Online satire plays by its own rules. Unrestrained by broadcasters' guidelines, regulations and duties of impartiality (and sometimes recklessly heedless of defamation law), satirists of all political stripes felt liberated to be as savage and cruel as they liked. So it's ironic that the creator of one of the most devastatingly effective pieces of political satire this century insisted he had no political axe to grind at all.

In the summer of 2010 Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg was flying high. During an often bad-tempered general election campaign, even his opponents fell over each other to proclaim "I agree with Nick". So meteoric was his rise that pundits coined a new term: 'Cleggmania'. After a messy set of results, the Lib Dems, with their highest vote share since 1983, emerged as kingmakers. Clegg ultimately chose to join David Cameron's Conservatives in coalition, becoming deputy prime minister - the highest office attained by any Liberal leader since David Lloyd George.

But in politics, as in physics, what goes up usually goes down. Clegg and his party were soon locked into delivering an austerity programme that would inevitably bring upset and hardship for many of their voters. Most damagingly, the Lib Dems took the brunt of the blame for the coalition's decision to lift the cap on university tuition fees - breaking a pledge signed by all 57 of its MPs to resist exactly such a move. Most universities immediately hiked their fees to the new maximum of £9,000 - a nearly 300% increase. Students, who had flocked to the party as a result of the pledge, screamed betrayal.

With his party's support collapsing, Clegg took the unusual step of recording a public apology: for signing the pledge, not for breaking it. Released online on 19 April 2012, the video appeared on that evening's TV news and current affairs programmes, and Clegg had every reason to be optimistic that its message would land. But within hours, a second video appeared that would eclipse his altogether.

Musician and producer Alex Vegas (real name Alex Ross) had already had success with the 'remix' format, notably with Muslimic Rayguns (2011), which set the addled rant of a fascist skinhead to Asian-infused breakbeats. Leveson Enquiry: The Musical (2012), commissioned by online satirists the Poke, repeated the trick with content from the phone-hacking enquiry.

Approached again by the Poke immediately after Clegg's video dropped, Vegas got busy. The Nick Clegg Apology Song was completed in six hours, using music from an earlier unfinished project (despite the title, he didn't use Autotune, but another application that enabled him to pitch the speakers' words to any note on the scale), and posted to YouTube that evening.

Overnight, it exploded. For most of its audience, Vegas's remix completely undermined the intended gravity of Clegg's original, making it seem not just absurd, but phoney and cynical - even if that wasn't its creator's intention. "I'm not really one of those angry students," Vegas insisted, "there's no political message behind it at all."

Wisely, Clegg took the remix in good humour, requesting only that proceeds go to Sheffield Children's NHS Foundation Trust. But if the anger diminished a little over time, the ridicule never went away. In the election of May 2015, the Lib Dems were eviscerated, with just eight seats standing; Clegg narrowly held his own seat, but resigned as party leader that July. Following his own electoral defeat in 2017 he left politics and Britain behind for a new role with social media giant Facebook.