Nick Clegg

Why organisations work with Nick Clegg

• He has sat on both sides of the table that defines tech policy: as the head of global affairs at Meta facing regulators, and as a head-of-government negotiator setting policy for a G7 economy.
• His 2025 book How to Save the Internet lays out a specific argument about how democracies, Silicon Valley and authoritarian states are pulling the internet apart, and what a workable settlement would look like. Boards get the thesis and the evidence behind it.
• He can map how Brussels, Washington and Beijing actually behave on AI and platform rules from direct experience of all three, not from secondary commentary.
• His coalition government experience gives him a working language for decision-making when no single party controls the outcome, which is the practical condition most boards now face on tech policy.

Biography highlights

• Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 2010 to 2015, in Britain’s first post-war coalition government.
• Leader of the Liberal Democrats, 2007 to 2015; Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam, 2005 to 2017.
• President for Global Affairs at Meta Platforms, 2018 to January 2025, leading the company’s policy and regulatory engagement worldwide.
• Author of How to Save the Internet (Bodley Head/Penguin, 2025), Politics: Between the Extremes (2016), How to Stop Brexit (2017), and The Responsibilities of Democracy (2019, with Sir John Major).
• Member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands, 1999 to 2004; earlier career at the European Commission.
• Knighted in 2018; recipient of the Financial Times David Thomas Prize, 1993.

Biography

The most consequential rules now shaping AI, data and the global internet are being written by a small number of governments that no longer agree with each other. Nick Clegg has worked at the centre of that argument from both sides. As Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015, he helped run a coalition government through the eurozone crisis. As President of Global Affairs at Meta from 2018 to early 2025, he led the company’s policy engagement with the US, EU, UK, India and beyond.

Few people have moved between those two seats. The combination matters because tech policy is no longer a niche regulatory file. It is a board-level question of capital allocation, market access and operational risk. Clegg’s value to a senior audience is that he understands how the political logic of Brussels, the commercial logic of Silicon Valley and the strategic logic of Washington and Beijing actually collide.

His 2025 book How to Save the Internet, published by The Bodley Head, sets out the argument in full. He proposes a “digital democracies alliance” to prevent the global internet fragmenting into incompatible national systems, and he is candid about where Big Tech, including his former employer, has misread the public mood. Earlier books, including Politics: Between the Extremes and The Responsibilities of Democracy with Sir John Major, focus on coalition, compromise and democratic resilience under stress.

The throughline is governance under conditions where no one is fully in charge. That is the working environment for any senior leader trying to plan around AI rules, content liability, data flows and the geopolitics of semiconductors. Clegg has been in the room when those decisions were taken, on both sides of the regulator and the platform.

Key speaking topics

• AI policy and regulation across the US, EU and UK
• The geopolitics of the global internet
• Big Tech, content moderation and platform governance
• Coalition government and political decision-making under uncertainty
• Democratic resilience in the age of social media and AI
• UK and EU relations after Brexit
• Trust, public discourse and the future of democratic institutions

Ideal for

• Boards and executive teams of companies materially exposed to AI, data, content or platform regulation
• General Counsel, Chief Policy Officers and Heads of Government Affairs in multinationals
• CEO and CTO audiences planning AI deployment under divergent regulatory regimes
• Senior public sector and policy audiences working on tech, digital and AI strategy

Audience outcomes

• A clearer read of where AI and platform regulation is heading in the EU, US and UK over the next planning cycle
• A working framework for how Silicon Valley, Washington, Brussels and Beijing each think about the internet, and where their positions are converging or diverging
• An informed view of the argument in How to Save the Internet, including the case for a digital democracies alliance
• A grounded sense of how senior decisions get made inside coalition governments and inside large global platforms, from someone who has done both