Nick Clegg

Biography: A British Liberal Democrat politician who in 2010 became the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Lord President of the Council and Minister for Constitutional and Political Reform in the coalition government of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. Clegg is the Leader of the Liberal Democrats and is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sheffield Hallam.

Clegg?s first major elected position was as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the East Midlands from 1999 to 2004. He was elected Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam in the 2005 general election and became the Liberal Democrats? Home Affairs spokesperson in 2006. Clegg defeated Chris Huhne in the party?s 2007 leadership election. Clegg became Deputy Prime Minister following the 2010 general election, when the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition government with the Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister David Cameron. As well as his parliamentary roles, Clegg has contributed to many pamphlets and books on political issues.

Clegg was educated at Caldicott School in Buckinghamshire and Westminster School in London, followed by Robinson College at the University of Cambridge, where he studied Social Anthropology; he later studied at the University of Minnesota and the College of Europe in Belgium. He is married to Miriam González Durantez; they have three sons.

Clegg?s father, Nicholas Clegg CBE, is chairman of United Trust Bank, and is a trustee of The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, where Ken Clarke was an adviser. Clegg?s paternal grandmother, Kira von Engelhardt, was the daughter of a baron from the multiethnic Imperial Russia, of German-Russian and Ukrainian origin, whose family fled the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Russian Revolution. One of his great-great-grandfathers, Ignaty Zakrevsky, was attorney general of the Imperial Russian senate. One of his daughters, Clegg?s great-great aunt, was the writer Moura Budberg. Clegg?s paternal grandfather, Hugh Anthony Clegg, was the editor of the British Medical Journal for 35 years.

Clegg?s Dutch mother, Hermance van den Wall Bake, was, along with her family, interned by the Japanese military in Batavia (Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). She met Clegg?s father during a visit to England in 1956, and they married on 1 August 1959.

Clegg is multilingual: he speaks English, Dutch, French, German, and Spanish. His background has informed his politics. He says, "There is simply not a shred of racism in me, as a person whose whole family is formed by flight from persecution, from different people in different generations. It?s what I am. It?s one of the reasons I am a liberal." His Dutch mother instilled in him "a degree of scepticism about the entrenched class configurations in British society"