Nick Clegg

Nicholas William Peter Clegg (born 7 January 1967 in Chalfont St Giles), most commonly known as Nick Clegg, is a British politician and Deputy Minister of the United Kingdom since May 2010. A Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam since 2005, Clegg became the leader of the Liberal Democrats in 2007 and was one of the candidates for Prime Minister in the elections of 2010.

---

Background and family life

Nick Clegg was born in Chalfont St Giles (Buckinghamshire) in 1967. His half-Russian father, Nicholas Clegg, was a banker and a trustee (as well as former president) of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. His mother, Hermance van den Wall Bake, had Dutch origins and worked as a special needs teacher. Clegg’s has also Russian noble roots: his great-great grandfather, the Russian nobleman Ignaty Zakrevsky, was Attorney General of the Senate in the Imperial Russia and one of his great aunts was the writer Baroness Moura Budberg.

Clegg was educated at Caldicott Preparatory School in South Buckinghamshire and later on he attended Westminster School in London. He began his professional career at the Robinson College in Cambridge, after spending a gap year working in Austria and Helsinki. In Cambridge, Clegg studied Archaeology and Anthropology. Clegg was very active during his time as a university student: he was part of the University Theater Group; he captained the university tennis team and was a restless campaigner for Survival International, an organization that focuses on the protection of indigenous rights.

After college, he received a scholarship to study a one-year scholarship at the University of Minnesota where he wrote a thesis on the political philosophy of Deep Ecology. After some time, he moved to New York where he worked for the left-wing journal The Nation and one year later, Clegg moved to Brussels where he worked on a coordination unit providing help to the countries of the Soviet Union. Soon after he decided to take a second master's degree at the Belgian College of Europe in Bruges, where he met his wife, Miriam González Durántez (a Spanish lawyer). In 2000, he married Miriam and nowadays they have three children together: Antonio, Alberto and Miguel. Although his wife is Christian, Nick Clegg has defied political convention several times ‘with a frank admission that he is an atheist’ and although he ‘respects all believers’, he does ‘not believe in God’.[1]

Nicholas Clegg grew up being bilingual (he has a perfect command of Dutch and English) and later on, he also added French, German and Spanish.

Such a multicultural upbringing, career and family circumstances have influenced him during all his life and especially in his political views and ideals. According to an article in the British newspaper The Daily Mail, Mr. Clegg declared that ‘multiculturalism should be the hallmark of an ‘open, confident society’ and that, from his point of view ‘multiculturalism had to be seen as a process by which people respect and communicate with each other, rather than build walls between each other.’ [2]

Political career

After spending some time in Hungary writing articles about the mass privatization of industries in the communist countries and working together with the European Commission in the TACIS aid program, Leon Brittan Clegg (a Trade Commissioner) offered him a job at his private office, as an advisor on the European Union and speechwriter. Besides, he was in charge of the negotiating team of the EC that controled the negotiations with China and Russia in the World Trade Organization.

1994 -2004: Clegg in the European Parliament

Clegg was selected as the Liberal Democrat euro-candidate for the East Midlands region in 1998. After his election in 1999, he became the first Liberal MP elected in the East Midlands region since 1931.

During his tenure as a deputy in the European Parliament, Clegg worked hard to support the party in the region. He also co-founded the Campaign for Parliamentary Reform, which called for reforms in the European Parliament. Later on, he was elected spokesman of Trade and Industry of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Group (ELDR).

Clegg ran a campaign against illegal logging and wrote a report on illegal and destructively logged timber, calling the attention of the members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and asking them to ban illegal logging as well as cosmetics tested on animals. Clegg also worked with members of the Green Party on the legislation to ‘liberalize’ the energy sector in the EU, arguing that liberalization is a key tool to promote greater energy efficiency and sustainability.

Clegg left the Belgian capital in 2002 because he thought that the battle to convince the British of the benefits of Europe had to be fought at home and not in Brussels. Clegg worked together with Sheffield Hallam MP Richard Allan throughout the campaign and won the Sheffield Hallam seat in the general elections of 2005.

After his election, Clegg was promoted by Charles Kennedy (the leader of the Liberal Democrats) to be the party’s spokesman in Europe, preparing the path for the referendum on the European Constitution and helping Menzies Campbell who was in charge of the Foreign Affairs at that time. In 2006, after Menzies Campbell's resignation, Clegg was proposed as a possible candidate for Prime Minister.

Head of the British Liberal Democrats

After the 2006 elections for leadership, Clegg was promoted to be the spokesperson for Home Affairs. Following the resignation of Campbell, Clegg was considered by the media to be the main candidate in the competition for the party leadership.

In his first speech as the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, Clegg said that Britain was "a place of tolerance and pluralism” and he laid down some of his party’s main priorities: the defense of civil liberties and the protection of the environment.[3]

In a recent speech given by Clegg and written in an article published by the BBC, he declared his support to '"liberal interventionism" arguing that the "unjustified invasion of Iraq" should not weaken support for it’ and pointing out the necessity for a 'more humanitarian foreign policy'. [4]

---

Sources

Bowers, Chris. Nick Clegg: The Biography. Biteback Limited, London, 2010.

Peele, Gillian Governing the UK: British Politics in the 21st Century. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken (New Jersey), 2004.

References

«Nick Clegg says: I don’t believe in God» The Times online, 19 December 2007. [1]

«Coalition divided as Clegg says: We have to talk to extremists» Mail Online, 4 March 2011. [2]

«Nick Clegg Speech in full» BBC News, December 2007. [3]

«Clegg puts case for intervention», BBC News, 23 June 2008. [4]

External Link

Nick Clegg’s official site: http://www.nickclegg.com/

The Liberal Democrats (official site): http://www.libdems.org.uk/home.aspx