THREE UNIVERSITY degrees, fluent in five different languages and the front-runner for the leadership of the country’s third largest Party. Nick Clegg has one hell of a CV. I on the other hand have 10 minutes and a dictaphone.
At 40 he’s young for a politician, friendly with a slight look of David Cameron about him, yet I don’t feel nauseous AND he’s wearing a tie! Having only been in Westminster two years he is the bookies favourite to take over the leadership of the Liberal Democrats. But with Ming Campbell only recently deemed too old and his predecessor Charlie Kennedy, seemingly too drunk, one wonders why anyone would want to take on such a task.
Here though, as so often with Clegg, he fails to fit the mould. The great grandson of a Russian Attorney General, and brought up in a bilingual Dutch and English household, he had a more cosmopolitan upbringing than most. It recently emerged that at the age of sixteen whilst on a school exchange in Munich, Clegg was given community service for burning a Professor’s cacti. Not quite a crime of Watergate proportions, but it must be said they were apparently part of the second best cacti collection in Germany.
Now of course it doesn’t pay for a yoof-chasing leader to be seen as too squeaky clean, but generally the trend has been to admit to things that don’t sound made up. Clegg does well to emphasise the quirky elements of his background because his educational route to the top has been uncomfortably traditional. Attending Westminster School in the shadow of Big Ben and then going on to study Anthropology in Cambridge. I began by asking him what his memories of University were like and in particular those of Union Politics.
“I was first at Cambridge and I remember going into the Union and being so appalled at students who seemed to have all the answers already to everything, and were totally adamant in everything they said. I was a student activist on many things; I was an activist for an organization called Survival International, which seeks to defend the rights of indigenous people, but I didn’t get involved in Party politics when I was there in the 1980. To be honest I found it quite off-putting”.
This period clearly had a profound effect upon Clegg:
“Politics was going through an awkward phase at that time; it was at the height of the ‘me, me, me’ culture. It was an unidealistic time, looking back on it that sort of dismal view on life, the idea that there was no society was certainly one of the things that propelled me towards politics.”
Following his time at Cambridge, he continued his studies at first The University of Minnesota and then the College of Europe in Bruges, taking a spell in between to work under Christopher Hitchens at the Nation Magazine in New York. It was whilst at the College of Europe that Clegg met his wife Miriam Gonzalez Durantez. The story goes that he fell for her at first site and learnt Spanish in order to woo her; whatever your views of Clegg, he certainly has commitment to a project.
He has since worked at the European Union, became an MEP for the East Midlands in 1998 and has been MP for Sheffield Hallam for the last two years. Talent spotted by then party leader Lord Ashdown he’s been the Heir Apparent for quite some time, yet with the job as leader within reach, what would the Clegg lead Lib Dems offer us as students? Clegg’s response was understandably upbeat:
“They would have a strong voice for all the student values, one that believes firmly in international justice, protects the environment for future generations, believes we can’t just allow our cherished British liberty to be trampled underfoot. We should be doing more to play a full interactive role in international affairs. I will make sure that my party is a voice for all things students care about.”
Specifics? Well, I asked for his view on a particularly controversial topic of late, the role of finance in higher education. What for instance was his opinion of top-up fees?
“Well as you know, the Lib Dems are the only major British party that continues to believe that tuition fees are a bad thing, that university education should in principle be paid out of general taxation. There are issues we need to keep under review, such as the position of part-time students who really aren’t recognized financially in the system. So I think we need to look at how we combine justice for people like that and high quality university education.”
Free university education isn’t exactly a hard sell when you’re talking to a student, but there seems a genuine passion behind it. Clegg’s politics seem refreshingly grounded in the activism of his student days, and whilst the Union politics of his Cambridge years still have a foothold in Westminster, there does at least seem to be a challenge coming from a young, smooth talking politician… who wears a tie. Clegg is on the march and whilst my time was up, I couldn’t help but feel that this was just beginning.
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