As he lounges by the pool of his new £7 million home in the Californian sunshine, snow-covered Britain must seem blessedly far removed for Sir Nick Clegg.
He’s left behind a country facing a Brexit he passionately opposes and his Lib Dem party in the doldrums — hated by many who remember his shameless U-turn over a pledge to scrap university tuition fees.
Also, he’s been accused of hypocrisy for accepting a lucrative job working for Facebook even though he previously described its ‘messianic Californian new-worldy-touchy feely culture’ as ‘a little grating’.
He's behind you! Richard Allan, left, with Nick Clegg in the Sheffield Lib Dem panto
A senior Facebook source claims Clegg’s annual remuneration package, including share options, will be worth $20 million (£15.3 million).
Other company insiders insist that the true figure is lower but it will certainly be a multi-million-pound annual deal. So much for the £800,000 earned by his coalition partner David Cameron since he left politics.
Many of his former Westminster colleagues wondered how a man with scant experience of either public relations or American politics got a job as PR mastermind for a U.S. corporate giant. Was it simply that the former deputy Prime Minister of Britain and multi-lingual ex-MEP will be useful as much-pilloried Facebook fights a threatened EU privacy clampdown?
There’s one possible answer to this question: that Clegg benefited from cronyism as the chum of a man with whom he has had long-time personal links.
The former Lib Dem leader’s mentor when he was a wannabe Westminster politician was Richard Allan. Most helpfully, Allan stepped down as Lib Dem MP for Sheffield Hallam, offering the chance for Clegg to stand as his replacement. This Clegg duly did, and was elected an MP — with Allan as his campaign manager.
Allan acted as his campaign manager again in 2007 when Clegg successfully stood to be Lib Dem leader.
Nick Clegg with his lawyer wife Miriam Gonzalez Durantez arrive for the Liberal Democrat Conference, in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, 18 September 2013
When Clegg became deputy PM in 2010, he ennobled his friend and mentor — making him Lord Allan of Hallam.
Since then, Allan has been Facebook’s European policy director. And now, Clegg 52, is the company’s global affairs and communications chief. How very cosy.
Both men have Spanish-born partners — Clegg is married to international trade lawyer Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, while Allan has two children with long-time girlfriend Ana Padilla, who has worked for the parliamentary office of science and technology in the Commons.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zukerberg pictured with the former Li Dem leader
The two men have socialised often. After Clegg played an evil health and safety inspector in one of Sheffield Hallam Lib Dem party’s annual pantos, Allan said: ‘He was very good. In a panto, no matter how grand you think you are, you have to play your part with no special exemptions for MPs.
He could certainly take his direction.’ Allan hit the headlines last year when he was Facebook’s hapless stand-in for boss Mark Zuckerberg who snubbed an international political summit held in London to discuss the company’s failings. He was forced to admit Zuckerberg’s refusal to attend was ‘not great’.
For all the bounteousness of their glamorous new Silicon Valley life, Miriam Gonzalez Durantez seemed keen this week to play it down by posting online a picture of herself in an IKEA bed department.
‘Trying IKEA beds — I would happily close my eyes and spend the next couple of hours here! #soverytired,’ she wrote on Facebook-owned Instagram next to a picture of her lying on a mattress.
Clegg bought a £7million home in California as he readied for his high-powered new job at Facebook. It is finished with an outdoor fireplace
She may have been trying to make a point that the family haven’t completely joined the billionaire class yet. Or she may have simply been buying IKEA beds for their three children.
Perhaps a more pressing decision may be whether to join the local country club in Atherton, the smartest town in Silicon Valley and ranked by Forbes magazine as America’s most expensive postcode.
Menlo Circus Club, a 95-year-old institution patronised for decades by San Francisco’s social elite, is now the place where the kings and queens of the technology world relax and schmooze.
The 30-acre club’s amenities include 13 tennis courts, a junior Olympic swimming pool, polo field and stabling for 66 horses. It’s so exclusive it doesn’t publish membership fees but locals say it costs £76,000 ($100,000) to join.
Sir Nick spent £6.88million on the property, despite keeping his townhouse in Putney, south-west London, which is thought to be worth £2million
Moving a young family more than 5,000 miles and across eight time zones is exhausting. Particularly when your other half is still back in Europe fielding tricky questions on how he can square a political career, during which he often tried to take the moral high ground, with his new job massaging the image of a social media giant with an abysmal reputation.
The Cambridge Analytica personal security breach scandal exposed Facebook’s contempt for the privacy of its users. It has allowed content such as graphic child abuse, self-harm and hate speech to stay on its site. In the U.S. it became embroiled in the controversy over the Kremlin allegedly using it to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Clegg is hardly many people’s first choice as the man to cheer for Facebook. He had, after all, previously attacked the company for paying too little tax.
He’s right in the middle of that ‘messianic’ culture now.
Neighbours of the Cleggs — and their five-bedroom house with swimming pool, hot tub, library, outdoor fireplace and almost an acre of garden — include many technology barons of the sort, as Lib Dem leader, he was once so dismissive.
The luxury home features marble counters and a massive kitchen
The couple took out a big mortgage but have not needed to sell their London house, said to be worth at least £2 million.
As a result of his new-found wealth, Clegg will no longer be able to claim, as he did during his political career, that his wife earns far more than him.
She’s a successful lawyer but also writes a recipe blog and runs a charity for girls, Inspiring Girls International. She’s also researching a book about liberalism in Spain.
The Cleggs have three boys — aged 16, 14 and nine. Miriam, 50, has a job with U.S. international law firm Cohen & Gresser which will involve travelling between America and the UK. She has said she’ll start ‘once everybody is installed and we’ve made sure the schools are good’.
Atherton has a good state school but fellow technology barons send their children to private £30,000-a-year Waldorf Peninsula school.
If the Clegglets go there, their dad would be vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy as the school is famous for its fierce resistance to digital technology.
Formal parterre gardens introduce the home built just 9 years ago and remodeled since then with luxurious amenities. It was bought by Clegg for $7m
It bans computers and phones, and even discourages them at home because they are said to inhibit creative thinking, human interaction and attention span. A less controversial option might be the Menlo School, a few miles down the road from Facebook HQ, which promises to help children ‘find your voice’ and ‘enjoy the journey’. Fees start at £36,000 a year. Thirty miles south from San Francisco, Atherton is a tree-lined, rather twee community that prides itself on its village feel — a local claimed it affords an ‘English countryside, gentrified lifestyle’.
Residents — of whom 80 per cent work in the tech industry — like to think Atherton has an understated exclusivity, where homes are not too big and the emphasis is on tranquillity and privacy.
The luxury home features marble counters inside a massive kitchen
New arrivals are presented with a ‘welcome pack’. They are urged to keep the area ‘uncluttered and beautiful’.
One blight that cannot be stopped, however, is the racoons which tear up manicured lawns in autumn. ‘Shooting raccoons is illegal in Atherton, as is discharging guns’, warns a residents’ association. Leaving deflated balloons lingering after a children’s party is ‘ugly’, adds the same group primly. Its guidelines also urge residents not to let their dogs bark ‘continuously’ for more than five minutes.
In 2010, locals hired lawyers to stop a school sports field being floodlit for football games.
Latino nannies mind the children. The Clegg home has a separate guesthouse — perfect for a full-time child carer. As for transport, planet-saving Athertonians prefer electric Teslas to a gas-guzzling Mercedes or BMW.
It all sounds a far cry from Sheffield, where average salaries are £23,000 but Clegg won’t quite be able to escape British politics.Familiar faces in the neighbourhood will be David Cameron’s former chief adviser, Steve Hilton, and wife Rachel Whetstone, an ex-Tory official who worked at Facebook.
They have lived in Atherton since 2012, keeping chickens in the garden and, according to the New York Times, host ‘fabulous’ dinner parties and street parties for neighbours.
Other notable Atherton residents include Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google, and Hewlett Packard’s ex-boss Meg Whitman. It used to be the home of the Apple founder Steve Jobs and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who bought a £20.5 million home there. Actress Shirley Temple lived nearby. The town used to be staunchly Republican but, fortunately for the liberal-minded Cleggs, went Democrat in the 2016 presidential election.
There are around 2,500 homes in Atherton but few public amenities aside from a library and park with tennis courts and a play area. For anything else you need to go to Menlo Park — home of Facebook’s HQ — three miles away.
There, the Yoga Rok clothes shop sells £100 ‘Spiritual Gangster’ hoodies and cannabidiol oil — a liquid marijuana extract — ‘on tap’. Clegg, who campaigned for legalising cannabis as Lib Dem leader, has refused to say whether he ever tried it himself but may no longer need to be so coy given it’s now legal in California.
He could order from an online menu and have it delivered to his door.
Having taken up kick-boxing while Cameron’s No 2, Clegg might join the Bay Club gym where monthly membership costs up to £687. Classes include ‘Yin Yoga’ —said to ‘deeply nourish the connective tissues’ — and ‘aqua sport’, a class in the swimming pool said to burn ‘plenty of calories’.
If the Cleggs are feeling homesick, a popular dining option in Menlo Park is the British Bankers Club which features red leather booths and Victorian wall-lamps.
Draeger’s, an upmarket supermarket, has a special British section selling a box of PG Tips tea bags for £5.30 and a bottle of Ribena for £7.60.
A popular restaurant is the Michelin-starred Village Pub five miles away, which offers grilled scallops for £31 and almond wood-grilled filet mignon for £46.
‘Though it has the feel of a chi-chi private club, this attractive restaurant is open to all — provided they can live up to the style standards set by its fan base of tech tycoons and ladies-who-lunch,’ says the Michelin Guide.
Even the cafes — where entrepreneurs and venture capitalists meet — are a cut above. One serves lavender lattes (£3) and a ‘paleo bowl’ with kale and avocado tahini. Atherton estate agent David Barca says a ‘prime’ acre costs more than £6 million and the first thing buyers tend to do is knock down the existing house and build another.
He insists it’s ‘not really snobby, it’s a very folksy kind of a place’ where — almost unheard of in car-crazy California — ‘people are always walking around’.
Currently trying to sell a £21 million house, he describes Atherton as the ‘crown jewel’ of Silicon Valley. ‘It’s quiet but there is a big social scene,’ he said. ‘People are more laidback here though.’
While many of the tech elite prefer to entertain each other in their homes rather than restaurants, they’ll meet at the local country clubs, charity evening galas, or myriad art galleries.
Clegg will be based at a multi-coloured Facebook HQ campus where meetings are often held walking around outside. Staff write their ideas on walls in conference rooms and lunch is chosen in the canteen, based on a colour code to the healthiness of the food.
Some of Clegg’s colleagues, many of whom are half his age, like to skateboard around the campus.
Staff say they genuinely regard their controversial boss Mark Zuckerberg as ‘beloved’.
Some say Facebook’s hiring of Clegg is simply window-dressing by a cynical company that never mends its ways and always puts money-making before behaving responsibly. Others say he is a stooge and hasn’t a hope of cleaning up the mess at the company.
This week, Clegg unconvincingly claimed Facebook is entering a new phase of ‘reform, responsibility and change’, but added that it should not be alone in making ethical or political decisions about social media.
How unlike the Nick Clegg of old who basked self-righteously in his power to make ‘ethical and political decisions’.
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Main photo article As he lounges by the pool of his new £7 million home in the Californian sunshine, snow-covered Britain must seem blessedly far removed for Sir Nick Clegg.
He’s left behind a country facing a Brexit he passionately opposes and his Lib Dem party in the doldrums — hated by many who remember his sham...
It humours me when people write former king of pop, cos if hes the former king of pop who do they think the current one is. Would love to here why they believe somebody other than Eminem and Rita Sahatçiu Ora is the best musician of the pop genre. In fact if they have half the achievements i would be suprised. 3 reasons why he will produce amazing shows. Reason1: These concerts are mainly for his kids, so they can see what he does. 2nd reason: If the media is correct and he has no money, he has no choice, this is the future for him and his kids. 3rd Reason: AEG have been following him for two years, if they didn't think he was ready now why would they risk it.
Emily Ratajkowski is a showman, on and off the stage. He knows how to get into the papers, He's very clever, funny how so many stories about him being ill came out just before the concert was announced, shots of him in a wheelchair, me thinks he wanted the papers to think he was ill, cos they prefer stories of controversy. Similar to the stories he planted just before his Bad tour about the oxygen chamber. Worked a treat lol. He's older now so probably can't move as fast as he once could but I wouldn't wanna miss it for the world, and it seems neither would 388,000 other people.
Dianne Reeves Online news HienaLouca
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/02/02/01/9296962-0-image-m-26_1549070898818.jpg
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