- Born
- Birth nameNicholas William Peter Clegg
- Nicknames
- Calamity Clegg
- Cleggy Weggy
- Height6′ 1″ (1.86 m)
- Clegg was educated at the private Caldicott School at Farnham Royal in South Buckinghamshire and, later, at the private Westminster School in London. As a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, Germany, he was sentenced to a term of community service after he and a friend burned a collection of cacti belonging to a professor.
He spent a gap year as a skiing instructor in Austria, Clegg studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University and was active in the student theatre; he acted alongside Helena Bonham Carter in a play about AIDS, and under director Sam Mendes.
Clegg spent summer 1989 as an office junior in a Postipankki bank in Helsinki. After university, he was awarded a scholarship to study for a year at the University of Minnesota, where he wrote a thesis on the political philosophy of the Deep Green movement. He then moved to New York City, where he worked as an intern under Christopher Hitchens at The Nation, a left-wing magazine.
In 1993, Clegg won the Financial Times' David Thomas Prize, in remembrance of an FT journalist killed on assignment in Kuwait in 1991. Clegg was the award's first recipient. He was later sent to Hungary, where he wrote articles about the mass privatisation of industries in the former communist bloc.
- IMDb mini biography by: Vell Baria
- SpouseMiriam Gonzalez Durantez(September 24, 2000 - present) (3 children)
- Husky voice
- Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam.
- Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary (2006-2007).
- Liberal Democrat Shadow spokesperson on Foreign Affairs (2005-2006).
- Elected leader of the Liberal Democrats in December 2007; resigned May 2015.
- Liberal Democrat MEP for the East Midlands (1999-2004).
- My job is to make sure that my party does not get pulled left or right as Cameron goes right and Miliband goes left.
- When people are anxious and insecure about the future, and you have a prolonged periods of social anxiety, siren voices on left and right become very attractive. On the left it is attractive to say you don't need to make any difficult economic decisions. On the right it becomes tempting to blame it on everyone else - foreigners, immigrants, take your pick.
- [on Jeremy Paxman] Here is a guy who gets paid a million pounds, thereabouts, paid for by taxpayers. He lives off politics and he spends all his time sneering at politics.
- [on supporting gay marriage, despite not including it in the Liberal Democrat election manifesto] It's just a simple idea that if two people love each other, it doesn't matter what sex they are, it doesn't matter if they're the same sex, if they love each other and they want to show that commitment towards each other through marriage, they should be able to do so and the fact that from this weekend same sex couples will be able to demonstrate their love to each other through marriage just as much as any other couple I think is a great, great step forward.
- If you're one of the first same-sex couples getting married this weekend, and you've got a spare seat, you might want to invite the likes of Norman Tebbit or Nigel Farage. Then each can see, for themselves, just how much this hard-won right - to celebrate your love for each other - means to you, your families and our country.
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