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From darling of the TV debates to villain of the tuition fees protests, the deputy PM Nick Clegg has had a year of extraordinarily mixed fortunes. Days before the crucial AV vote, he reflects on his punishing first year in office and opens up about life in the coalition, the impact on his family… and having a sneaky fag in the garden We are talking in his capacious Whitehall quarters with its fine view over St James’s Park, and I pop a fairly obvious question: has he enjoyed the last year? Up until this point, Nick Clegg has been as candid, good-humoured and relaxed as it is reasonable to expect from a frontline politician under great pressure. In fact, he has been bouncy. But now the sun disappears behind the low cloud of wariness that scuds across his face. His reply is cagey: “I’m not sure whether to take up your invitation to provide a kind of enjoyment monitor.” He smells a trap. If he responds that it has been a thrill to be the first Liberal in many, many decades to be entitled deputy prime minister, then he will expose himself to the accusation that he is on a power frolic while thousands of voters are suffering the effects of spending cuts, tax rises and job losses. If he says that he hasn’t enjoyed it, then he will feed the rumours that he has often been depressed by the onslaught on him. In the end, though, he can’t leave the question alone and comes back to it without prompting: “Enjoyment? Some parts more than others.” In the positive column: “Do I get up every morning and ask: am I doing the things that I believe in and am I doing them for the best possible motives? Yes. Unambiguously yes.” In the negative column, he has been pounded by “a barrage of criticism”. It is not David Cameron who has been burnt in effigy by protesting students. It is not George Osborne who has had dog shit poured through his letterbox. It is not William Hague who gets sworn at when he takes to the streets of his constituency. For opponents of the coalition, it is Nick Clegg who is the magnet for loathing. That has got to be tough for a politician who liked it when he was liked. Many politicians before him have travelled this trajectory from the fresh face enjoying the cheers of the crowd to the battle-bloodied leader who can no longer hope to be loved and must instead aim to gradually win respect for his resilience. Yes, it is a road well travelled. But rarely at such speed. A process that normally takes years – about six if you think of Tony Blair – has in the case of Clegg been compressed into months. His very existence as deputy prime minister is a daily reminder to the Conservatives and their tribalist mouthpieces in the media that the Tories failed to achieve a clear election win, even against an opponent as unpopular as Gordon Brown. For many on the left, Clegg is the great betrayer who sold out when he contracted his shotgun marriage with David Cameron. “Getting it in the neck from both sides, yeah,” says Clegg. Basically pretty friendless, I remark. “Yeah,” he says. “Both left and right are enraged.” He likes to locate this in a bigger picture. “You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It’s highly, highly polarised. It’s right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.” This is spoken with feeling by a man who has whooshed and plunged on “an emotional rollercoaster” over the past 12 months. He was up when he stole the show at the first of the election leaders’ TV debates; then he was down when the Lib Dems lost five seats on election night despite gaining nearly a million extra votes. He was victorious in becoming the first Lib Dem leader to lead the party into government; and then – if not crushed, certainly hammered – by the backlash that soon followed. “I do ask myself: did we take the right decision going into the coalition? Have we taken the right decisions since? Are the progressive values of the party that I lead being properly reflected?” On the first choice he made – the big call from which everything else has flowed – he is “completely and bullishly assertive” that “it was the right thing to go into coalition with the Conservatives”. “I understand a lot of people on the left, maybe people who read the Observer , they’re not happy with the coalition. I do ask them: what would they have done? Couldn’t have gone in with Labour. You couldn’t have provided a stable government with Labour. If we hadn’t gone into coalition with the Conservatives, as night follows day there would have been another election within a few months. You probably would have had an outright Conservative victory.” Fair-minded observers would surely agree that his analysis is essentially correct. Neither the maths nor the personalities added up to make it feasible to form a coalition with Labour. The Lib Dems would have been ridiculed for eternity if they had passed up their first chance since the second world war to be part of a government. It is highly probable that the Tories, the only party with any money, would have formed a minority government and then dashed into a second, autumn election which they would have won outright. Astute Lib Dems anticipated that government would be tough: the smaller party nearly always takes the bigger risk when it goes into coalition. But none of them guessed that within months they would be the target of rioting in the streets over tuition fees. Clegg argues that they did their best in the circumstances. Given that they were the minority partners, they did well to broker a more progressive outcome than the policy inherited from Labour, the scheme recommended by Lord Browne , or what would have been done by a solely Conservative government. But only one number has lodged in the public consciousness: £9,000 is a tripling of the cap on fees which the Lib Dems had pledged to freeze and then abolish. They weren’t the first party to break a manifesto promise and they won’t be the last. But the starkness of this breach enraged people in ways that Clegg can’t deny, and the damage was magnified because the volte-face jarred so horribly with his pre-election pieties. In the election debates he presented himself as the prophet of a pure politics who would sweep away the grubby mendacities of the broken down red-blue duopoly. Has he looked again at those TV debates? “No. Never.” He winces a little. A Lib Dem campaign broadcast featured Clegg walking the embankment opposite the House of Commons surrounded by pieces of paper meant to represent the betrayed pledges of the Conservatives and Labour. He proclaimed that a vote for him would mean “an end to broken promises and the beginning of a new hope.” You can watch it again on YouTube . An effective piece of propaganda at the time, it makes pretty excruciating viewing now that we know what happens next. Does he recall what he said in that broadcast? He looks rueful: ‘Yeah. I remember that.” Opponents have relished having their revenge on the politician formerly known as St Nick as his hands have got grubby with the compromises of power. Deputy prime minister’s questions in the Commons often resembles a blood sport. The jokes have come thick and piercing: why did Nick Clegg cross the road? Because he promised not to. I suggest to him that he is paying the price not just for specific broken promises but for a deeper intellectual dishonesty at the heart of that broadcast. If the Lib Dems ever found themselves in government, they must have known it would be as part of a coalition. Coalition entails compromise, and compromise means not being able to keep all your promises. He ought to have been more honest about that. Clegg doesn’t really argue. “I have as gracefully as possible taken a barrage of criticism about what we’ve done in government in comparison to what we’ve said before, and I take all of that on the chin. What I totally accept – and here I do have a regret – is that all parties will need to be clear (in future) what their real priorities are.” So will it be Lib Dem policy at the next election not to raise tuition fees above £9,000? He laughingly refuses to answer: “I think I’ve learnt from my mistake.” In the second half of last year, when the barrage was especially intense, he was visibly ragged. He groaned to friends about how little sleep he was getting and talked about the strain of trying to keep an eye on everything the Tories were up to. The Whitehall machine took a while to adjust to the novelty of a deputy prime minister who was the leader of another party. He was having to cover as many policy areas as David Cameron – more really because the Lib Dem cabinet ministers are greatly outnumbered by the Tories – with nothing like the same level of official support. Some around Westminster whisper that Clegg is already reconciled to being in this role for one parliament and no more. Others gossip that his wife, Miriam, has set a time limit. It is suggested that he will return to Brussels, where his political career began, to become a European Commissioner. “Absolutely not,” he says. “No, no, no. No, no, no. I’ve concentrated on delivering a full five-year parliament because that’s what we said we would do in the coalition agreement, and that is the period of time we need to sort stuff out.” As he doesn’t say, the Lib Dems also need time – and an accumulation of evidence that they have had an impact for the good– to rebuild support. Their opinion poll rating has slumped into single figures; the party is braced for a severe kicking in the ballots at this Thursday’s local and devolved elections. Of his own future, he says: “I don’t do this as a person: constantly trying to second-guess what might happen round the corner. In politics, that is an extremely perilous thing to do.” This strikes me as genuine. The caricature Clegg is the Lib Dem Pinocchio. Or the cartoonists have him as the junior schoolboy fagging for Flashman Cameron. Neither depiction does much service to the truth. I generally find him unusually frank for a politician. He is often too open for his own good. He was rewarded with “Clueless Clegg” headlines when he made a light-hearted remark to one interviewer that he had “sort of forgotten” that he was supposed to be in charge when Cameron was abroad. When he told another interviewer that music can move him to tears , that was twisted to lampoon him as “Crybaby Clegg”. That emotional side of him is the fruit of his father’s family tree with its roots in Russia. “My dad’s side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There’s an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It’s very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It’s very warm, it’s very up, it’s very down. I would celebrate that. Emotion is not something to be frightened of.” Passions of a venomous nature are now running high in the battle over reform of the electoral system: a bitter fight which reaches its climax with the AV referendum on Thursday. At the beginning of the campaign, Clegg and Cameron appeared to have a gentlemen’s agreement to keep their differences polite. But it has now degenerated into a slanging match, with Conservative and Lib Dem cabinet ministers calling each other liars. Clegg holds the Tories responsible. “I kept my silence for weeks and weeks and weeks of ludicrous bilge being put out there [by the no to AV campaign] to dupe and to scare the British people.” He “makes no apologies” for hitting back. “The yelling and screaming” from the anti-reformers is “the yelp” of people who can’t accept that first past the post is bust and the two-party system is over. They “desperately want everything to be put back into its box”. These “yelpers” and “screamers” include his frenemy, David Cameron. Clegg blames the prime minister for letting the campaign turn ugly. “David Cameron and George Osborne, a couple of months ago, became very worried that the right wing of the Conservative party would react very badly if AV wasn’t defeated, and they decided to basically throw the kitchen sink at the referendum.” He hopes that the voters will “strip away the yah-boo” and see AV for what he believes it to be: “a pretty simple and relatively modest change” that offers an evolutionary improvement. “It’s not a revolution. It keeps single MP constituencies. You’ll still be able to visit your MP in their constituency surgery every week. It’s not fully proportional. It’s something which is very familiar, it’s used up and down the country, it’s used in the Conservative party. It is an incremental change which gives voters more of a say. It makes MPs work harder. It challenges this culture of safe seats. Between now and Thursday, what all – particularly progressive – voters need to ask themselves is: what’s wrong with that? A relatively small change which nonetheless makes quite a big, progressive difference.” A win for AV would be a significant boost and a needed one. He can plausibly contend that the Lib Dems are shaping coalition policy, and often in progressive directions, on everything from schools to the environment, from tax on lower earners to the future of the nuclear deterrent. They have put a brake on the Tories headlong rush to shake up the NHS. “It’s got to have significant changes,” he says, a shot across his coalition partner’s bows. “This will not pass parliament, I won’t ask Liberal Democrat MPs to pass this legislation, until I am satisfied.” But the jury of public opinion is not currently giving him much benefit of the doubt. Even if the ultimate verdict is more favourable, it will not be returned for quite some time. The greatest gamble – essentially a bet on George Osborne’s judgment – was to sign up to the Tory approach to tackling the deficit by making early and deep spending cuts while the economy was still fragile. He insists that “the judgment to be decisive” was “the right one”, but has to rely on “the passage of time” to prove it so. If that gamble pays off, then it may help Clegg’s ambition to build a reputation for the Lib Dems as credible and competent wielders of power. If they lose their shirt on it, then the Lib Dems probably face evisceration at the next election. Clegg is frustrated that the scale of the spending squeeze “dominates everything” and “obscures what I think is a brick-by-brick building of long-lasting progressive changes which I’m genuinely proud of”. He rests his hopes on the Lib Dem contribution to the government being more clear in four years’ time. He believes he will be able to point to enough delivered manifesto promises to earn some forgiveness, or at least more understanding, for those that were broken. He has made the promotion of social mobility his personal cause within government. We cannot escape the irony that he and David Cameron are striking examples of how Britain appears to have gone backward in terms of equality of opportunity. A prime minister who went to Eton with a deputy who went to Westminster would seem very familiar to Victorians. But Clegg’s passion to unfreeze social mobility is sincere, if not yet fully formed into altogether coherent and workable policy. He is a liberal, not a social democrat – an important distinction – but he does have a pronounced egalitarian streak which he puts down to the influence of his Dutch mother. It is also true to say that social mobility is much higher up the agenda of the coalition than it would have been for a purely Tory government. But formidable obstacles confront any politician trying to spread opportunity more fairly in Britain. We are talking just before the royal wedding. Kate Middleton might just about be construed into an example of upward social mobility from the affluent middle classes into the aristocracy. William Windsor owes his position entirely to his birth certificate. I tease the deputy prime minister by wondering how the monarchy helps social mobility. “I, I, I actually don’t think there is a, er… I don’t think there is a powerful link between the existence of the monarchy and social mobility.” Really? “Well…” His delightful press secretary, Lena, starts giggling as her boss tries to unknot himself from this contradiction. I persist: are the royals not a symbol of people reaching great and privileged positions thanks to parentage not their merits? “You put your finger on it. It’s a symbol.” He thinks this gives him an escape hatch. “To then elevate what the monarchy is today into a sort of fetish, to make a wider point about social mobility is not something I subscribe to.” You don’t think hereditary monarchy sends all the wrong signals about our society – how you get ahead in Britain? “I’ll tell you what I think. If you were to ask me what is the most urgent task to promote social mobility, do I think it’s having a debate about the monarchy rather than dealing with the tax system, the education system, early years, internships. Do I think any of those things are more important in promoting social mobility? You bet they are.” He eventually falls back on the stock defence of the lukewarm monarchist: they’re good for tourism. “Just look at the thousands of people who have flocked to London for the royal wedding.” He has now acquired some of the trappings of the establishment himself, including the Chevening country house where John Prescott once embarrassed himself by being snapped playing croquet. Clegg confesses: “I’ve grown to like it. I was a little bit embarrassed by it when we first went down there. But from my purely selfish point of view, being able to walk through the woods and fields without having a protection team at my shoulder, and being able to let the kids run around totally unrestricted, that is absolutely lovely. It’s a sort of haven of freedom.” His children are nine, six and two. The elder two are aware of his status and “I hope” proud of what he does. “We’re an incredibly close family. I try and do everything I can as a father to protect their innocence.” He and Miriam have kept them away from the lenses of the media. “I don’t think you’d ever find a photograph of my children in public. Miriam and I thought we don’t want our nine-year-old to go to school and have little Jack sitting next to him and saying: ‘Oh, I saw you in a Sunday magazine’, because I think it’ll make them feel different and separate. I want my children to feel normal. And they go to a nice normal school just down the end of the road. We’re very lucky. Miriam and I haven’t had to move into some battlement in Whitehall. We still live in the home that we did before. We still walk the kids to school.” Is he still smoking? “A little bit.” That sounds like the sort of fib people tell to their doctors or partners. How much is a little bit? “Not much. No, not much. Three. Maybe three. Sometimes four. I never have smoked that much. I smoke only in the evenings, out of sight, when the children are asleep.” They don’t know he smokes? “No, no. So please don’t tell them.” You hide in the garden? “Yes, I hide in the garden. No, hide is the wrong verb. I cower. I cower.” Miriam gives him a hard time about his habit. Has he tried to quit? “Not much. Not right now.” He pulls a face which begs for mercy. “Can I please have one little private sin which I can keep to myself?” A less open and more artful politician would have not allowed himself to be drawn into conversation about his smoking. Perhaps he would be better off bodyguarding his tongue more carefully and growing several extra layers of skin. “Look,” he says. “I’m not going to do this for ever. I’m 44. I’m adamant that what we’re doing is the right thing. My conscience is clear. I think that over time people will see that the difficult decisions we are taking now are the right ones, and so on and so forth. But in that process, I want to remain a human being, I don’t want to lose my sense of humour. I don’t want to clip on the armour every morning. I’ve seen some politicians do this and they get a bit mangled and bitter. I just refuse to do that. I refuse to be angry or bitter or complain, and I remain open. I may sometimes be a bit too open but I’m not going to change that one bit. It’s really important not to allow politics to distort who you are. You’ve got to hold on to yourself.” He might make fewer mistakes if he were one of the calculating machines of politics, those robots who are carapaced in caution. But he would also be a less interesting and engaging human being. FROM CLEGGMANIA TO CLEGGZILLA – 12 months as deputy PM 7 May 2010 The nation wakes up to a hung parliament. Nick Clegg says the Conservatives, having won the most votes and the most seats, should have the first go at forming a government. Gordon Brown locks the door to Downing Street from the inside. 11 May After a weekend of frenzied negotiations, David Cameron becomes prime minister, appointing Clegg as his deputy, forming Britain’s first coalition since 1945. In a formal ceremony, senior Lib Dems exchange their sandals for ministerial cars. 12 May Cameron and Clegg hold genial press conference in Downing Street rose garden; herald era of “new politics”; laugh at each other’s jokes. 20 May The full coalition agreement – a blend of the Conservative and Lib Dem manifestos – is published. “You’ve never read a document like this,” Clegg tells the nation. 12 June Clegg tours Europe and impresses his hosts with proficiency at foreign languages, including Spanish, German and Dutch. Foreign secretary William Hague pretends to smile in fluent English. 5 July Clegg unveils plans to hold a referendum on the voting system, reduce the number of MPs and change constituency boundaries. 21 July Standing in for Cameron in prime minister’s questions for the first time, Clegg describes the Iraq war as “illegal”. Downing Street clarifies that this is not the government’s view. 11 October News emerges that Clegg, a professed atheist, is looking at a posh Catholic school for one of his children. 12 October A major review by Lord Browne into the future of funding for higher education proposes higher fees. The Lib Dems back the plan, although Clegg had signed a pledge opposing the idea in opposition. And had his pictures taken signing the pledge. Trouble brews. 15 October Clegg announces a £7bn “fairness premium” to help the poorest children and, hopefully, undo some of the damage done to his reputation by the tuition fee U-turn. 20 October The government publishes its comprehensive spending review, with the biggest cuts to the public sector in living memory. Conservatives cheer George Osborne’s heroic axe. Lib Dem MPs look uncomfortable. Clegg smiles weakly. 21 October A “row” breaks out when the Institute for Fiscal Studies questions claims that the spending review is progressive. “Nonsense,” says Clegg. It depends how you define “progressive”, say pundits. 10 November Police and politicians taken by surprise when around 50,000 students hit the streets of London to protest against cuts to higher education and higher tuition fees. A crowd surrounds Conservative headquarters and some demonstrators break in. Luckily for the Lib Dems, no one knows where their HQ is. Clegg is burnt in effigy. 9 December Another demonstration turns sour as parliament takes a crucial vote on tuition fees. Two Lib Dem ministerial aides resign and 27 MPs rebel. 11 January 2011 Clegg pays tribute to “alarm clock Britain”, the people who he says “get up early to go to work”. Lie-in Britain fails to be impressed, probably because it is still in bed. 11 February A freedoms bill is published, scrapping what Lib Dems say are authoritarian state measures introduced by Labour. The ceremonial sandals of liberal principle get a rare outing. 24 February Clegg jokes that he “forgot” he was in charge of government while David Cameron was on holiday. No one laughs. Cameron says he is still in charge. 13 March Lib Dems hold spring conference in Sheffield. Clegg tells party members to pass on the message to the country that they are building a Liberal Britain. Party members tell Clegg to pass on the message to the Tories not to wreck the NHS. 23 March The budget introduces major Lib Dem policies on tax reform. Tories start to mutter that Clegg is too powerful. Lib Dems are pleased that Tories are muttering about how powerful they are. 5 April Clegg attacks nepotism in the awarding of unpaid internships to the “sharp-elbowed and well-connected”; defends fact that he benefited from connections himself; promises to blunt own elbows. 7 April Jemima Khan interviews Clegg for the New Statesman . Showing his softer side, he reveals that he cries to music and reports his son asking: “Why are the students angry with you, Papa?”. 12 April Gillian Duffy, the voter called a “bigoted woman” by Gordon Brown during the 2010 election campaign, confronts Clegg in Rochdale. Is he really happy with coalition policy, she asks. Clegg ducks the question. 18 April Clegg distances himself from Cameron on immigration. He says a “numbers game” – slashing immigrants to tens of thousands a year – is “not a government policy”. 23 April Cameron says he is “relaxed” about offering work experience to the children of friends – a contradiction of the coalition’s social mobility policy. Mina Holland and Rafael Behr Nick Clegg Liberal Democrats AV referendum Liberal-Conservative coalition Tuition fees Andrew Rawnsley guardian.co.uk