Nick Clegg, who last week was elected leader of the Liberal Democrats,
certainly has a quirky character. He left the European parliament because he
wanted to return to domestic politics working for a party which dealt in
“big ideas”. Let me remind you that this is the Lib Dems we are referring
to. Then, having said he has no faith, he insists that his two children are
taught Catholic dogma. Oh, and he firmly believes the Lib Dems will be in
power within a decade.
Clegg, who has reached the top of his party at the alarmingly young age of 40,
is a thoroughly charming chap. Convivial, confident, cultured. The sort of
person with whom a chat at a dinner party would be rather entertaining.
Personable, famously conversant in five languages, Clegg likes the theatre,
watching television with his young sons and walking in the Peak District.
So, a normal, middle-class family bloke who is probably funky enough to use
male grooming products, but not outrageous enough to take illegal drugs (the
usage of which while at university is a taboo area).
He is probably a bit brighter than most and definitely more upper-middle-class
than average, if you take his aristocratic Russian grandmother, posh
education at Westminster, Spanish wife and nannied-up household into account.
However, get him going on politics and Clegg’s appeal rather starts to wobble.
Where shall we start? How about in 2004 when he decided to leave Brussels
and his job as MEP for the East Midlands.
“After a while I thought, I am in the wrong place,” he says. So he comes back
to London and the throbbing heart of the Lib Dems; a party that has so
little sway over the hearts and minds of the British public that it barely
features in the opinion polls and is so undynamic that only 60% of its
members bothered to vote in the Clegg/Chris Huhne leadership contest. (Which
culminated with Clegg winning by a paltry 500 votes.)
Never mind. The Lib Dems might represent but a dim imprint of the Liberal
party’s glory days but Clegg, elected as MP for Sheffield Hallam in 2005,
had at least achieved his aim, which was to reach the House of Commons where
he could get to grips with the “big debates of the day”. He was quickly made
a Lib Dem front-bencher and set to work “trying to make the big case”.
Now, I’ve never really understood what the “big case” is for the Lib Dems.
Interviewing Clegg should be the ideal time to find out. “Let’s take the big
issues,” he says. Oh dear, I know what is coming: all those radical ideas
that the Lib Dems first came up with that everyone else has now copied. “But
it makes a difference!” he cries. “We were speaking about the environment
years before anyone else. You can shift the debate in a big way, if you are
right, and if you get onto things much earlier than other parties.”
So is that what the Lib Dems are for - shifting debate? “No!” Well, what then?
“To make Britain more liberal. It’s as simple as that. Britain is not a
liberal enough country. Civil liberties are trashed. Kids born into deprived
areas are literally condemned at birth. That’s not liberal. It’s not liberal
that things are decided by Gordon Brown and a bunch of acolytes behind
closed doors in London.”
Surely the prime minister and his government are our democratically elected
representatives? “It is not liberal. A liberal society is one in which
families and communities have power over their own destiny,” he continues,
sounding a bit like Captain Kirk. “I advocate seriously radical
decentralisation. Get rid of council tax. Allow people to raise taxes
locally.”
What, so that financially challenged boroughs such as, say, Hackney in east
London would have the onerous burden of raising their own taxes? “Well, you
would make sure that such places are not only reliant on the funds they can
raise locally,” he admits. So his decentralisation isn’t that radical, then.
At this juncture we start to canter through all the things that we, the
benighted public, would have power over were we to live under a Lib Dem
government: taxes, education, health. Choice coming out of our ears. Votes
for everything. Ballot boxes springing up at every moment. Blimey, I think,
we’d hardly have time to keep our day jobs alive.
Is not this all just wishful thinking? Surely the only way that the Lib Dems
are ever going to have a sniff of power is by cosying up to that nice Mr
Cameron, whose ideas about personal choice over health and education are
perilously close to Clegg’s anyway. Is Clegg trying to smooth the way for a
coalition? “No!” he says. Clegg’s plan is bigger than that. Much bigger.
“My objective is to break the two-party system. We can do that in two
elections.” My, that’s a boast. How? By cosying up to the soft Tory
underbelly in the southeast of England? Homing in on the disaffected Labour
urban areas of the north? Neither. “One of the exciting things about
politics is that automatic tribal loyalty to one party or another has gone.
And it was tribal, class-based politics that sustained the two-party system.
So you have got a society that is changing and a political system that
hasn’t. And at some point the political system will have to change.”
What are your tactics for storming No 10? “Oh, tactics, schmactics,” says
Clegg, weirdly. All right, let’s put it differently. What are your plans,
your policies? “Oh, to make the party bigger,” he says airily. In what way -
party members, MPs? “All that. I will hold American-style town hall meetings
wherever I go. I hope people will genuinely come and tell me what their
priorities are, people who have really good ideas and really strong feelings
about the way things should be changed.”
Actually, let’s not bother about tactics, or even schmactics, because Clegg
believes that everyone will come round to his way of thinking. Forget the
fact that we haven’t had a Liberal government for about 90 years. According
to Clegg, voting Lib Dem is “in our blood”. Funny that so few of us do it
then.
“There is a liberal temperament in Britain.” Our liberal temperament, for
those of us who didn’t realise we had one, sounds like a cross between Shami
Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, the human rights organisation, and a
grumpy listener to the BBC’s Today programme: “Being quite bolshie, not
liking arbitrary authority, whether from London or Brussels. Really
disliking faceless, insensitive bureaucracy, the erosion of British civil
liberties and the heavy hand of the state.”
And fairness: “People don’t like it when things are unfair. When you have
grinding poverty cheek by jowl with Olympian global wealth. People feel
that’s wrong.”
Is he a wealth warrior? “Well, there are a lot of loopholes for the super-rich
which should be tightened up. Of course you shouldn’t squeeze them until
they leave. But you should have one flat tax on nondomestic earnings of 10%.
And that money should go directly to cutting council tax for people on the
lowest incomes,” he finishes with a flourish. Oh, here we are. Back to
cutting council tax again, which by now sounds like the only solid idea in
his arsenal.
Luckily for him, Clegg is interested in bigger things than boring old
policies. “The political establishment is really skating on thin ice.
Everyone is underestimating the profound sense of alienation and frustration
in the country. Let me tell you a few stories,” he says, plunging into a
series of wearying anecdotes about people in his constituency who are having
problems with automated answering services and other assorted horrors of
modern life. All of which the Liberal Democrats - naturally - will offer
sanctuary from.
Will they really be in power? “Yes. Politics is broke. It is just broken. Look
at the trend over the past 50 years. The proportion of people voting for the
two larger parties has gone down remorselessly.” Yes, but that doesn’t make
them vote Lib Dem, does it.
Perhaps they are apolitical because they are quite happy with their lot, I
suggest. After all, we are richer, better clothed, better fed and better
holidayed than ever. “People are not content,” says Clegg. “There is a great
level of alienation, anxiety and frustrated potential here. There are
thousands of children condemned by the circumstances of their birth.”
We have a brief chat about what Clegg calls “our segregated educated system”.
Interestingly, he rejects the idea that our public schools, which cream off
the best pupils and the best teachers and enjoy charitable status while
doing so, are in any way responsible. Apparently, what is wrong with our
education system is we haven’t got our “building blocks” in place.
“It’s not rocket science,” he continues, citing a book that he wrote after a
fact-finding trip around primary schools in Scandinavia and Holland. “Public
schools are a London issue. That’s not where the problem lies.” Would he
send his children to private schools? (The eldest, aged five, is at a state
primary.) “I am not going to hold his education hostage to my politics,” he
responds. So that’s a yes. “I am not going to play politics with my kids. I
am not going to use my strong sense of principle as a means to hijack ...”
The trouble with Clegg is that although he enjoys spouting about “the big
picture”, it’s not quite clear that he has thought the big picture through.
Last week The Guardian called his ideas “crisp”, but after an hour in his
company I feel that “waffle” might be a more appropriate carbohydrate snack.
The Clegg mind may have been brilliantly honed at Westminster and Cambridge,
but it is now dismally weighed down by unleavened bagginess. I feel like
sending him off on a long walk in the Peak District in the company of
Fowler’s English Usage, if only to help him banish the clichés and
meaningless verbiage which litter his utterances.
He makes a big deal about being more human than his fellow politicos. How will
this be revealed to us? “To be as clear and articulate and passionate as I
can about what my values are and what I think a liberal Britain could look
like. And why I trust in the fact that a lot of people will like that.”
Don’t tell me. It’s not rocket science.
