You can go from being a rising star in politics to crashing and burning in the election and taking up a top job at a tech company.
Just as Nick Clegg.
He was once the UK’s deputy prime minister.
Now he’s perhaps in even more limelight as a public defender (official title: vice-president for global affairs and communication) of the tech giant Facebook.
He spent several days recently interviewing at prominent US TV news channels.
This was in the aftermath of a Facebook whistleblower Frances Hagen handing over company docs to the Wall Street Journal.
The company is alleged to have ignored the harms of its actions for the sake of massive profits.
Of course, the charges were denied with enthusiasm.
But it reminded those aware of Clegg’s history of the times he was a politician.
Then also he struggled to defend his party’s reputation, much like he has been doing in the corporate context of Facebook.
And as a seasoned politician comfortable with debating, he quickly brought out numbers, including figures about thousands of moderators.
His stance on how with an open and uber-popular social media site, evil people were bound to make some mark and that all Facebook could do was to “reduce the bad and amplify the good” was similar to the time when he accepted the role of deputy prime minister against people he had previously staunchly opposed.
But the aspect of his new job environment that goes in his favour is its location.
The US audience doesn’t know the types of U-turns he took as a politician (most prominently on university tuition fees).
So a lot hasn’t changed for Nick Clegg after all these years.
Only faces have changed.
Previously he was forced to defend George Osborne and David Cameron with tremendous backlash.
And now he’s doing the same for Mark Zuckerberg and Sherly Sandberg.
But let’s see if he can keep this kind of role up as long as he can do it in his home country.
