Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg (2014)

Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg (born January 7, 1967 in Chalfont St Giles , Buckinghamshire ) is a British politician who was Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015 . He also served as party leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2007 to 2015 . After the party suffered heavy losses in the 2015 British general election , Clegg resigned from this office. In October 2018, he became Head of Corporate Communications at Facebook Inc.

Life

Clegg's parents are the English banker Nicholas Clegg and the Dutch teacher Hermance van den Wall Bake. Clegg's paternal grandparents are Hugh Anthony Clegg and Baroness Kira von Engelhardt. The Russian baroness and double spy Moura Budberg was Clegg's great-great-aunt. His maternal grandfather, Herman Willem Alexander van den Wall Bake, was a friend of the Dutch royal family and president of the major Dutch bank ABN Amro .

Clegg attended Caldicott School in Buckinghamshire and Westminster School in London . He was raised bilingually in English and Dutch and also speaks French, German and Spanish. After a break as a ski instructor in Austria and a job at a bank in Helsinki, Clegg studied archeology and anthropology at Robinson College at the University of Cambridge . After finishing his studies, Clegg received a one-year scholarship to the University of Minnesota , where he worked on the political philosophy of deep ecology . He then did an internship with Christopher Hitchens in New York City for the left-wing weekly magazine The Nation . This was followed by a stay in Brussels as part of a six-month internship as part of the Group of 24 . In Bruges , Belgium , she completed a second master's degree at the College of Europe .

Clegg with his wife in 2009

Clegg is married to Miriam González Durántez, a lawyer from Valladolid in Spain. His wife is not a UK national. He himself is an avowed atheist , but lets his wife raise his three children in the Roman Catholic faith.

In 1993, Clegg won the David Thomas Prize from the British newspaper Financial Times . In April 1994 he got a job with the European Commission and worked on the TACIS aid program for the post-Soviet states . EU Trade Commissioner Leon Brittan then offered him the opportunity to work in his office as a political advisor and speechwriter.

Political career

In 1998 Clegg was set up by the Liberal Democrats for the 1999 European elections . Surprisingly, he was elected to the East Midlands constituency and thus a member of the European Parliament , to which he was a member until 2004. Clegg chose to run for the 2005 British general election and won a seat in the lower house for Sheffield in the Hallam constituency.

On December 18, 2007, Clegg was elected party leader of the Liberal Democrats.

As part of the Conservative- Liberal Democratic coalition , Clegg was appointed Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Chairman of the Privy Council under Prime Minister David Cameron in the Cameron I Cabinet on May 11, 2010 .

During the reign, the Liberal Democrats voted for several bills that they had opposed during the election campaign, including an increase in tuition fees . The party's polls plummeted, but Clegg defended approval by stating that compromises had to be made in a coalition. He later described the increase as a mistake.

Participation in government had an adverse effect on the Liberal Democrats in the subsequent elections. In the 2014 European elections , the party fell to 4.8% of the vote and is now only represented by one member in the European Parliament . There were also heavy losses in local elections.

Nick Clegg earned respect for speaking on TV in 2014 with EU critic Nigel Farage from UKIP on the subject of Europe. The debate over who won the duel was split.

The Liberal Democrats suffered heavy losses in the 2015 general election; of the 47 seats won in the previous elections, only eight remained. Thereupon Clegg resigned as party chairman.

Clegg is one of the 89 people from the European Union against whom Russia imposed an entry ban in May 2015 .

In the British general election in June 2017, he was defeated by Labor candidate Jared O'Mara in his constituency of Sheffield Hallam , thereby losing his seat in parliament.

At the annual New Year's ceremony of the Queen, Clegg was beaten to Knight Bachelor ("Sir") in January 2018 .

Controversy

Nick Clegg, who campaigned for a reform of expense reports both in the European Parliament and in the House of Commons, was the target of public criticism several times during his career because of his own expense claims against the state. Until 2009, he had, among other things, paid for household items, renovation and gardening work on his property, as well as telephone costs and food expenses. For 2018, the year he switched to Facebook, Clegg had £ 113,000 paid out from the treasury for public service, more than his former boss, David Cameron, who received around £ 110,000.

Fonts (selection)

• Politics: Between the Extremes . Bodley Head, 2016
• How to stop Brexit (and make Britain great again) . Bodley Head, 2017

Web links

Commons : Nick Clegg  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Carsten Volkery: British Liberal Democrat Clegg - Britannia's Kingmaker on Spiegel Online from March 7, 2010
• Official website
• Entry for Nick Clegg in the European Parliament 's database of MEPs
• Nick Clegg on LBC 97.3 (Weekly Interview Hour with Nick Clegg)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Facebook hires former deputy PM Sir Nick Clegg. BBC, October 19, 2018, accessed October 27, 2018 . 
2. ↑ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1370299/Mystery-Nick-Cleggs-Mata-Hari-aunt-plot-kill-Lenin.html
3. ↑ April 30, 2004: GPlus welcomes Clegg as Fifth Partner ( memento of the original from January 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ BBC News: Nick Clegg
5. ↑ BBC News: Clegg 'does not believe in God'
6. ↑ Guardian: Sheffield Hallam ( August 28, 2004 memento in the Internet Archive )
7. ^ Telegraph: Menzies Campbell resigns as Lib Dem leader
8. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/sep/19/nick-clegg-apologies-tuition-fees-pledge
9. ↑ http://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/exclusive-student-support-for-lib-dems-collapses-to-just-six-per-cent-9267942.html
10. ↑ http://www.oe24.at/welt/England-Schwere-Verluste-fuer-Liberaldemokrats-bei-Kommunalwahlen/26934890
11. ↑ http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-26843996
12. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/08/nick-clegg-resigns-as-lib-dem-leader
13. ↑ Andreas Borcholte: Entry bans: Russia accuses EU politicians of showing behavior. In: Spiegel Online. May 31, 2015, accessed June 1, 2015 . 
14. ^ RUS: Russian Visa Blocking List. (PDF 23 KB) In: yle.fi. May 26, 2015, accessed June 1, 2015 . 
15. ^ London Gazette  (Supplement). No. 62150, HMSO, London, December 29, 2017, p. N2 ( PDF , accessed December 30, 2017, English).
16. ↑ "How Nick Clegg pushed expenses claims to the limit: MPs' expenses" telegraph.co.uk dated
17. ↑ "Taxpayer handed Nick Clegg close to the £ 115,000 maximum in expenses for carrying out 'public duties' last year despite the ex-deputy PM taking a full-time Facebook job with a £ 1MILLION salary" dailymail.co.uk from 26. July 2019