war, the MP’s expenses scandal and the global financial crisis. But it was the decision to elect Cameron in 2010 — a politician whose measure President Barack Obama had two years earlier when he reportedly described him as ‘lightweight’ — which set us on the path to where we are today. BC — Before Cameron — the situation was recoverable. After, not so much.

So it is for me and my politics. I haven’t had one political awakening; I’ve had dozens. I’m still not sure that the way I see the world today is the right one. Frankly, the level of conviction most political writers seem to have these days strikes me as indulgent narcissism.

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Don't let Brexit become the next Troubles

By Jenny McCartney

My first political memory is staying up late in 1992 with my father, nestled on the sofa in the upstairs living room of our house in Birmingham. As the results ticked in, and his hopes for a Labour victory expired, I felt his sense of despair as if it were my own. I believed it was my own for a long time: I had a sort of lizard-brain level conviction that I was Not a Tory.

Around this time I remember walking home from school with my good friend Catherine, who had no such in-built disdain for the Conservative party, and wanted to know why I was so passionately against them. In an instant, I conjured up a rationalisation for my stance: the mess the government had made of child support laws had pitted my parents against each other during their divorce. They had stayed friends, I maintained, until the Child Support Agency ruined things.

Catherine nodded wisely, and said that made sense. But I felt awkward, because I knew it wasn’t true. Yes: I had a vague inkling that my parents had found the CSA hard to deal with. But I knew the truth was that I hated the Conservatives because I loved my father. The feelings came before the reasons, not the other way around.

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Why shouting 'traitor' is a fool's game

By Giles Fraser

I continued to consider myself Not a Tory for years, with other vague political identities layered on top, like George Bush is a Bad Guy and Northern Ireland is Important (I had a boyfriend whose dad had served there, and who had friends caught up in the Omagh bombing). But honestly, I paid almost no attention to politics.

In 2002 I had an interview for a graduate trainee scheme at Reuters where they asked me to name “a news story from the last few months”. I stared blankly until the interviewer generously reminded me of a few: a Foot and Mouth epidemic, a postponed General Election, the Soham murders, the death of the Queen Mother. I didn’t get the job.

In the end, I came to politics through policy. I was a journalist at a magazine called Property Week, where I was assigned the job of reporting on tax and planning policy (as well as industrial warehouses). I loved it. I saw how incentives and rules create system-level change, or system-level failure. I never got the hang of reporting on deals — the life blood of the magazine — but discussing and explaining policy? I had found a metier.

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Our politics of impossible promises

By Polly Mackenzie

So I went to work for the Liberal Democrats, as a policy adviser on housing and local government — that’s when I fell in love. Because joining a political movement is exactly like falling in love. The feelings come before the reasons.

I went to party conference, in Harrogate, and I stayed up until 3 in the morning, then kept myself awake during the day by chain-drinking caramel macchiatos. I felt like I was part of something. I belonged. I gazed longingly at the most senior political advisers, like Charles Kennedy’s handsome press officer, and his handsome speechwriter, and I dreamed of being like them.

My addiction to The West Wing bears a lot of responsibility for this, of course: this was my Aaron Sorkin phase, where I believed earnestly that all problems could be resolved if we were all just a bit more articulate, clever and brave.

Then came the coalition, in which I worked as Nick Clegg’s senior policy adviser. I’d long since been able to observe intellectually that the Conservative Party was not the exclusive force for evil I’d been brought up to believe it. But I think I only emotionally absorbed this when I was working day after day alongside talented, wise, compassionate and thoughtful people who chose to wear a blue rosette at election time. There are still Conservatives I’d cross the road to avoid. But there are far more I’m privileged to call friends.

I shared an office with Steve Hilton, the maverick adviser to David Cameron. At one point he introduced me to a policy specialist who was advising on the introduction of elected Police and Crime Commissioners. “You know how I’ve told you that everyone who’s against PCCs is just an establishment bore who has to be ignored,” Steve told this adviser. The adviser nodded. “Well, Polly’s the exception. You can listen to her.” And most of the time, this was the spirit of the coalition. We mostly found ways to listen to each other, instead of starting with the assumption that our opponents were wrong. It made for better government. I believed in it.

But my illusions that you could win hearts and minds with decent government and reasonable compromise were shattered by the 2015 General Election. The morning after, Paddy Ashdown stood in our Lib Dem HQ among the hungover and the heartbroken hangers on, who couldn’t bear to face the reality of going home. Perched on a chair, his voice cracking, he asked: “Why would anyone compromise in the national interest ever again?”

He reminded us that politics is feelings, not facts. We’d placed our faith in facts, and reasonableness. We’d tried being clever, articulate and brave; and discovered that the public preferred intransigence.

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As a headstrong activist, I was a dangerous thing

By Paul Embery

I miss being partisan. It’s so comfortable to be right all the time, and there’s no view better than the one from the moral high ground, from which your enemies are the ranged forces of evil. It’s the way to make money as a columnist. It’s the way to win votes at the ballot box. But even these victories are less valuable than the feeling of being surrounded by your tribe and the warm fuzzy glow of righteousness. I miss it. I just don’t feel that tribal belonging any more. I’m a political apostate.

In fact, I think we do better when we listen to each other with an open mind. I think politics should be about finding a way forward together, not winning and making the other guys shut up for a few years. I think all our parties, and every individual within them, are wrong on some things and right on some others. And I think the same of myself.

Humility needs a place in our politics. I hope some day it will take the place of the hubris we see from our current crop of leaders.