Nick Clegg has led his party in to government. Here we profile Britain's new deputy prime minister.
With "ambition" one of his favourite words, Nick Clegg was hailed as a future Party leader from the moment he was elected to Parliament in 2005 at the age of thirty-eight. But few thought it would take little more than two years.
He kept his powder dry after the ousting of Charles Kennedy in 2006 and was a vocal supporter of Sir Menzies Campbell for Party Leader. But when Campbell resigned after only eighteen months he was quick to throw his hat into the ring.
After a fairly low-key campaign he won by only a whisker, beating Chris Huhne by just 511 votes out of more than 41,000, to become the youngest party leader by three months.
It was the last leader but one, Charles Kennedy, who promoted him straight to the front bench as number two to Sir Menzies on foreign affairs. But barely eight months later he was one of the twenty-five front benchers who forced Kennedy’s resignation by saying they would refuse to serve under him.
Even then he was seen as a possible contender for the succession. But unlike Huhne he declined and became a key member of the “Ming wing”. He soon got his reward, promoted to be the Liberal Democrats’ Shadow Home Secretary. But as doubts about Sir Menzies’s future grew he was constantly talked about as a successor.
For a long time he diplomatically shrugged off the suggestion. But in September 2007 he said he probably would stand for the leadership when there was a vacancy, and earned himself a rebuke from the leader’s wife Lady Elspeth.
And when Sir Menzies fell on his sword – or was stabbed in the back – a month later, he did not hesitate, quickly becoming the bookies’ favourite in a two-horse race with Huhne. He secured the support of the former leader Lord Ashdown and the nominations of twenty-eight of the party's sixty-three MPs.
He differed from Huhne in wanting to keep the Trident nuclear missile system as a bargaining counter in non-proliferation talks. But many though he fought a poor campaign restricted to generalities and waffle. He occasionally appeared flustered under fire from his opponent.
After his narrow win he said his leadership would be about ambition and change. He appointed an image adviser, formerly of the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising agency, who told him to cut out the waffle. He seemed to have taken notice, with some concise and confident performances during Prime Minister’s Questions.
But within three months of his victory he faced a major embarrassment over the vote on the European Lisbon Treaty. He stuck to the policy of his predecessor in calling for a referendum on membership of the EU, and instructed his MPs to abstain on Conservative calls for a referendum on the treaty itself. But the move backfired: nearly a quarter of his parliamentary party defied the whip and voted for a referendum on the treaty. Three members of his Shadow Cabinet resigned and there was considerable criticism of his tactics. Some put it down to inexperience.
He fought back with a combative conference speech calling for a new type of government based on pluralism. But he has yet to lead his party to any noticeable revival in the opinion polls.
He reshuffled his front bench team three times in just over a year, the last changes in January 2009 being billed as the team to fight the next general election. He set up an economic recovery group of senior MPs to co-ordinate the party’s response to the recession.
He was embarrassed in 2008 when he was overheard by a reporter making unflattering comments on some of his colleagues, notably Steve Webb, but claimed he was misreported.
Before entering Parliament he already had successful careers behind him as a journalist, Eurocrat and for five years MEP for the East Midlands. He stood down from the European Parliament in 2004 to fight the Westminster seat, and took a job as a part-time lecturer, conveniently at Sheffield University, in the constituency. He also worked as a consultant to various firms on EU matters.
He and Huhne have been called the Blair and Brown of the Liberal Democrats, with Clegg cast in the role of Blair, though he has also been compared to his new partner in power, David Cameron.
He was furious when Huhne broke ranks to stand against Sir Menzies in 2006. But he wisely appointed his rival to his own former job as the party’s Shadow Home Secretary.
Seen as on the right of the Party, he contributed to the controversial 2004 Orange Book, which advocated radical thinking, largely from the Party’s free marketeers. In his essay he argued against an uncritical approach to the European Union and even talked about repatriating powers from Brussels. It was a theme he pursued in a sparkling maiden speech.
His background is highly European and highly educated. He was born in 1967, one-quarter English, with a Dutch mother who had been a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, and an aristocratic Russian grandmother.
He went, like Huhne, to Westminster public school and read social anthropology at Robinson College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the university Conservative Association. He won graduate scholarships to read political philosophy at the University of Minnesota and European Affairs at the College of Europe at Bruges.
He started as a trainee journalist in New York, won a writing award from the Financial Times, and has since written for several newspapers including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and the Independent. He has contributed to the Guardian website and published many books and pamphlets on policy issues.
He worked for the European Commission, managing aid projects in the former Soviet Union, and got his first political break as a senior policy adviser to the former Conservative Cabinet Minister Sir Leon Brittan, vice-president of the Commission. Brittan tried and failed to convert him to the Conservative cause.
In the European Parliament he was Liberal Democrat trade spokesman, campaigned against red tape, and to promote industries such as coal and textiles as well as broadband internet services. He was a founder member of a cross-party campaign to modernise procedures.
Switching Parliaments in 2005, partly for family reasons, he inherited the affluent Sheffield seat made safe for his party by his predecessor Richard Allan, later to be his leadership campaign manager. He fulminated against negative campaigning by the other parties. He said his ambition was to dismember HM Treasury, allowing for genuine decentralisation of British Government.
He urged the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail and breaking up the National Health Service to make it more responsive. He called for tougher sentences for serious crimes and promoted an earned amnesty for long-term illegal immigrants.
He speaks five European languages, and to complete the picture of Renaissance man, is an accomplished skier and keen on mountaineering, not to mention the theatre and literature. In 2007 he was one of a cross-party group of young and photogenic MPs who trekked across the Arctic for charity.
But lest he should seem completely flawless, he confessed that he had a conviction for arson, after setting fire to a rare collection of cacti in a drunken prank while a sixteen-year-old exchange student in Munich. He was sentenced to do community service, digging gardens. He refused to say whether he had ever taken illegal drugs, but has sometimes said too much: he attracted some ribald comment when he told an interviewer that he had slept with “no more than thirty” women.
His wife Miriam is equally pan-European. A bilingual Spanish lawyer, daughter of a senator and a Middle East specialist, she is a former Foreign Office civil servant who was previously principal aide to Chris Patten at the European Commission. Clegg said he didn’t believe in God, but that their young sons Antonio and Alberto were being brought up as Roman Catholics. Their third son Miguel was born in 2009.
Profile supplied by Dods People.
