Nick Clegg on why London still needs the Lib Dems

Nick Clegg is the man who could decide which party takes office on Friday. Sarah Sands boards the battle bus with the kingmaker and his wife to hear why the capital needs a Coalition government
On the buses: Nick Clegg and his wife Miriam González Durántez aboard the Lib-Dem coach (Picture: Adam Gray/SWNS)
Sarah Sands6 May 2015

While David Cameron and Ed Miliband are in ferocious denial about a hung parliament on Friday, Nick Clegg approaches the end of the week sanguine with statesmanship. He believes he carries the fortunes of the country on his slim shoulders. After the 2010 election, the Evening Standard’s front page headline said: “Take your pick, Nick.” He was wooed by Labour and the Tories. Clegg chose the Conservatives because they had more seats but probably also because they were bolder and more polished in their courting of the Lib-Dems.

This time there are other dealmakers in the mix, arranged marriages of a nightmarish kind. Miliband says he will not deal with the SNP. Cameron claims he will have no truck with the admittedly tiny parliamentary presence of Ukip. Clegg, with customary clarity, points out that he is the only suitor who can keep the ugly sisters away. Thus he has turned the Prime Minister’s rhetoric against him. It is now Clegg and the Lib-Dems who claim to represent stability over the alternative chaos.

I meet him on the yellow Lib-Dem bus careering across the country from Land’s End to John O’Groats. His wife Miriam is alongside him, coolly working on her laptop while he talks. The press pack notes that Miriam is not cordoned off as Samantha Cameron is and is happy to talk to “real people”, which in election terms means party supporters. She tells me she does not object to the scrutiny and that her approach is to be “authentic”.

While Cameron is pumped up in shirtsleeves, Clegg, 48, wears a blue sweater and canvas shoes. He looks normal and tells it straight. That is his electoral appeal: “We are the only people saying nobody is going to win, we are being up front with people.”

Looking back at the campaign, it is the comic moments he remembers. For instance, his first visit was to a hedgehog sanctuary, with Paddy Ashdown. Ashdown muttered under his breath to Clegg: “When I was in the Special Boat Service we used to eat hedgehogs.”

I wonder if it his Europeanism which makes him serene about the prospect of another coalition. He responds that it is experience: “We have proved over the last five years that history books will judge what we did very kindly indeed. It is remarkable that we did so many things and remained resilient.”

Will it be as constructive next time around? The election has been thick with insults and the Lib-Dems have issued some damaging kiss-and-tells about their relationship with the Tories, including accusations of a secret agenda of cuts. Surely the Rose Garden can never be the same again?

Clegg answers that the Coalition is not “based on saccharin sentiment” but is “a business arrangement”. If he and Cameron appear side by side again they will be battle-hardened and, he adds, “a little greyer around the temples”. Although, funnily enough, both leaders have miraculously kept grey hair at bay.

Clegg is exasperated that Cameron and Miliband are refusing to acknowledge that they need the Lib-Dems. It is the Lib-Dems who are the patriots, according to Clegg, while the other parties pursue narrow party interests. He warns that London will be the great loser in this “political shambles”.

“Be under no illusion, the direction of travel for Miliband and Cameron is that they will put people in government, either directly or indirectly, who don’t give a damn about London. On one hand you have Alex Salmond, who regards London as nothing other than something to denigrate and attack in order to burnish his credentials north of the border.

“And in Nigel Farage you have someone who wants to pull the government out of one of the most important mainstays of the London economy, namely our membership of the European Union. And so the only guarantor of stability for London in my view is a stable, Coalition government with us in it.”

Happy days: Cameron and Clegg on the first day of coalition government (Picture: Christopher Furlong/Getty)

I mention Cameron’s counter-claim that a vote for the Lib-Dems effectively allows in the SNP. “Poor Cameron, I feel slightly sorry for him. He is panicky because, poor chap, he is the first Conservative party leader to have failed to win a majority on two occasions and he is coming up with ever more foolish claims. The Tories claim they need 23 seats to win a general election. They need 323. They are not going to succeed. Remember in 2010 the hysterical claims made about what would happen, the earth would stop spinning. A few days later they went into coalition.”

It sounds as if a little relationship therapy may be necessary this time. First Clegg compares Cameron’s authority to that of John Major. “What happened to Major when he was held to ransom by the Right-wing of his party is going to look like a walk in the park compared to Cameron as he is pushed pillar to post by the zany members of his own party.”

Then Clegg alights on another comparison: “Cameron has now gone so far in chasing Ukip to the Right that he and Nigel Farage are interchangeable. Their sole priority in life is to obsess about the referendum. Everything else, tax cuts, the NHS, our schools, the protection of the vulnerable, all that is subservient to the referendum. His words, not mine.” Ouch.

As for the other side, Clegg accuses Miliband and Ed Balls of failing to learn any lessons of the damage done to London by fiscal and economic instability. He is vexed that, while he apologised for his U-turn on tuition fees, Miliband has still not said sorry for Labour “crashing” the economy when it was in power.

On other potential partners, Clegg paints his red lines. “A government that is put on life support by the SNP or Ukip is not a government we would be part of.” Even if it means the alternative of a second election? The Lib-Dems would pay that price?

“Of course there will be circumstances in which the Lib-Dems will not go into government. I don’t want to be in power for power’s sake. I don’t want to be in government for government’s sake. Having me and the Lib- Dems is a whole lot better for London. Beyond that I can’t make safe predictions. But the more I listen to Miliband and Cameron, the more I think they will force a second election before Christmas.”

'I don’t want power for power’s sake': Nick Clegg (Picture: PA)

He argues that the most dangerous outcome would be a Conservative Party winning enough seats to try to run as a minority government: “Since they can’t win, the better they do, the more likely Cameron will be held hostage by the swivel-eyed elements of his own party.”

Clegg’s solution is tactical voting for Lib-Dem rather than Tory in south-west London seats such as Twickenham: “Better not too strong a Tory party because it means they are held hostage.”

In 2010, Clegg, with remarkable sang froid, demanded the resignation of Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour Party as the cost of negotiation. Brown did stand down but Clegg nevertheless decided to side with the Tories. When he says he can lend mental rigour to Labour, just as he adds heart to the Tories, he is not messing around.

Similarly, he played hardball with the Tories. Cameron says of Clegg’s tennis that he is an elegant player but the Prime Minister is “more resourceful on the line calls”. Clegg can play dirty too: many say Clegg got his own back on the Tory decision to fight constitutional reform by blocking boundary reform, and thus handicapping the Tories in this election.

He is scornful of the idea of Cameron and Osborne as great political strategists: “They are not strategists. If the Tories are such great strategists, surely the party with bucketloads of money, with their black tie, white tie, pink champagne receptions and almost unbridled support from great swathes of the press, you would think they would walk it.”

I ask if he thinks more or less of Cameron, having worked with him. He answers that he has become familiar with his strengths and weaknesses. The main weakness is “buckling against their Right-wing”. Who would be a better Prime Minister, Miliband or Cameron? Clegg smiles: “Me.” He is joking but he is at home in government. It is just that the party got smaller.

Clegg is ready to stride back into coalition. He says he can make the case for Europe and he has some unfinished party business, including appointing women into the Cabinet. “We are in the last-chance saloon as far as our candidates are concerned. I have said if we don’t shift the dial in a more diverse direction after Thursday I personally will want something more radical.” Quotas? He agrees. Miriam, the most public feminist of the leaders’ wives, keeps her eyes on her laptop.

Can there be a workable coalition after Friday? Who will it include? Can anyone produce a Queen’s Speech? Clegg says he is not a soothsayer but in an undecided election the Lib-Dems are more needed than ever to secure the centre ground.

Will his own party trust him? “We are a wonderfully, if sometimes painfully, democratic party. We can’t capriciously make decisions. I try to lead from the front but also carry people with me. The party will be wary, I will be wary, but it would be more irresponsible not to put the country first.”

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