Not many people embody British political failure like Nick Clegg – sorry, that’s Sir Nick Clegg to you and me.
When he took over the Liberal Democrats, they had 63 MPs; when he quit as leader, they had eight. It took nearly a decade for his party to recover.
The Coalition Government, in which he was deputy prime minister, had its ups and downs, but in the public imagination, Clegg’s role was largely to be the Tories’ whipping boy, forced to repeatedly apologise for his own decisions.
Nor did the Coalition help further the argument for the type of politics – leaner state, social liberalism, pro-Europeanism – that Clegg represents. Britain left the EU, taxes are at a record high, and now even a Labour Government is cracking down on immigration.
His response? To scuttle off to Silicon Valley to become Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand man, helping to extend the political influence of Meta and sanitise its brand after Facebook became known as a factory for fake news. At least he will have earned more than those ex-Lib Dem MPs who lost their jobs under his leadership.
No wonder that his return to Westminster this week has attracted, at best, mixed reviews. His big message, that the Lib Dems should embrace any future opportunities to go into coalition despite the political costs, is one that many agree with, given our fractured political age. But he is the wrong messenger. “Shut up and go away would be good advice to him,” one of the party’s MPs has been heard saying around Parliament.
So it is galling to be told to take some advice from such a flawed source. But Clegg’s speech to the Institute for Government may actually contain some wisdom for Sir Keir Starmer.
The speech was primarily an attempt to reset the story around the Coalition – and to make it clear that Clegg was right all along. Buried in it, however, were nuggets of insight for the current Prime Minister, and for Rachel Reeves too.
Clegg recounted the horror of being briefed by a Treasury official about the danger that the global financial crisis posed to the British economy, similar to how today’s Chancellor was warned of a black hole in the public finances left by the Conservatives.
Their responses were very different: Reeves and Starmer promptly adopted a gloom-and-doom narrative, which crushed business and consumer confidence, probably contributing to the slow economic growth Britain suffered in Labour’s first six months. Clegg and David Cameron, by contrast, focused from the off on the message of a brighter future ahead: “We strived to project the confidence that we knew people and markets needed to see,” he said this week.
square HUGO GYE Labour is defiant against public anger – but we can't go on like this
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Clegg can also tell Starmer a thing or two about how to hold a government together internally in turbulent times. The Coalition was constantly riven with disagreements over policy – not a surprise, given that it was made up of two quite different parties. But crucially, they had a formal mechanism to deal with it, every decision going through the “quad” of four senior ministers who would need to sign it off.
He says now: “You start at the beginning knowing that you disagree, so there’s no emotional surprise.” That “emotional surprise” is a big factor in the divisions currently rocking Labour, whose MPs seem shocked to discover that the leadership is not able to reproduce their exact preferences on every topic. Those splits now seem to be spreading to the Cabinet, with reports of Angela Rayner pushing for an alternative economic policy. A more formal way of acknowledging differences of opinion and managing them could bring the temperature down.
After Clegg’s speech, I asked him how he coped with being so unpopular. After all, he went from the most popular politician in Britain to the most disliked party leader in history. A similar trajectory is now being walked by Starmer, whose net approval rating has slumped to a horrific -46.
His response: “If that’s the case, when you’re in government, go for it. Don’t try and hold the Ming vase across the slippery floor. Just go for it, do what you think you can in the time you’ve got, because it is probably gonna be shorter than you think.”
Some in Labour are already obsessed with the next general election – how to hold off Reform, how to kill off the Tories, how to keep their left-wing voters on side. This is a fool’s errand: by far the best thing Starmer could do is just double down on his plan for governing, and trust that he leaves a legacy to be proud of.
Politics should not be a game that you win or lose; instead, great leaders use it as a machine for improving the country.
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