Nick Clegg: at home in more ways than one

More positive press for the Liberal Democrats today: following yesterday’s Observer editorial, sister paper the Guardian today has an interview with Nick Clegg.

His first interview in his family home, with his wife and children around, the G2 piece is a mix of lifestyle and political issues.

Clegg had never allowed access to his family home before, but from what I saw he could give WebCameron a run for its money when it comes to cuteness. Deep in leafy Putney, the front door opened on to a vision of middle-class domesticity – a newborn baby dozing in a basket, and two young boys prancing about in their pyjamas, the elder proudly writing out his diary for the week: “school and French” one day, “church on Sunday” and so on. Clegg’s Spanish wife, Miriam, a lawyer, offered beer and smiles while Clegg momentarily lost himself in his children – “Hello, monkey!” – prompting a gurgly smile from his youngest.

The charge of being Cameron-lite “struggles to stand up when he talks with un-self-conscious passion about civil liberties, internationalism and, above all, social mobility.”

In all our conversations, Clegg says nothing that could have come from Cameron’s mouth. There is little discernible similarity as a character either; any confusion between the two men would require, for one thing, almost total ignorance of our class system, for Clegg’s Eurocentric internationalism – his mother was Dutch, his home life is bilingual, he used to work for the European commission – places him on a different planet from the sloaney Englishness of the Tory leader. He is a quintessential Liberal, and on issues from ID cards to the environment can plausibly claim to be ahead of the curve. But even his stated ambition to double the number of Lib Dem MPs – currently 63 – within two elections still feels ambitious. Does Clegg seriously believe he will one day be prime minister?

“Yes!”

Nick talks a bit about rebuilding British politics, psephology, the Liberal Democrats’ “national spread now, south and north, rural and urban” and yes, even Piers Morgan.

Decca Aitkenhead concludes,

Clegg is emerging as the party’s most promising leader, and knows that opportunities like this one don’t come along very often.

Too right they don’t, and Nick comes across as being ready and at home with the challenges of the moment.

You can read the full piece here.