Nick Clegg is certainly getting about at the moment.  From the Today programme (where his cactus burning past was brought up like it wasn’t something that has been well known for years), to Good Morning Scotland to Call Clegg to Pink News, he’s rarely out of the public gaze.

One of my favourite interviews, though, was published in Shortlist earlier this week.  When was the last time you saw a politician using the word “hard-arsed” in an interview? I thought his response to a question about whether men were in crisis was excellent:

I think the traditional, macho, tub-thumping man who’s the sole breadwinner, who’s uneasy about same-sex relationships, who thinks you can’t have hairs on your chest and care for your children – he’s in crisis, and thank God. It’s wonderful how chilled out young men are now about the fact you can be a football fan one moment, and a cook the next. You can weep at your child’s nativity play, and still be a hard-arsed trader. That’s a more well-rounded understanding of what it is to be a modern man.

The novel we’ll never see

Nick wrote a book once. Who knew? And he still has it. He’s not exactly blowing his own trumpet about his creative abilities, though.

I wrote a novel that will never, ever see the light of day [laughs]. I found it recently. It is such cringingly, toe-curlingly, puce-embarrassingly, pretentious adolescent tripe. I’d just read The Autumn Of The Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, which has no punctuation, so I went pure no-punctuation as well. It was about the tortured memories of an old man. I just don’t think that’s the right subject for an anguished teenager to write about.

Is it wrong that I want to read it now?

“We’ve massively reined them in”

On the realities of coalition, the need to compromise and how he’s stopped the Tories from doing their worst:

 It’s an inescapable fact that if you don’t win a majority, you have to compromise. The bit I don’t get is that some people describe every compromise as a betrayal. The Conservatives have had to compromise, too – we’ve massively reined them in. Tax cuts for multimillionaires – this would have happened if we had not been in coalition. There are currently some Conservatives who want to impose an obligatory prison sentence on anyone who’s committed a previous offence possessing a knife for the second time – not committing another offence, just possessing the knife. So you’ve got your penknife in your pocket, and… I disagree with that. [It’s a] policy that would probably see the prison population go up, and put a lot of youngsters on a conveyor belt from being today’s young offenders to tomorrow’s hardened criminals. And the Lib Dems are saying, “We’re not going to do that.” So what you see is that untested prejudices are tested in a coalition government. But if you haven’t won an election [outright], it’s not democratic to assume you can do everything you want. I have to deal with the world the way it is, not the way I’d like it to be. I’d like to be prime minister, but I’m not.

The dangers of populism

 I’m in favour of Europe, not because I love Brussels, but because I love Britain, and Farage is trading on a sense of despair about modern Britain that I don’t share. Populism is stalking Europe. I was in Austria the other day and there were posters for these eerily Farage-looking Austrian politicians beaming down, with the slogan “We understand your fury”. It’s the same thing in France with Le Pen, in Holland with Wilders; they’re all drawing on a profound sense of fear people have about the speed of change in the modern world. So I think the views that populism represent are genuinely dangerous. I can’t think of a worse antidote to fear than increasing job insecurity, and if you did what Nigel Farage is advocating [leaving the EU], you would make that fear and insecurity worse.

I’ve done more to change politics than Russell Brand

So what about Russell Brand urging people not to vote?

There are always people who say, “Everything’s pants, all politicians are the same, don’t vote, let’s have a revolution.” I understand the emotion sometimes, I share their frustration. But the idea that you can achieve something with a message of despair… it’s self-defeating. It would be incomprehensible to the people in the past that fought for our right to vote. Dare I say it, I’ve done a lot more than Russell Brand to try to change politics.

 

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings