What can you tell us about Nick Clegg’s upbringing, and how it has influenced him?
His family is massive, and by that I mean his wider family, not just his wife and children, though they are also very important to him. His two grandmothers are of vital importance, even though they’re both long dead. His paternal grandmother lost everything in the Russian Revolution and became a British liberal, while his maternal grandmother was nearly starved to death in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). It means Clegg has had all the access to horrendous suffering without having experienced it himself, thus leaving him without the chips on his shoulder that some victims of suffering carry for the rest of their lives.
How has Clegg performed in government – what have been his successes and his failures?
Generally pretty well, though he had a horrendous first three months, when he simply didn’t have the civil service back up to deal with the myriad tasks thrown at him. That was the time when the Bank of England put pressure on the coalition for immediate scathing cuts, the tuition fees compromise was worked out, and the NHS reforms dumped on him before he’d really got his feet under the desk. Since May’s defeat of the AV referendum, Clegg has played a largely low profile role, which is fine for the short term, but before too long he’s going to have to get noticed. He may well be doing a great job behind the scenes, but no one ever got credit politically for behind the scenes work if it wasn’t accompanied by some high-profile achievement.
How do you think this has affected his morale over the course of his time in power?
As a person, it’s very difficult to dent his morale. He’s an eternal optimist who surrounds himself with friends from outside politics and seeks refuge in his family. His three boys of 9, 7 and 2 aren’t going to view the deputy Prime Minister as a very important person but just as Dad. His staff speak about how he comes into the office on a day when there’s been some bad news, and while he takes the news seriously, he doesn’t get too worried about it while many of his staff do. Politically his morale will be a bit fragile, but in the early days of the coalition there were many who didn’t give it six months, so to have established it as a form of government with some permanence – at least until 2015 – must feel like a real achievement to an upbeat personality such as his.
If Nick Clegg leaves parliament, what do you imagine his next step will be? How much ground is there in speculation he might join the EU?
He’ll do something with people. I don’t buy this idea that he’ll take a job with the EU – he’s done that and he left Brussels because he felttoo detached from the people he represented. If he’s to take on a big international job, it’s more likely to be as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees than anything bureaucratically EU-like. But don’t lookfor his post parliamentary career just yet – he has something about him that makes me believe he will bounce back at some stage, and if that bounce back comes during the TV debates in the run-up to the 2015 election, he may well be in parliament for a while yet.
