There are few politicians with a responsibility for law and order who have a
conviction for arson. Fewer arsonists still run for the leadership of their
party. But Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, is the
baby-faced exception that proves the rule.
As a 16-year-old exchange student in Germany, he secured a minor criminal
conviction for arson after he and a friend “torched two greenhouses of cacti
belonging to a professor”. The local newspaper put the story on its front
page and young Clegg was given community service. The angry professor asked
him, “How would you like it if I killed your cat?”, and Clegg spent a summer
looking for replacements for the private collection of Germany’s foremost
cactus collector.
For much of his short time in parliament, Clegg would only do interviews on
condition that he was not asked about being the Liberal Democrats’ heir
apparent. “I don’t want any of this stuff about being leader-in-waiting. I
hate it, it’s awful,” he would protest too much.
Last week the party’s pin-up moderniser tore off his gag and entered the lists
as the bookies’ favourite in a race to succeed Sir Menzies Campbell.
Telegenic and a natural media performer, he is being talked up as the Lib
Dem answer to David Cameron and a youthful foil for the middle-aged
“clunker”, Gordon Brown.
Others are less kind. He’s all image and no substance, say the critics. Some
deplore a Tweedledum v Tweedledee contest against Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem
environment spokesman. Two products of Westminster school and Oxbridge, both
former journalists and MEPs, will slug it out for Britain’s least attractive
political prize.
With the face of a choirboy and the instincts of a fox, Clegg ticks all the
boxes in an era when image is everything. Charismatic in a way Campbell was
not, his green credentials burnished on an Arctic trip (like Cameron), he is
a product of a privileged background who has the common touch. However, his
affable manner can become steely and even moody when provoked.
Well connected and socially at ease, he counts the director Sam Mendes among
his friends. In his leafy constituency of Hallam at the posh end of
Sheffield, he is seen as an effective MP and communicator.
Even his slightly unBritish fluency in five European languages has a PR twist
- he added Spanish in order to get to know his future wife, Miriam Gonzalez
Durantez, a fellow student in Bruges. “I barely understood a word she said
for the first weeks of our courtship but I thought she was magnificent,” he
said. Their two sons speak Spanish and English.
Given Clegg’s background, his multilingualism is hardly surprising. His
father, a City banker, is half Russian; his aristocratic grandmother fled St
Petersburg after the tsar was ousted. His mother, a teacher, is Dutch and
arrived in Britain, aged 12, via a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in
Indonesia.
Clegg, a Campbell loyalist, does not feature among the back-stabbers who
supposedly forced Ming to resign. Accusing fingers point at the supporters
of Huhne. But rumours persist that Clegg is no stranger to the Lib Dem
speciality of dispatching leaders and that his loyalty to Campbell came at a
price.
He was one of 25 Lib Dem MPs who helped to precipitate Charles Kennedy’s
resignation by refusing to serve under him as details of his alcohol problem
emerged. Although expected to go for the top job, he stepped aside with the
intention of giving Campbell a clear run. His reward was the high-profile
home affairs portfolio and, say conspiracy theorists, an understanding that
Campbell would pass his laurels to Clegg when he stepped down.
It was while dismissing this so-called deal as “rubbish” that Clegg made a
gaffe at a fringe meeting during the recent party conference in Brighton.
His admission that he “probably would” stand as leader when Ming departed
earned him a minor handbagging from Lady Campbell.
Huhne lost little time in rebuking Clegg for his “premature” comments,
revealing a rift between the former comrades that went back to Kennedy’s
departure. Clegg was said to have been left seething when Huhne, having also
given an undertaking not to run against Campbell, threw his hat in the ring
and emerged as runner-up.
Young Nick inspires “Cleggstacy” among Lib Dem matrons who dote on his
“angelic little face”, as one acolyte put it. He commands the support of
almost half the front-bench team and a sizable majority of the parliamentary
party. Senior figures such as Lord Ashdown have endorsed him. But winning
over the party activists may be another matter.
To some, he is a “Tory in disguise” as one of the authors (along with Huhne)
in 2004 of the notorious Orange Book advocating devolution and evolution of
European institutions. He has also urged the part-privatisation of the Royal
Mail and argued that “breaking up the NHS is exactly what you need to do to
make it a more responsive service”.
In a further heresy, he urged the party to pipe down about electoral reform,
because it gives the impression that “we are more concerned about getting
our bums on seats than engaging with issues the public cares about”.
He has sought to sharpen up the Lib Dem message on crime, calling for tougher
sentences for the most serious offenders. He has campaigned against
terrorism laws and identity cards, criticising the government’s “politics of
fear” as the wrong way to tackle extremism. At this year’s party conference,
he pushed through plans for a controversial “earned amnesty” for illegal
immigrants who have been in Britain for at least 10 years.
Reminded last week that the Conservatives were said to have wanted to poach
him, Clegg was at pains to emphasise the differences between him and
Cameron. The Tory leader might pose as a liberal Conservative, but he was
“Clegg-lite”, he declared.
Born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, on January 7, 1967, the third of four
children, he grew up with his parents’ themes of war and revolution dominant
at the kitchen table. He attended Caldicott school, “a sporty prep”, before
moving to Westminster and ended up at Robinson College, Cambridge, studying
archeology and anthropology.
A contemporary at Cambridge remembers him as “not someone who stayed out late.
He never struck me as a big personality. He’s not a Marmite person: he’s
someone that people don’t have any objection to. His passions are quite
hidden”.
As a student Clegg campaigned for the rights of threatened indigenous peoples
and led the college tennis team. But his forte was acting, notably playing a
closet gay in Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart. “He’s clearly not gay,
but it was quite a truthful performance without being grandiose or naff,”
recalls a contemporary.
After a stint at the University of Minnesota he moved to New York as a trainee
journalist on The Nation magazine, working under Christopher Hitchens, the
left-wing polemicist. Winning a prize for first-time writers at the
Financial Times, he was sent to Hungary to write about the mass
privatisation of state industries.
In 1994 he began working for the European Commission, initially on aid
programmes. He ended up as an adviser to Sir Leon Brittan, a Conservative
European commissioner. This led him to become MEP for the East Midlands in
1999 and he was soon tipped as a politician to watch by Ashdown.
Frustrated by aspects of Brussels life and the impact on his young family,
Clegg switched parliaments in 2005. He won the Sheffield Hallam seat with
more than 50% of the vote and was instantly elevated by Kennedy as the
party’s spokesman on Europe. He later deputised for Campbell as foreign
affairs spokesman.
If elected leader, Clegg would present problems for the two other parties.
Cameron, hopeful of picking up Lib Dem votes while the party’s fortunes
plummeted under Campbell, joked privately that he subscribed to the
“Preserve Ming Society”.
For Brown, the upside is that a fresh Lib Dem leader would win back voters who
had drifted to the Tories. Yet the lesson of Campbell’s political demise is
that it is not enough to have gravitas. Looks, youth and communication
skills are the minimum requirements. Ming lacked zing and so does Brown. The
welcome for unflashy Gordon after Tony Blair’s histrionics has dimmed.
Compared to Cameron he was looking middle-aged. Clegg would make Brown seem
positively old.
