The Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, and his deputy Vince Cable, are the subjects of two interview features well worth a read:

Nick Clegg was interviewed for EurActive.com, answering questions on numerous matters, including the Lisbon Treaty:

What I do know from my own personal experience, having been a MEP and watched, from Brussels and Strasbourg, the debate about Europe deteriorate and degenerate in the UK, is that this is one of the reasons I went into British politics.

I wanted to be in a position to engage with people directly rather than commenting on the debates from afar, and I think, even in this globalised high-tech world, people still make their political decisions based on feelings and sentiments that are often most powerfully derived from human contact. I think there’s no surrogate for old-fashioned doorstep politics.

The uncertainty concerning the Lisbon Treaty has been enormously damaging to the image and credibility of the EU. I hope that we can all play a role in persuading the Irish people to vote for the treaty [in the new 2009 referendum; see EurActiv 12/12/08], but if they vote it down, then that should be the end of the story. We’ve got to put an end to this period of uncertainty.

Meanwhile Vince Cable is the recipient of an extremely warm feature by Andy McSmith in The Independent:

His explanation of his success is simple and humble – what else would you expect from Cable? “I think it’s partly luck. I happen to have built up a fairly good reputation in economic matters at a time when this became the big issue of the day. Most of that time, people weren’t very interested in economic policy, quite frankly.

“The other thing that has worked is that I did anticipate a lot of the problems we are now facing. I was involved in the campaign against the demutualisation of the building societies. Ten years later, we are seeing the effect.

“And I did, a lot, in Parliament, point out the instability of the banks. In 2003, I raised with Gordon Brown the issue around the very rapid growth of British household debt and the bubble in house prices. He swatted all this away at the time. In retrospect, this was the right thing to have said.”

In other words, when other politicians were chasing issues where there were votes to be had, Vince Cable was quietly beavering away on a dull, difficult but vitally important subject, on which he has been proved right. He calls it “luck”. Others might say that it was hard work and good judgement. It’s a shame that there are not more people in Parliament like him.