We asked Nick Clegg, a former journalist, to write the beginning of his own interview. He groaned but good-naturedly agreed. “It would be something like, ‘Love or loathe the Liberal Democrats, he for one believes that liberalism is not being served by the other two parties and there is a massive opportunity for a party to articulate something that a lot of people actually would respond to - which is a very innate British sense of “don’t like overweening government, don’t like self-evident injustices, don’t like encroachment on civil liberties, don’t like faceless impersonal bureaucracies”, and the last thing that could ever be said about him is he’s not driven by a sense of conviction’.

“But please don’t write that,” he said.

Our version would have been rather different. Something like the following exchange we had with him:

Had he been frustrated by the way the Liberal Democrat leadership contest has gone?

“Quite a bit,” he said.

Had it been reduced to a squabble over a document called “Calamity Clegg”?

“Correct. Correct.”

Could it have been more inspiring?

“I agree and I regret it. In as much as I’ve still got a month to go, and in as much as I wittered on for an hour to you guys, I’ll do my bit to do it different.”

Mr Clegg began as the clear favourite to succeed Sir Menzies Campbell. For all his personable charm - his allies like to boast that he speaks “human” along with his five other languages – he has not made much of an impact on the British public. But had his poor show been the result of a lack of ideas or a failure to communicate them?

Mr Clegg first wanted to talk to us about whether he was too nice. “Is niceness incompatible with toughness? I don’t think it is,” he said.

The Calamity Clegg document, which was produced by workers in the rival camp, was not nice politics, but it was effective, we thought, in raising a question – whether he had a clarity of vision?

“Well, when the results come through I would be – how can I put this politely, nicely – gobsmacked if that episode proves to be helpful politically,” he said.

Was he saying that he would win?

“No. I just don’t think that that kind of negative campaigning is something that fits or works in an internal contest . . . everyone else switches off. I’m seeking to lead a party that has been through two odd years, which have been by turns embarrassing and unhappy . . . it’s quite simply testing the patience of the British people.

“The last couple of weeks in this leadership contest have become very introverted and lots of point scoring and people dancing on the head of pins and all the rest of it . . . If we carry on like this, there’ll be no future for us. You either turn outwards and try and communicate some of the stuff I’m communicating or you’re finished as a political party.

“It’s just stating the flaming obvious that you then have to draw a line under that quite firmly, quell all the internal ructions and rubbish.”

Mr Clegg scattered his speech with “pissed off”, “bonkers” and even “blah blah blah”, which is part of his appeal. He said that he wanted politicians to change, to call each other by their names in debates and to drop the archaic traditions. “The whole way in which we do politics in this place, it is literally gobbledegook to anyone who doesn’t come from an oak-panelled public school background [both he and Chris Huhne went to the same public school]. It is an insane way of conducting ourselves,” he said.

“Frankly it is the arrogance and the self-confidence that money buys in a public school system that is exactly replicated in this place, which makes it an exclusive province of too many public school people, and I think that is outrageous. It’s a form of political apartheid.”

We asked how much the Lib Dems would change with him in charge.

“I think they’d change quite a lot in style . . . I think you’re getting a much more lively, dare I say it sort of human way of doing politics,” he said.

Mr Clegg did not want to dwell too much on policy differences – “I don’t think that is what is interesting” – instead he wanted to talk about the themes that dominated people’s lives today, such as powerlessness or fear.

“What we need to do is not do what new Labour did, who went completely wonky and they thought that dealing with fear meant trying to catch up with it, by talking up ever more draconian responses to it. What you’ve got to do with fear is you’ve got to try and address it and you’ve got to try and explain what you do about it.”

In general, Mr Clegg has benefited from the edit he gets in print. His vagueness is maybe due to puppyish enthusiasm but it gives the unfortunate impression that he doesn’t have a clear point. For this see his own introduction.

Nick Clegg

Born January 1967

Education Westminster School, Cambridge, University of Minnesota

Journalism Trainee journalist, Nation magazine, New York, 1990

Other jobs Political consultant GJW Government Relations 1992-93; adviser to Sir Leon Brittan, European Commission vice-president, 1996-99; lecturer, Sheffield University, 1999

European Politics MEP for East Midlands, 1999-2004

British politics MP for Sheffield Hallam since May 2005; foreign affairs spokesman 2005-06; home affairs spokesman since 2006

Family married to Miriam González Durántez, a Spanish lawyer, formerly at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Two children; lives in South London

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