Latest / Giant Ideas / "They Haven’t Got a Clue How Remorseless the Pressure Is", Former Meta President Nick Clegg on His Life Lessons

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"They Haven’t Got a Clue How Remorseless the Pressure Is", Former Meta President Nick Clegg on His Life Lessons · Giant Ideas

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: You are subject to a level of scrutiny that people in business have no clue, no clue at all.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm amazed when you meet business, senior business people who are getting their knickers on a twist because there's a disobliging adjective about them on page six of the Financial Times.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Giant Ideas.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Last week we had former UK Deputy Prime Minister and former president of Meta, Nick Clegg, talking about the fractious relationship between business, society, and technology.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk to Nick about the different models of leadership he's seen right up close in politics and business.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: We'll also talk to him about getting the balance right between work and home, the secrets of a happy marriage, and what money does to happiness and drive.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Nick, welcome back to Joe On Ideas.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: We ask every guest in this second episode to think about their life in just three photographs.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you could look back at your life, what would be the three photographs that would define it?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, two-thirds of them would be family.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm I'm like I'm sure most of your guests tell you this, but I'm I'm uh deeply shaped, steeped in, invested in, and in love with my family in the wider sense and the sort of nuclear sense.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I suppose the first photograph would be me, my mum's Dutch, and and I spent pretty well, me and I've got two brothers and a sister.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: We spent pretty well every minute of every holiday at my grandmother's quite sort of large rambling house in uh in the Netherlands with a horde of cousins.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: My my mum comes from a sort of matriarchy of four sisters who all had kids.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, so there's a sort of photograph of my grandmother and all my aunts and all my uncles and hordes of cousins.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I think I just had a I did have a wonderful childhood, but the but the the the epitome of the sort of happiness that defined me as a kid was in a very large, loud, rowdy, quite yeah, quite sort of active, sporty, outward bound sort of family, and very much focused around my my grandmother, my maternal grandmother.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: So that would be the first focus.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And a very international family, which is fair to say is very important to who you are as a person.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: No, absolutely.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, much to the chagrin of I remember I remember once there was a double page spread in the Daily Mail with a very unfat flattering, rather jowly photograph of me with a huge banner headline saying, Is there anything British about this map?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh which I suppose biologically, I suppose they had a point because my, as I said, my mum uh is Dutch.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, she's now elderly, but I we all still I mean I speak Dutch and I was raised bilingually.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Pity it was Dutch.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Dutch is I mean, it's a next to useless language to learn because they all speak English better than we do.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, um, and my dad is uh uh half Russian by by birth.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: My uh paternal grandmother was Russian, was part of that uh what you call um sort of what they call white Russian diaspora that that that left Russia at the time of the revolution.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Same as my wife's family.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Oh well, I don't know what route her your wife family took, but my grandmother through the Baltic states, and then quite a lot of the quite a lot of that community of in effect dissidents of of the revolutions and turbulence in the early part of the 20th century in in Russia, settled in Paris and London, and then many of them congregated around the Orthodox churches.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: So my grandmother used to take us to the incense-filled Orthodox Russian Orthodox Church in central London.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And my yeah, no, the war, I mean, like every every family, like yours, no doubt as well.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: The war, of course, looms large.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: My mother was born in Indonesia prior to the war, and then spent the war, unfortunately, in a Japanese prison of war camp in uh in Indonesia before then going to going to the Netherlands.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, yeah, so very international.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: But first photograph would be it would be just the I yeah, just immensely happy memories of of a and oodles of cousins I'm still very, very close to.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us about your second.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the second one I think would be my sort of nuclear family.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: If I've got Miriam and me, and we've got our three lovely boys, Antonio, Alberto and Miguel.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, I could pick endless photos, but one that I probably would pick is uh I remember during the god, we were lucky, during the lockdown pandemic when we were living in the US.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how we managed this, but we ended up having Christmas, pretty well on our own in a remote um ranch in the wilds of Montana.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, how lucky are we?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm not I'm acutely aware of how lucky we were to do that, but it was um and who knows, maybe my memory's playing tricks.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: I I keep saying to Miriam, I honestly being locked up with Miriam and the three boys in actually quite nice circumstances and being able to go to the beautiful wilderness of Montana was honestly one of the happiest times of my life.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: Was it really?
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I well, she says, yeah, but you don't remember you were actually much more anxious about your parents, and so maybe maybe maybe I'm maybe my sort of glass half full of tendencies are uh but but I'm my memory I I really, really, and particularly for someone who'd obviously spent a lot of time in politics and constantly feeling guilty as a young dad that I wasn't spending enough time when the kids were small.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that was one of the reasons.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: But the the the sort of joy and relish which which I think back to the time we spent as a family of five together, it certainly my memory, I yeah, it fills me with just I just sort of glowing with with I just loved it.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely loved it.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Was it was there an element for someone who is constantly having to be on, constantly performing out there dinner after event after, you know, just was there was there an element of relief of just being able to, you know, that you're not allowed to?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I think everyone had that, didn't it?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it it it it it it did have um, and again, I of course I'm very conscious that for many people it has much more tragic um uh and and agonizing and heartbreaking connotations.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: But I think for for a family like us, yeah, it just had this, it just had such a simplifying effect.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Everything was just suddenly totally slowed down, made style, just simplifies everything.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: And and in and in our case, we were still our kid, I mean, our two oldest boys were now you know left home and one's about to leave university, the other one's working, and so on.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, then our kids were still at home, so we were lucky enough that we were all under one roof.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so, and you know, as an we were still in that adventure phase of the United States, and anyone who's lived and traveled in the United States who's not American, and and it particularly if you're European, it's the great open spaces that of course is so so special about that country.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so, so that that would be my second photo.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Before you move on to your third, I want to ask you about Miriam.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And we need some we need some Nick marriage guidance.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: So you you you you are in a in a you're in a marriage with two extremely successful people who are right at the top of their game.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Miriam is a fantastic lawyer and is helping to run UBS and you know, is tipped to be a uh a future star of Spanish politics.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um how have you figured out the kind of rhythm and the ebbs and flows with two really successful people of giving one person a go for a bit and then the next in terms of, you know, one person's gonna spend maybe more time at home with the kids and then the other one will take a bit of time.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Have you planned that out or has it just happened?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Totally unplanned.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Totally unplanned.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Totally unplanned.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I'll know I listen.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: The last thing I'm gonna do, or I don't think Miriam's gonna do, we're gonna somehow pretend that we've got it all sorted.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Of course not.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: We're like any couple.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: You go through your ups and downs, and you go through the stresses and strains of life.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: And gosh, having small kids when I was in this mad world of politics, where I was a party leader trying to sustain a coalition, traveling up and down to Sheffield.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: And Miriam quite you know rightly didn't want to give up her work.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I I honestly, when I look back on it, I don't quite quite know how we did it.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Probably because we were just young and had a lot of physical energy.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I do I I know this sounds trite.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: I actually think when couples and families are under a lot of pressure, particularly with young kids, and at the same time you're trying to build careers, physical resilience is actually an underestimated thing.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think the other thing perhaps is um I think Miriam and I, in different ways, are not bad at just like leaving it outside the front door, just kind of not bringing it too much home.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think um is that conscious?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: I certainly went on in politics, I was very, very conscious.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't want to constantly sort of pollute my home life with.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you come to my home, you won't see a single cartoon or picture or anything about it.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I never I I admire it and I'm not criticizing, but I've never understood politicians who adorn their whole home with their politics.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you do that?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I so I think we always have a quite a separable thing.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Probably a little bit more, particularly when the kids are small, a lot more antisocial than you might imagine.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: We were we would just wouldn't.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: So you I think if you you're trying to do the career thing and the small kids, and then you're trying to spend all the time at dinner parties, I'd yeah, I think you have to build time.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I think a little smidgen of antisocialness is not a bad thing.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's quite surprising to hear that.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And what what about the physical endurance?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: How did you foster that resilience and physical endurance?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have a moment where you said I'm gonna try and I'm trying to get fitter or I'm gonna Oh boy, I must I certainly remember.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: So this is in the spring of 2011.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: So a year, roughly a year after the coalition was formed, and sort of my political career went from, you know, there's all the excitement of 2010, and the absolute hammer blows within about a year, and you know, sort of goes from sort of being hero to villain sort of thing.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: As deputy prime minister, this is prime minister, and you had all the controversies around the fiscal decisions we had to take post-2008, the controversies around university tuition fees.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember in the spring of 2011, I put on a lot of weight, I was smoking, I was exhausted, I would come home in the evening because um you see, I we didn't live in Downing Street.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: When I became Deputy Prime Minister, I remember some perfectly dutiful person from the home office said, Well, can we show you the apartments that you that you will occupy for your own security in in uh Downing or behind Downing Street in that complex of buildings?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Off I trotted to see some vast, cavernous, slightly sort of soulless place.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I went back to Miriam that evening and I said, Sorry, darling, but you know, we we've been it's been suggested we move with the boys to she just went, nope.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, No, no, no, no, but surely, no, and and so I went back the next day and I said, I'm sorry, the answer they said, but surely deputy private.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: I said, No, you don't understand.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's no, and then they retrofitted some security in our home, and we had obviously a police presence outside our home.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: It turned out, actually, that that obduracy from Miriam was the best possible thing that could have happened to us as a family because it meant the kids who all went to the local state school pretty well at the end of the primary school at the end of the road, yeah, could continue to do that.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: We had a we had a very nice community around us.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: They could do their, you know, their football, their swimming, all those sort of middle-class things that little kids do in that in that, certainly in in our neighborhood, could all do that unmolested by politics.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I was doing all the mad sort of crisscrossing London.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: I've what was the quick question?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you had a moment of realizing you needed to go.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, sorry, that's right.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I digress.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then in the spring of 2011, there was um there were local elections, I think.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I'm misremembering this, but also this ill-starred referendum on changing the electoral system, which I'd sort of insisted on.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember crisscrossing the country uh with pneumonia.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: I literally had pneumonia, and I was just popping antibiotics and pills, and I felt absolutely shockingly bad.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I remember at that point, I mean, I'm being a little melodramatic for effect, but I did remember thinking, wow, I've got to be careful here.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in my kind of 40s, and um, you know, this kind of job's this is gonna just knock me down physically.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm either gonna get very ill or worse.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: So at that, I I literally installed or bought a rowing machine and put it in a sort of white hall cupboard, and literally in the middle of the day would do that.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: In the office.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: I was on some cubby hole upstairs.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in in and no, no, I just so I just try and go, and I remember that I I'd go to some uh sort of kickboxing classes uh very early, like six in the morning near.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I yeah, I definitely remember, I definitely remember in the spring of 2011 thinking, you know, I've got another four years of this, whatever it was.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna this is either gonna kill me or I'm gonna get my my my shit together.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I tried to get my shit together.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Very good.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us about your third photo.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, actually, related to this, it might surprise you, but I actually think a photograph of my of the uh we can take your pick, I either of the sort of huge loss of the election in 2015, um, or if you want a you know, another version of the same thing, which is you know political failure um or or loss, uh the loss of my seat in 2017.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I say that is I do, I've certainly found, and I'm sure this is a I'm sure there's some Chinese proverb, and it's it's a perfectly trite and commonplace observation, but I've as a I've personally found that I've learned a lot more from failure than success.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I just think it, I just think it's it's taught me much more.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you just keep succeeding, you don't actually ask yourself a whole bunch of searching questions.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I you know, I was the I was the leader of the tribe and and I was extremely in Romaine, exceptionally proud.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think we was, I think, modestly, I think the government between 2010 and 15 was the best government this country's had in in the last decade and a half, if not more, in very difficult circumstances.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: We'll need to bring you back for a whole episode on that.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, okay.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: But uh no, I really do.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's just remarkable what we achieved in that five-year period in that in the in the ruins of the 2008 financial crisis.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in a sense, if you look back on it in history, you've had 2008, which is this body blow to the British economy, and 2016, this mad self-inflicted wound of Brexit, which is still bleeding.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: And in a sense, that that that government, which no one expected was going to last more than a few months, I think did a remarkable job to steady the ship and more.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: But my point is I I I think political, certainly my case, and if you're if you're a party leader and if you're in government and if you then lose an election, it's there's nowhere to hide.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's so public.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's absolutely it's an excoriatingly public form of sure.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and yeah, I it was interesting.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: I I I um I remember going to speak to John Major shortly after the election.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: I was slightly sort of dazed about because you literally go from one moment to the next.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one moment, every millisecond of your day is taken up and is organised by other people, and then suddenly you're sitting there thinking, you know, what's not yeah, and um and I remember John saying he was just a lovely guy, and he was so thoughtful, and he said, Nick, it's gonna take you, it's gonna take you up to two years for you to really rewire your system.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember we were had a nice drink together, I remember leaving and sort of thinking, I'm sure I can but it does take a while, and part of the process of sort of dealing with something where you feel you've done great things and then it sort of comes to a crashing halt.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um I found at least was that I just I think it's really important if something goes wrong, is you've got to you mustn't deny it, you've got to face it, you've got to almost weirdly embrace it and say, No, I that it's you know, one I I take the rap, I screwed up or whatever, maybe it was your fault, not your fault, maybe it was in your control, not in your control.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: But certainly in politics, you'll find a lot of politicians, since most political careers end famously in failure, uh, as Enoch Powell, I think once said, sort of almost denying the the end point and then constantly trying to revitigate history and rewrite history and so on.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so I found that very useful.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I developed much greater resilience out of it and much greater kind of, yeah, probably a level of self-knowledge.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it led you to have this amazing new act in right at the top of Silicon Valley.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and how lucky was I?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, which is very unusual.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you are very unusual in having been right at the top of top of government and right at the top of Silicon Valley.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think if you're a modest for a minute?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: What is it what is it about you do you think that has allowed you to achieve that?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because it is unusual.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's a nice leading question.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um well, I think partly, but only partly, um, I think I was quite disciplined and not trying to sort of hanker after being a sort of bad smell and the sort of in the sort of you know, the parameters of the penumbra of politics.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'd never want to go to the House of Lords and I'm gonna try to abolish the place and replace an elected, you know, unfashionable idea of a little democracy in the place.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, um, still not happened, amazingly, after sort of what, 150 years of discussion.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: But um, and I didn't want to do that, and I was too young to kind of just what hang out on what advisory boards.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I so I thought, and I think I was quite disciplined with myself.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: When I arrived in Silicon Valley, I literally remember making a mental note saying, I'm never gonna talk ever about what I've done before, unless someone asked me.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I knew instantly I was only as good as what I was doing that day.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I mean, much though, much I admire about Mark Zuckerberg, these are very unsentimental places.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: They don't give a shit what you did before.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: You can be as fancy as you like.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: You you you either do the day job well, so I immerse myself in the day.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I had a willingness not to stand on ceremony, not to be proud of myself, not to cling on to past glories.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think I was, I think I was quite good at just like letting go.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's a new chapter.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: I've got to throw myself into the new chapter.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: And anyway, I I mean, I that was the only way I could do that job.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was such an all-immersive job.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I think I think I was, I think maybe that's something I was able to do.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Just let go.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Just look like just roll the punches.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's one thing.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then the only other thing I would say, which I found striking when I went to Silicon Valley, it's an odd thing to say given how, in a sense, sort of ruthless and efficient these organizations look like, is if you've ever been in government, and particularly as I was if you've been in a very senior role in government, and as I was if you're senior in government at a very difficult time, a country was going through a financial and fiscal crisis and so on, you learn very quickly, you just have to take decisions.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: You just have to take them.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they might not none of them might be good.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: Just take a decision.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's one thing I've always been relatively unafraid of doing.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll pay the consequences, and if those decisions people don't like them, then I'll get you know beaten around the head and neck and so on.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: And boy, did that happen.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: But but I've never ever shirked from just taking a decision.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's always served me relatively well.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Whether I took the right ones or the wrong ones, you can debate, but I've always never, I've always accepted if you're in a senior position, whether it's in the private sector, take bloody decisions.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's what you're there for.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: You're there to make judgments and arrive at judgments.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: And they the decisions come to you precisely because other people can't take them.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: So take them.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can compare the leaders that you came across in Silicon Valley tech versus the leaders in in government, not just David Cameron, but others around the world.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: You you met all of them.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: What are the differences between what makes a really good prime minister and a really excellent CEO?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think they're more different than I might have imagined.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, as you know, people in tech, uh particularly in Silicon Valley, love to denigrate politicians and all politicians are venal and all politics is ridiculous and so on.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I actually will stand up for the political class.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: I I think taking political decisions and carrying the country and making the excruciating trade-offs you have to do is way, way harder than running a business on the whole.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Way harder.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's just so much.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you're level, you are subject to a level of scrutiny that people in business have no clue of, no clue at all.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm amazed when you meet business with senior business people who are getting their knickers in a twist because there's a disobliging adjective about them on page six of the Financial Times.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Quite thin-skinned.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, so thin-skinned.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the thing.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: I've I I um I've I've one of the things I really learned was is like, and boy, have I been subject to it.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, endless people in Silicon Valley Pontific is if they would find it very easy to become president of the United States or Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: They haven't got a clue, I don't think, how quite how remorseless the pressure is, yeah, how unforgiving it is, how you can't hide anywhere.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Most CEOs are are honestly, they're cloistered in cotton wool compared to certainly British politics, where you are exposed to a very, very aggressive newspaper industry, perhaps outside Australia, the most aggressive political press on the planet.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: You've also got this very levelling effect of being a constituency MP, whether you like it or not, you can be as senior as you want.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: You have to turn up on a Thursday evening and listen to Mrs.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Smith complaining, complaining about the overgrown Lalanda of their, you know, their neighbour's garden and stuff.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I I actually I actually think senior politicians who get there and then make good decisions, I I think it's a quite it's a skill that I think a lot of CEOs often um I think they often exaggerate their own.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: But having said that, I certainly when I went to Silicon Valley, what I discovered was I moved from a world in Westminster which is all about cajoling and persuading, it's about the language.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're losing language often in a in a in a in a disingenuous way or in a poetic way or a lofty way or a brutal way, but you're constantly, you're you're constantly communicating.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, love or loath Trump, he's an extraordinary communicator.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, an absolutely astonishing, demotic communicator.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't matter whether you're 12, a 12-year-old kid with no education, or a 65-year-old, the directness of it.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in Silicon Valley, of course, I realize you're dealing with engineers who want systems and statistics.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just a much more, it's much more data-driven, often acronym-driven world compared to the world of language, which politics is.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I have come to the conclusion that the two skill sets and archetypes are more different than I had slightly anticipated.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of thought running big complex organizations, roughly the same.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's quite different.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Last question for you.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's unusual that you have been right at the top of politics and right at the top of business.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: I there are probably not many people in the world, probably five people or something who've managed to do something like that.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: Having done that, though, your next act, I want to talk about the future.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have a hankering now, having been the deputy presenter of the UK, albeit a very unusually powerful one, and the number two at Meta?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Do you now think, right, I've got all the experience in the world.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: I want to go be, you know, the president of Europe or the CEO of Meta, or whatever it might be.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: If those are up for if those are on the piece of certain certainly would on the former.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: I I can't I care passionately about um our continent.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um and just ignoring Brexit for a minute, it is our continent.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: We are, whether whether you like it or not, Britain is part of tectonically part of Europe.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I do I think my North Star now, and I don't know how it's going to manifest itself.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think it'll obviously manifest itself in the private sector, but I do passionately feel that we are we are we're at the sort of 59th second of before midnight, where Europe as a whole could become like a sort of museum continent where we are basically subject to the predatory um designs of China and the US in particular.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the weakness, demographic problems, economic underperformance.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I I I think my North Star really would be to do anything I can to try and foster greater scaled uh technological success in Europe.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a lot, but when I when David Cameron and I assembled the coalition government, what was it, 16 years ago?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you'll remember this.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: There basically wasn't a tech startup scene in London.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing, really.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: And to be fair to the coalition, we did a lot of really good stuff.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't only us, but actually we did a lot of good stuff.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now you've got a genuinely vibrant tech scene here.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: You you know you know this better than I do.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're you're you're a VC.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, if you if you're a bright young founder here and you've got to raise six, eight, nine million quid, you can do it relatively easily now.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is it's the next rungs of the ladder that we don't have.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: If you then need to raise 20, 30, 40, 50, you you know, the famous growth capital gap.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that and other things like that would be where I probably want to invest my resources.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: I want, I want, I got two of my three kids who are both in the US, and I can't as a father begrudge them that they're just finding opportunities that they don't have here.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to play a part that in 10, 15 years, people like my kids feel that they can find, you know, fortune and success in in this old battered continent just as much as they can in the US.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that that I think will be very much my sort of guiding, my guiding sort of yeah, North Star for the for the for the foreseeable future.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: Brilliant.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: Can't wait to see what you do next.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining us on Giant Ideas.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.