Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, on politics and family life

IT IS perhaps ironic that the would-be kingmaker of British politics, Nick Clegg is the man who wants to torch the two-party “Tweedledum, Tweedledee” electoral system, began adulthood as a delinquent fire-starter.

WARM Nick Clegg is eager to please Picture MARK KEHOE WARM: Nick Clegg is eager to please / Picture: MARK KEHOE

As a 16 year old on a public school exchange trip to Germany, the young, mischievous and drunk Nick Clegg “accidentally” set fire to a professor’s rare collection of cacti, a high-jinx misadventure that landed him with several hours of unofficial community service, Munich-style.

Fast forward almost three decades to the count on May 7 later this year and it’s increasingly possible that the now mature and certainly chastened leader of the Liberal Democrats will hold the balance of power in a hung parliament.

As Labour continues to narrow the gap with the Tories over worries about what David Cameron actually stands for, the 43 year old whose school nickname was Clog—his mother is Dutch—could have a vital say on who holds the keys to Number 10.

Yet despite more than two years in the party hot seat and leading on issues such as the Ghurkhas and ousting Michael Martin as Commons Speaker, he remains largely unknown to the general voter.

His shadow Treasury guru, Vince Cable, has a higher profile with the public and Mr Clegg is probably more (in)famous for a glossy magazine interview he gave two years ago.

In it, Piers Morgan cajoled the new party leader—someone who as a young man who had been a ski instructor—into saying how many women he had slept with.

Asked whether it was 10, 20, or 30...Mr Clegg, instead of telling the pushy Britain’s Got Talent judge to mind his own business, replied awkwardly: “Not more than 30…it’s a lot less than that.”

His naïve honesty was portrayed, a touch unfairly, as bragging and it’s an episode he now laughs about, but which he also regrets.

“Yes,” he sighs when it’s mentioned: it’s the politician’s cue move on to grown-up issues.

Sitting with him in his Commons office, it’s easy to see why he fell into Morgan’s trap.

He smiles easily, his face is friendly and open and he has a warm manner, which while confident and assured, is also eager to please.

Occasionally in television interviews, it’s a slightly anxious look, his easily furrowed brow lending the appearance of a rabbit caught in lights.

However, it’s that slight vulnerability which makes him likeable, and in a forthcoming election campaign that will be highly personalised and feature Britain’s first televised leaders’ debates, such warmth could be useful.

Harshly, critics describe him as “Cameron-lite”: after all, they are the same age, of similar 6ft-plus height and the products of elite schooling, with Mr Clegg an old boy of Westminster, the Tory leader of Eton.

But in truth, Mr Clegg, a southerner who has spent his entire political life north of the Watford Gap, has that one crucial quality Mr Cameron acknowledges he currently lacks: a down-to-earth ability to connect with the North.

Born in Buckinghamshire in 1967, his family background is fascinating.

His mother is Dutch, his banker father, to whom he talks daily, is half-Russian (his great-great grandfather was a Russian nobleman) and his wife, Miriam, is a successful Spanish lawyer.

The couple are bringing up their three young children—Antonio, eight, Alberto, five, and baby Miguel—bilingually in Spanish, a lesson he learned from his own mother: he speaks Dutch fluently, as well as French, German and Spanish.

After studying social anthropology at Cambridge, he went to America to complete a thesis on the Deep Green Movement, an ecological philosophy exploring man’s relationship to the environment, and then, perhaps not in the most natural of next steps, on to a career in Brussels.

He was recruited by former Tory Home Secretary and EU trade commissioner Sir Leon Brittan, and successfully led aid negotiations with former Soviet Union countries.

Only in the late Nineties did he become professionally involved in politics.

He served five years as an MEP for the Midlands before moving to Westminster as the Lib Dem member for Sheffield Hallam in 2005 and in December 2007 he succeeded the veteran Sir Menzies Campbell as leader of 63 MPs and a party that runs other major cities including Liverpool, Bristol, Newcastle and Hull.

But although he has such an interesting story to tell—he plays tennis well and is a keen mountaineer—his face will not be plastered over billboards nationwide.

Instead, he takes a practical view of what it takes to get known.

“I like to think that over time that if people see the things that I care about, they’ll get a sense of what makes me think and tick,” he says, launching into a heartfelt account of family life.

“The most important things in my life are my three young children: I’m besotted by them.

“They’re the most lovely children in the world, but I would say that. Miriam works full time and we’re like a lot of other young couples.

“If we’re not working, we’re with our children and we have to juggle that. One night I’m looking after the baby because he’s not sleeping very well at the moment and we alternate.

“I take them to school most mornings, Miriam’s there in the evenings to help with homework.

“My life is now much less exotic. I’m not going to pretend to you that I have oceans of time to climb mountains or paint paintings—I’m like a lot of young dads. My life is almost entirely devoted to my children.”

However, he is not going to start using them as election props.

“I’m not going to start inviting people into my bathroom or shoving my kids in front of the cameras,” he adds.

“For as long as possible, I want them to have the most innocent normal background and upbringing.

“I don’t want them to go into the classroom and little Jack or little Susan to turn round to them and go, ‘We saw you in a magazine,’ because suddenly as an eight year old or as a five year old they would turn round and say, ‘Does that mean I’m different?’ and I don’t want them to feel that.”

The word different is his current favourite and it is clear it will be a key theme in his election strategy.

While the Tory mantra is “we can’t go on like this”, Mr Clegg tells voters: “If you really want to try out something different and you feel as I do that the constant going of blue/red, red/blue is the reason why we’ve messed up, it’s the reason why we let the banks get away with what they have done, it’s why we’ve got this huge mess in our public finances, it’s why we went to war in Iraq, it’s why we’ve got Government busybodies snooping in our lives, it’s why we’ve short-changed the pensioners, then I’m just saying to people, let’s give it a try.”

He will not admit it, but his party is desperate for a hung parliament, so they can squeeze promises out of rivals.

The real prize is proportional representation, something Gordon Brown moved towards in agreeing a referendum on the Alternative Vote system for future elections.

Under it, voters rank the parties, but when asked, in an attempt to discover his preferred coalition partner, to state how he would order his own crosses, Mr Clegg laughs and says: “I’d just put Lib Dems.”

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