As the leader of the Lib Dems steps down after a nightmare election, his career so far can be read as one of remarkable achievement or of opportunities lost

He might go on to greatness. Or he might not. It’s the kind of ambivalence of a school report, the sort of comment that Nick Clegg’s headmaster might have written in his final report from prep school. It could also be an assessment of his prospects now, in the aftermath of leading his party more or less into oblivion.

For a man still a couple of years short of his 50th birthday, Clegg has packed a lot in. He has led his party for nearly eight years and been deputy prime minister for five, the first Liberal with desk space in No 10 for nearly 90 years. But, like the ambivalence about his future capacity for greatness, so too his life so far can be read as an extraordinary list of achievements or a sad underfulfilment of a life that began full of privilege and promise.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Cameron and Nick Clegg at Downing Street on 12 May 2010. Photograph: Daniel Deme/EPA

One thing about Clegg is his appearance of supreme, inoffensive ordinariness that belies his family’s exotic origins, the Russian and Dutch antecedents and even his Spanish wife. He could be the headmaster of a successful prep school, perhaps, or a model in a Boden catalogue, the kind of person who would be comfortable to chat to at the school gate.

Yet this is the man who left a good job working for the European commission in Brussels that used both his intellect and his fluency in five European languages – at one stage he worked for the former Tory cabinet minister Leon Brittan, who urged him to join the Conservatives. First he stood as an MEP and then went on to fight a seat in Sheffield – albeit one with a growing Lib Dem tradition.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clegg with former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

And this is the man who went from being a new MP to leader of his party in the space of not much more than two years. Long before he stunned at least half his party by leading it into coalition with the Tory enemy, he had shown a steely sense of purpose, as well as a rare talent for campaigning. He had also played a significant role in shifting his party on to completely new territory to accommodate the perception that the political centre of gravity had moved rightwards. He had done the spadework for a coalition with the Conservatives.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Clegg in 2005. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

It was the Orange Book, published in 2004, the year before he became an MP, that reshaped the Lib Dems and gave a philosophical edge to the more serious and disciplined party that Paddy Ashdown had created. Clegg contributed the chapter on Europe, advocating reform, devolution and evolution. But the real impact of the collection of essays was its economic liberalism, its commitment to market economics and to 19th-century principles of individual freedom allied with social justice.



In 2010, by then leader of the Lib Dems, Clegg dominated the closing stages of the election campaign. Once again it felt as if the party was almost at the point of lift-off. But although it won a slightly bigger share of the vote, the party actually lost seats. But the Tories had no majority. The Lib Dem’s moment had arrived, and the party under Clegg was prepared better than many of its activists understood.

Clegg did not take the decision to negotiate with the Conservatives alone, nor was it only his choice to take the leap of faith implicit in joining a coalition that could last five whole years. But he sold it to his party. As deputy prime minister and party leader he was its figurehead. And in public perception, he was the lead traitor. The moment the decision was taken to overturn the pledge that had won the party hundreds of thousands of student votes and back the Tory plan to treble tuition fees, it was headed for electoral oblivion.

That single decision – to millions of voters, and many activists, a betrayal almost as unforgivable as Tony Blair’s catastrophic decision to go to war in Iraq – has made it almost impossible to get across the achievements that Lib Dems could reasonably be proud of. Pupil premiums, school dinners for infants, extended child care – they may not be enough to set against free schools and the constant undermining of Ofsted, but they are still good measures.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Clegg delivers a speech to party delegates as home affairs spokesman in 2006. Photograph: Bruno Vincent/Getty Images

The Lib Dem commitment to liberty played a key role in blocking the Home Office’s determined efforts to introduce a snooper’s charter. And while the Lib Dems were in coalition, the Human Rights Act was safe, and an in/out referendum on the EU was never on the cards. Not for much longer.

The progress that has been made on decarbonising electricity supply and setting tough targets to cut carbon emissions can go in the balance in favour of the Lib Dems. But on the other side of the scales weighs their support for the austerity agenda, the decisions to freeze some benefits and cut others, their votes for the bedroom tax and the household cap, and the multiplication of food banks.

As for the Lib Dems’ agenda for political renewal, it has turned to dust. Electoral reform, Lords reform and reform of constituency boundaries have all failed. The generation of Lib Dems who worked so hard for so long to climb the ladders of power at Westminster have been knocked back to the beginning, down the longest snake on the board.

That Clegg recognises the sense of betrayal that his party feels was clear from his speech in his constituency. As Danny Alexander and Vince Cable, Ed Davey and Jo Swinson paid for their experience of office with their careers, Clegg stood alone among the ruins of his party like a shell-shocked survivor on the field of battle.

It had been “a cruel and punishing” night for the Lib Dems, he said. But then, politics was sometimes a “brutal world”.

