Yet any excitement for Clegg being duly ordained as a master of the metaverse will be tempered by the realisation that he is now officially responsible for defending the indefensible. A thick hide tanned in British politics has proved a valuable asset for Clegg.

Those who never understood his move into generously remunerated public relations must understand that failing upwards is a skill in itself. With Clegg as spinner-in-chief, Meta has reeled from crisis to crisis but has convinced itself that he is the man to turn it all around. Talk about an alternate reality.

Now he is officially the main public face of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, perhaps Clegg can find a way to out-weird Zuckerberg’s two-day congressional testimony.

He’ll have plenty of opportunities. Calls for Facebook to be reined in on multiple fronts are at fever-pitch. It stands accused of abusing personal data and undermining democracy; providing an outlet for terrorism and hate speech; not paying its taxes; abetting genocide of the Rohingas in Myanmar. It is accused of algorithms that promote fake news and allow dangerous misinformation to spread on vaccines while simultaneously suppressing views it doesn’t agree with such as the Wuhan lab leak theory, despite the fact that it had been reported by serious news outlets around the world.

Instagram is not much better. The app has been accused of being particularly toxic for teenage girls in promoting anorexia and other eating disorders, self-harm and suicide content. Among the many damning claims that whistleblower Frances Haugen made about Facebook was that it knew about Instagram’s role in exacerbating issues around body image and self-harm but did nothing about it, another example of the company prioritising clicks over the welfare of its users.

And yet Meta (and Clegg in his previous lesser role) have done little to dispel concerns about its real-world impact. Regulators and politicians are demanding more constraints on its power, while some want to see it dismantled altogether to allow more competition to thrive.

Clegg reportedly considers one of his main achievements to be his part in the creation of the Facebook oversight board, though it’s not clear why. Touted as Facebook’s “Supreme Court”, the 20-strong independent board of academics, lawyers, activists, and prominent journalists was supposed to provide the checks and balances that had previously been missing.

But it has proven to be toothless with very little evidence that it has either the appetite or indeed the power to change how Facebook is run. Instead the impression is that it was constructed as little more than a veil of respectability for an organisation that has repeatedly demonstrated a shocking lack of governance.

Even if its members had the stomach for a fight with its founder, the fact that Zuckerberg controls a majority of the voting shares, means he is able to veto any attempts at reform. In an act of supreme irony, a member of the Oversight Board, a former Guardian editor, was seen on Twitter this week refusing an invitation to submit himself to the oversight of a committee of MPs.

But the longer that Facebook refuses to accept it has a problem the more it risks turning into a full-time lobbying business rather than a social media platform.

The biggest worry of all for Meta is that Facebook is in decline, as witnessed by its record-breaking 26pc nosedive on Wall Street this month. Even in Silicon Valley the knives are out for Zuckerberg: first Apple blocked the mobile web tracking technology on which much of his advertising empire depends. Now Google has announced similar changes on its Android smartphone software.

As he retreats to the metaverse, if Nick Clegg is the best answer to all this that Zuckerberg can come up with then he is already more out of touch with reality than anyone imagined.