Nick Clegg is rapidly discovering that it is tough at the top. There is never a honeymoon period for leaders of the third party, as his Liberal Democrat predecessors Paddy Ashdown, Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell all found out.
No remark, however casual; no aspect of his life, however private; no mistake, however minor, goes unexamined. And, after less than six months as leader, Clegg has stumbled a number of times, both in handling his parliamentary party and in talking about his personal life.
This raises the question of whether he is up to the job of establishing a new, stronger position for his party in the face of the Conservatives’ revival under David Cameron. There is a strange paradox in political leadership. In most cases, the top job comes after years, even decades, of waiting, and at times, too late in a career to make an impact. Sometimes, it happens too early, when youthful (or, more aptly, early middle-aged) talent and energy are found wanting, unprepared for the challenges of leadership. In both the late and early cases, it is not just the personality of the leaders that counts, but also the political circumstances of the time: it is the man and his moment. Only rarely is the time exactly right for a leader to make a maximum impact over a long period.
In the too-late category can be counted Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, James Callaghan, even perhaps Harold Macmillan on the Conservative side, Michael Foot for Labour and Menzies Campbell for the Liberal Democrats. In the second group are the Earl of Rosebery and William Hague. Among those few who saw a happy marriage of timing and opportunity were Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
They were both right for their times. David Cameron hopes that, after all the party’s failures of the 1990s and the first half of this decade, he is the man to ride the Tory’s return to power. Gordon Brown’s nightmare is that his time may have passed: that, after all the anguished years of waiting, he may have missed his opportunity.
Winning by a whisker
Last December, Clegg won the Liberal Democrat leadership by a whisker of a few hundred votes, because enough of the party membership thought it was time for a fresh approach. They believed it was the party’s Blair or Cameron moment, after the infighting at the end of the Kennedy era, and after what proved to be a lacklustre interim 18 months under Menzies Campbell. Clegg was seen as having the youth – 40 when he was elected – to compete with Cameron.
The narrowness of his victory is revealing in another way. Although most of the party establishment backed him, others had doubts about whether he was tough or sharp enough. Some Huhne supporters saw Clegg as indecisive and thought his leadership campaign lacked direction. Tactically, Clegg was also outmanoeuvred.
The tag “Calamity Clegg” was invented by a member of the Huhne team, and though later disowned, it stuck. Clegg did not always look hungry for the job, partly, in some respects, because he wasn’t. He had been a loyal supporter of Campbell, both during his leadership battle in 2006 and subsequently. While he did not disguise his eventual ambitions for the leadership, he privately hoped the chance would come after the next general election, when he assumed that Campbell would stand down.
This was not just because of personal loyalty to Campbell, but also because he has a young family and he was reluctant to expose his wife and children to the pressures of party leadership. But the on/off election fiasco of early October 2007 changed all that, and Clegg immediately recognised that, too early or not, this was an opportunity he had to take.
Faster-than-usual rise
His election was a gamble. Few MPs have been elected leader only just over two-and-a-half years after first entering the Commons. Clegg’s opponent, Chris Huhne, was also a 2005 entrant to parliament and a former member of the European parliament. However, Huhne was older, in his fifties, and was generally seen as a more fully formed politician. He had also already done well in his losing contest against Campbell in February/March 2006. He has a clear-cut, often sharp and aggressive personality.
He was a known quantity
By contrast, Clegg was a work-in-progress, even though he had been a professional politician for almost 20 years. Educated at Westminster, and then at Cambridge, he was briefly a journalist and political consultant before working for three years in the late 1990s as an adviser to Sir Leon (now Lord) Brittan when he was Vice-President of the European Commission. He then served for five years as Liberal Democrat MEP for the East Midlands up to 2004. By the end of his term he had been selected as the party’s candidate for the Sheffield seat of Hallam.
