Former Liberal Democrat leader says he has yet to decide whether he will stand again for Sheffield Hallam seat

Nick Clegg has suggested he could follow David Cameron, with whom he spent five years in coalition, out of parliament before 2020.

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The former Liberal Democrat leader, whose party was crushed in last year’s general election, said he was not willing to commit to running to be an MP again in the next election.

“I haven’t decided yet and obviously I need to in the next year or so. Assuming the election is in 2020, I’ll take a decision a little nearer the time,” he told journalists during a lunch in the House of Commons.

The MP for Sheffield Hallam said the decision was not linked to proposed boundary changes that will have a significant impact on his seat. Party sources insisted he would still be on track to win the redrawn constituency.

Clegg, who oversaw his party slipping down from 57 to eight MPs after its time in coalition with the Tories, joked that Cameron had once again overshadowed his work this week by deciding to step down on the same day as his book was launched.

Asked if he knew what the former prime minister thought of his successor, Theresa May, as well as her foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, and international trade secretary, Liam Fox, Clegg said he did, but was not willing to share it.



However, he claimed that tensions over the EU would cause a “major political conflagration” within the Conservative party and suggested the Brexit-supporting Fox would be the first to walk out.

“If I was a betting man, I would put a fair amount of money that Liam Fox will resign in a huff within the next 18 months,” Clegg said. “He doesn’t have a job and he doesn’t appear to have realised that yet.”

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He said Fox was “a proud man” who would start coming under pressure from Tory backbench colleagues who wanted Brexit to happen more quickly.

“They will get increasingly agitated and at one point Liam Fox will have to ask himself: ‘Am I going to sit here and become an increasing laughing stock because I’ve got nothing to do, or do I join my spiritual fellow travellers – the angry brigade on the right wing – and say I was also betrayed?”’ Clegg said. “He will do that. I would put a fair amount of money that he will do that within the next 18-24 months.”

He suggested Conservative MPs would start to get agitated with May and the rest of the party’s leadership over the EU issue and claimed the leave vote had papered over a “great faultline” between the party’s demands for free trade and parliamentary sovereignty.

“It’s the contest, the tension between the two sides of the Conservative brain,” Clegg said. “You cannot have untrammelled or extensive [single market] access without in one way or another being subservient to the rules set in that market. You can’t negotiate your way around it, you cannot paper over that tension,” he said.

“And so – odd though it might seem, given how unassailable the Conservative position appears to be at the moment – if I was to make any prediction about where the major fireworks in British politics are likely to detonate in the next few years, it would be within the Conservative party.”