Better than his party

I have been awaiting a definitive biography of Nick Clegg for a while. And while I’m not entirely sure whether Chris Bowers’ Nick Clegg, The Biography quite gets there, don’t let me discourage you. This is an excellent book and a fascinating insight into the man.

The trouble is that most of us who enjoy reading about our leaders have been used to being thrown great hunks of red meat scandal, vile gossip and an undertone that the subject is far more of a shit than we had dared imagine. We then toddle off to bed, sleeping soundly in the reassurance that our hero has feet of clay like the rest of us.

If this book is to be believed (and to be fair, it is painstakingly researched), Clegg has no redeeming defects. Marcel Theroux, with whom Clegg travelled America, cross-legged and in a state of transcendental meditation in the back of the car, summed up his character succinctly: 

‘Nick’s a good guy, and if you don’t have good guys doing the job he’s doing, then there’ll be arseholes doing it, so I want him to hang in there. He’s gone from non-entity to saviour to this person being hounded, and that makes me hopeful that another huge change can happen. If he sticks around I think people will realise that he’s got a good heart and what he’s doing is in good faith and with a hand he’s been dealt that isn’t the hand that he wanted.’

The irony here is that these comments could equally be made about David Cameron. Both men come from comfortable backgrounds, from stable families, are well-educated and are not interested in party dogma. The centre of both their universes is family. And yet both are regarded with suspicion by their parties: Clegg as a closet Tory and Cameron as a closet Liberal. It is clear why both are the cement that holds the Coalition together.

The trek across America with Marcel and Louis Theroux is quite instructive. Marcel said this of him: ‘He was a bit neurotic and could get wound up about things, so the TM was a way of relaxing and centring himself and calming down’. The Theroux family nicknamed him Grizzly Fish, ‘because he had the persona of being someone who could tell what the weather would be by looking at a flock of geese overhead. We felt that he was a cross between Grizzly Adams and Michael Fish.’

Nick Clegg is probably the only prominent politician who can out ethnic Boris Johnson. His mother is Dutch, and spent the war as a child in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and witnessed appalling atrocities. Yet she married an Englishman who eventually worked for a Japanese bank. His paternal grandmother was Baroness Kira Von Engelhardt, steeped in German and Russian Aristocracy. 

But the most interesting relation was his great, great aunt Moura Budberg. She had affairs with Bruce Lockhart, on whom James Bond is said to be based, Maxim Gorky and HG Wells. British authorities regarded her as a ‘very dangerous woman’ as it appears that she was spying both for us and the Germans in World War I. Clegg is also married to a Spanish lawyer, Miriam, of international acclaim. 

Clegg was talent spotted early on by his boss former Tory Home Secretary and Euro Commissioner, Leon Brittan, who tried to persuade him to be a Tory candidate. He failed. He then stood, against the wishes of David Steel, to become the Lib Dem candidate for Europe in the Midlands. Against the odds he was selected, and against even worse odds was elected. Then he was taken under the wing by his mentor, Paddy Ashdown, after Brittan described him as ‘the brightest young man I have ever come across.’

His sights were then on Westminster, where he won Sheffield Hallam, which in my day was a Tory seat. Interestingly, he was tipped as a potential leader even before he became an MEP. His easy charm a sense of humour impressed the locals, while a sharp brain impressed the mover and shakers.

Well, the rest is history. In a nutshell, Huhne behaved like a copper-bottomed shit. Clegg, Alexander and Cable fought and lost the argument against the abolition of tuition fees pledge. He strung Brown along to get a good deal with the Tories and Huhne is still behaving like copper-bottomed shit.

So what is Cleggism? 

‘I’m a Liberal interventionist, it goes back to Gladstone, you can’t be indifferent to people who are suffering, even if they may be in countries which seem a long way from us. You just have to do it for good moral reasons and legally…’

And then comes a comment which even Speccie readers could agree with: ‘there’s something wonderful about every person, there’s something marvellous about their potential and talents, and you’ve got to everything you possibly can in politics to give them privacy, give them freedom, give them the ability to get them ahead.’ 

I have no doubt that Nick Clegg is a thoroughly decent fellow with instincts that resonate with the public and the non-Lederhosen wing of the Conservative Party. The trouble is that the Liberal Democrats as a party are like the French as a nation. Individually we get on very well with them, but dealing with them collectively, sleep with a revolver under the pillow, lock your daughter in her room and hide the spoons.