1/ Bit more detail on @nick_clegg's move to @facebook. My @BBCNews blog up shortly. Before that, here's a digest, based on a long-ish conversation with him a short while ago...
2/ Elliot Schrage first mooted the job this summer. Clegg rejected. Then Sheryl Sandberg called him when he was walking in the Alps over the summer. Clegg flew to the Bay Area, spent a couple of hours, I understand, in Zuckerberg's garden...
3/ Then Clegg + his wife dined w Zuck/Sandberg at Zuck's house. Clegg starts in London in a couple of weeks; family will move (to Menlo Park area, not San Fran) after Xmas. Miriam is giving up her job here; charity work will continue; and no shortage of legal work on West Coast
4/ He describes Zuck as a "shy guy" with ethos that is "small 'l' liberal, Californian... He believes in free speech but doesn't want to be the arbiter of truth." Sought reassurances that he would be in the inner circle, "in the black box", in Court of King Mark (my words)
5/ I asked if he'll still speak out about Brexit: “No, no, no… I hoped I wouldn’t have to make this move until Brexit had happened or perished in Parliament."
6/ So no more tweets and campaigning for a Peoples Vote etc? “Obviously I have mixed feelings, but I don’t think it is right as a full-time paid, private employee of a company to do that”
7/ I asked if he's a sellout, going for the cash. He resisted, says he's a private citizen, and has written to Cabinet Office saying his stipend for work as Deputy PM should stop when his office here closes.
8/ I asked if it's weird that a company derided as out of touch should hire a metropolitan European liberal. He responded that the company had: "identified Europe as the source of a lot of policy and regulatory innovation"
9/ The family will soon fly out to look at houses, schools etc. Clegg's children are 16, 14 and 9; eldest is in remission from Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and said he had heard California is cool. As he's written on Facebook, this is about re-invention...
10/ “I’m 51, and part of that generation of politicians – Osborne, Cameron, Danny Alexander, the Milibands – where you have to reinvent yourself,” he says. “I’m basically a tech optimist, a liberal who thinks you should shape progress.”
11/ “I thought, I could do this academically, as a commentator, running a start-up, but then I thought, in for a penny, in for a pound,” he says. Or indeed a dollar, and a few million of them by the time he’s done.
12/ It's one helluva tough gig. Facebook share price not far off flat over the year, but a reputational battering over Cambridge Analytica + data security, Russian meddling, fake accounts... and the astonishing false claims about video views means it has been on the defensive
13/ Many of those who ran the Coalition have gone on to jobs in the tech world. So Clegg far from the first, and certainly won't be the last.
