Nick Clegg's coterie of friends in London will not be at all surprised at his pitch-perfect performance in the television debate on Thursday night. But those friends, who comprise smart European business and political people, British media folk and a smattering of theatrical types such as Sam Mendes - who directed him in a student production at Cambridge - must have choked on their ciabatta when Clegg reinvented himself as a Yorkshireman, speaking passionately about 'my city of Sheffield'. David Cameron may alienate many voters with his overly smooth Etonian manner and eager sense of entitlement. But what few voters realise is that, far from being authentic Yorkshiremen, Nick Clegg's recent ancestors are actually every bit as grand as the Tory leader's. Performer: Nick Clegg taking part in a university production of Sleeping Beauty with Rivka Smith Despite his Anglo-Saxon name, Nick Clegg is by blood the least British leader of a British political party, the son of a Dutch mother and a half-Russian merchant banker father. In fact, Clegg's father and brother both had illustrious careers in banks that promoted the sort of 'risky' lending the LibDems now want to ban. Records from Companies House show Clegg's father, Nicholas, is still a chairman of the United Trust Bank, which specialises in financing property developers. He has been at the bank since 2001, where the highest-paid director earned £235,000 last year despite the bank making a loss of £464,000. Clegg describes his Buckinghamshire boyhood as all 'catapults and scuffed knees' with his three siblings, but admits his upbringing was 'affluent' - his father owns a 20-room chalet in the Alps and a chateau near Bordeaux. Friends speak of the close and loving family that was young Clegg's world until he was sent away as a boarder at Westminster School, where fees are now close to £30,000 a year. There were quite a lot of drugs at the school in the 1980s, but when asked if he indulged himself there or at Cambridge, Clegg says firmly that he prefers to draw a veil over the subject. The first crisis in Clegg's life occurred in his gap year between leaving Westminster and taking up his place at Robinson College, Cambridge, when he decided to become a 'ski bum' in the Alps - and very nearly killed himself. One evening Clegg lost control while skiing very fast over a treacherous gully, was thrown into the air and, in slow motion terror, decided his life was about to be ended by a fast-approaching tree. He landed in a hideous heap, luckily avoiding the tree, but recovered from unconsciousness to find that his right leg has been ripped out of its hip socket, with lifelong consequences. That hip will need to replaced in the next few years. The helicopter-ambulance couldn't land, so after a couple of hours on the ice, Clegg was manhandled-onto the front of a snow plough, his leg hanging uselessly, and carted off to hospital where he spent three weeks in traction, followed by three months in plaster. 'All my own fault,' he concedes, 'I was a fool to take on that gully.' European outlook: Mr Clegg met his wife Miriam while studying for a postgraduate course at Brussels Indeed, there is a faint strand of recklessness in his life. Clegg himself relates a story of being nearly expelled for setting fire, while on a school exchange in Bavaria, to the finest private collection of cacti in southern Germany (it has to be said a Mail reporter who investigated the incident found it to be more wish-fulfilment than reality). Clegg's damaged leg made a further appearance in the most foolish gaffe of his political career, which inevitably became known as the great 'Cleggover' controversy. In 2008, the new LibDem leader was suckered by Piers Morgan into speculating about how many women he had slept with. His answer - 'no more than 30' - let the newspapers define this anonymous political figure by his sexual history rather than his policies. But the claim was a source of ripe amusement to his friends. 'We all just laughed and said, "in your dreams, Nick",' recalls Pippa Harris, an old friend from Cambridge who now owns a production company with Sam Mendes. 'When he came up to Cambridge he had a girlfriend from school, and then there were a couple of romances,' she recalls, adding with a laugh that he was no ' swordsman' as a student, 'much as he might like us to think he was.' Clegg clearly retains an image of himself as Prince Charming, though. He indulged his thespian passions in 2006 when he played the Prince in an amateur pantomime of Sleeping Beauty. After Cambridge, where he read social anthropology, Clegg's European outlook led him first to study at the College d'Europe in Bruges, and then to the Brussels bureaucracy, where he was taken up by Leon Brittan, then the European Commissioner for Trade. Brittan tried to turn his promising protégé into a Tory. Perhaps he had heard the rumours that a certain 'N. Clegg' had joined the Cambridge university Conservative association. Clegg insists it was mistaken identity and that he kept clear of all student politics. He has, though, airbrushed a stint as a lobbyist out of his CV - he worked for GJW between 1992 and 1994. Balance: Mr Clegg's relative inexperience is balanced by Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable's formidable reputation The beards-and-sandals element of the rackety LibDem coalition have always been suspicious of Clegg, regarding him as too Right-wing. He was a co-author of the 2004 Orange Book, a right-ofcentre manifesto by free market members, who wanted to push the party more into Tory territory. So is Nick Clegg, in fact, a closet Tory? Far from it, insists his predecessor as leader, Sir Menzies Campbell. 'He's a gut liberal, his whole leadership is a natural manifestation of traditional liberalism.' Sir Menzies sees Clegg in the old libertarian tradition of the party rather than the imposter strand of thinking that came with the merger with the Social Democrats. Home affairs spokesman under Sir Menzies, Clegg spoke out consistently against Labour's assault on civil liberties, even when some in the party warned that Draconian measures were popular at a time of national insecurity. Some allies regret that, to satisfy the Left-wing tendencies of sections of the party, Clegg has this week had to endorse wealth-punishing tax policies that would spell huge pain for middle-class voters. Other stalwarts are astonished by the speed and effortlessness of Clegg's rise. He became a member of the European parliament only in 1999, before switching to Westminster-in 2005 in the safe seat of affluent-Sheffield Hallam. His chance to take the leadership came after Sir Menzies replaced Charles Kennedy. He was in pole position when, two years later, Sir Menzies concluded that the media and electorate were too unforgiving of a man of his age. Many wondered then and since whether it was Clegg who had discreetly stuck the stiletto into the elderly leader's back, though Sir Menzies denies this flatly. 'It was entirely my decision to go, in fact Nick didn't even know that I was announcing my resignation. He was totally loyal and professional.' Since then the view of the party is that he has led the parliamentary grouping effectively, though his performances at Prime Minister's Questions have rarely risen above the adequate. Independent: Nick Clegg has refused to be drawn on who he would support in the event of a hung parliament Away from Westminster, it is Clegg's Spanish-born wife Miriam who has been hailed as the real breath of fresh air. In a sly dig at Samantha Cameron, who has put her job as creative director of stationery firm Smythson on hold for the campaign, Miriam has said: 'I don't have the luxury of a job I can simply abandon for five weeks, and I imagine that is the situation for most people in the country.' Yet, as with her husband, it would be stretching credulity to describe Mrs Clegg as coming from an ordinary background. The daughter of the late José Antonio González Caviedes, a long-serving member of the Spanish Senate, Miriam met Clegg while studying for a postgraduate course at Brussels. She now juggles her work as a lawyer with raising their three sons, Antonio, Alberto and Miguel. Nick's old friends all use the same word to describe Miriam - 'formidable' - which might suggest this glamorous and accomplished Spaniard could also be a trifle overbearing. However, the international alliance has enabled Clegg to portray his family as being essentially classless in a way that David Cameron most certainly has not. 'Unlike Cameron, Nick Clegg certainly doesn't come across as some soft Southerner to me or my neighbours,' says Lord Shutt, the Lib-Dem chief whip, speaking from his home outside Halifax. In the next few days, however, the question becomes how Clegg will react should there be a hung parliament. He has seen how Paddy Ashdown and Menzies Campbell make fools of themselves by entering into negotiations with Labour, only to be abandoned at the altar. Publicly, Clegg's position is that there is no need to call who his party might support until the electorate has spoken. 'I'm not playing footsie under the table,' Clegg says. An unfortunate phrase, perhaps, for one whose loose talk about his flirtations has made him a figure of ridicule once before. Clegg, the panto Yorkshireman: He plays the Northerner,
but he's really from the Home Counties and is as posh as Dave
Saturday, 17 April 2010
Last updated at 1:15 AM on 17th April 2010
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