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.
Even when he was an MEP, an anonymous group little known at Westminster, Clegg was marked out. The party elders saw him as a man with a future – good-looking, clever, charming and with none of the quirks and idiosyncrasies displayed by a number of Liberal Democrat MPs.
Indeed, some pro-European Tories with whom he had worked wished he had joined their party. That was certainly the view of Brittan, Chris Patten (for whom Clegg’s wife worked in Brussels) and Kenneth Clarke, an East Midlands neighbour. It is quite easy to imagine Clegg as a liberal-minded, pro-European MP in the Conservative Party of the 1970s and 1980s, but that group is virtually extinct now – and certainly not attractive to anyone with ambitions to have influence at the top.
His earlier Tory links and style have made some wonder whether he would be willing to do a deal with the Conservatives in the event of a hung parliament. Clegg has wisely dodged questions about what his party would do if neither of the two larger parties won an overall majority. The immediate answer is almost certainly nothing. The Liberal Democrats would not want to be seen to be propping up a Labour Party that had lost both seats and the overall majority. And there is no evidence that the Tories would back electoral reform. The real test might come later if a second general election failed to produce an overall majority. That would be Clegg’s opportunity to change the political system.
Influence of Brussels
On the surface, Clegg’s CV is a conventional enough story of a professional politician’s rise, matched by Cameron’s career as a special adviser and public relations consultant, or George Osborne’s as an adviser both in government and Opposition.
Like them, Clegg is part of the political class, the establishment that he has often criticised as leader. But there are crucial differences. While the careers of Cameron and Osborne developed entirely in domestic, and largely Westminster, politics, Clegg’s formative period, in his thirties, was in Brussels. He is an internationalist not only by persuasion but also by background. His father, a banker in the City, is half Russian, and his mother, a teacher, is half Dutch. Clegg himself speaks five languages and is married to a Spanish lawyer, Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, whose late father was active in the rebirth of the constitutional right in Spain. His years in Brussels and in the Strasbourg parliament left him a good deal less than starry-eyed about the EU.
He recognises its defects
Nonetheless, his European perspective partly explains his impatience with the world of Westminster. He is much less of an insider than his career would appear. Clegg is also not a tribal figure. He is remarkably open intellectually and is both interested in, and knowledgeable about, the way public services are run in, say, places like Sweden and the Netherlands. He is critical of the reluctance of those on the traditional side to learn from overseas. As seen in several other European countries, Clegg favours what he calls “free schools”, independent of local authority control and run by the private and voluntary sectors. Similarly, he has no objections, in certain circumstances, to private provision of healthcare if waiting times are exceeded. But he is a strong egalitarian, favouring a redistributive tax system.
Getting it wrong
Clegg is clearly frustrated that his proposals for public services have been overshadowed by other matters. He was criticised, in particular, for his tactics on the issue of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty bill. Many Liberal Democrat MPs, in their 2005 election addresses, had promised a referendum on the original, now abandoned, European constitution and believed they had to honour that pledge for fear of being vulnerable to Conservative charges of betraying the electorate.
Clegg, like the majority of the leadership, believed that the treaty was sufficiently different from the constitution not to require a referendum. But he accepted the Campbell formula of not backing a referendum on the treaty, but, instead, proposing one on the underlying question of Britain’s membership of the European Union. This was logically defensible, but convoluted. However, the tactic did not work to completely. First, Clegg was involved in what amounted to a walk-out from the Commons when Ed Davey, his foreign affairs spokesman, was thrown out for protesting against the Speaker’s refusal to call a Liberal Democrat amendment on its referendum proposal. Second, three members of his own frontbench and nearly a quarter of his parliamentary party rebelled and decided to vote for a referendum on the treaty. The three lost their Shadow Cabinet posts.
Clegg was criticised for not honouring the earlier pledge. Some argued that he should have had the courage to oppose a referendum on the treaty outright, risking a larger rebellion, or allowed a free vote. There were no easy choices and much of his problem was inherited. But it did not look good and damaged his standing in the polls.
Trying to make his mark
Clegg’s underlying problem – like that of all centre party leaders – is getting noticed. This has convinced that he needs to play the anti-Westminster politics card, championing new forms of deliberative democracy. He has also said he is willing to face prosecution rather than sign up for an Identity Card. His impatience makes him willing to adopt a confrontational approach and ideas that challenge the consensus.
He talks of “doing politics in a different way” but he has yet to show a sure political touch. His recent interview with GQ magazine, during which he was questioned about the number of lovers he had had, fuelled an impression of naïvety. Clegg has time to learn, to avoid the pitfalls, and find a means of articulating his far-reaching ideas on taxation (a switch from income tax to green taxes) and on reform of public services. He is smart and politically appealing. But once the British public makes up its mind about a leader, it seldom changes it for the better. Just ask William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith or Menzies Campbell.
Peter Riddell is Chief Political Commentator of The Times and author of six books on British politics, the most recent being ‘The Unfulfilled Prime Minister: Tony Blair’s Quest For a Legacy’. He is Chairman of the Hansard Society and has two honorary doctorates
PRINCIPLES MATTER
In his first major speech to the Liberal Democrat party, Nick Clegg called for “a year of thinking daringly” as he set out his plans for the future
When to back off
“I stand for these simple principles: the state must intervene to allocate money on a fair basis; the state must intervene to guarantee equality of access in our schools and hospitals; and the state must oversee core standards and entitlements.
But once those building blocks are in place, the state must back off and allow the genius of grassroots innovation, diversity and experimentation to take off in providing an array of top-class schools and hospitals. So we must challenge monopolies.
Give real power and responsibility to people who use public services and people who work in them. And change those services so they’re human in scale and personal in nature.”
Scaling back Whitehall
“Let me give you a sense of the direction I want us to take. The first step is to scale back the vast monster of Whitehall.
Whitehall should get out of the business of the day to day running of public services in Britain. That strategy doesn’t work. We will draw up plans for radically shrinking the size of all our public service departments – to re-focus them on setting broad objectives for the local agencies and people who deliver on the ground.
Government should step away from daily management, and instead make sure that public services are held clearly to account through effective, independent systems of inspection.
Downscaling national government’s role will also require a major revitalisation of local government. Both Labour and Conservatives alike see our local government as a Whitehall delivery agency... This is just daft. You can’t run thousands of schools from an office in Whitehall, and you can’t innovate effectively on a national scale.
More powers must be devolved from central government, and with them more power to raise and spend money.”
Power to the people “We need to empower people who use and people who deliver public services every day. We know central government gets in the way of that happening. But let’s not pretend that local government is blameless.
Councils too can impose bureaucracy, insist on unnecessary control. There is no liberal reason why those who deliver public services must always work directly for the government, central or local – so long as we are absolutely clear about the principles under which those services operate.”
The full speech can be read online at: www.libdems.org.uk/news/nick-clegg-promises-a-new-type-of-government.14005.html