Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg & Lady Clegg have three young sons – Antonio, Alberto and Miguel. Nick Clegg was born in Buckinghamshire in 1967.
He grew up in Oxfordshire with two brothers and a sister in a large extended family. His mother is Dutch and father is half Russian.
He studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge and afterwards continued my post graduate studies at the University of Minnesota and the College of Europe in Bruges. He then spent some time in New York, working as a trainee journalist with Christopher Hitchens, as a consultant in London, and in Budapest writing about economic reform having won a prize from the Financial Times.
Later he moved to Brussels where he worked for five years for the European Commission. His job included managing aid projects in Central Asia following the collapse of communism and acting as a trade negotiator with China and Russia as a senior member of Leon Brittan’s office, then Vice President of the EC.
In 1999 he was elected Member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands – the first liberal Parliamentarian in the whole region since the 1930s. As an MEP, he co-founded the Campaign for Parliamentary Reform, which led calls for reforms to expenses, transparency and accountability in the European Parliament. He was also the Trade and Industry Spokesman for the Liberal group of MEPs and piloted a radical new law breaking up telecoms monopolies.
The travelling life of an MEP was difficult to reconcile with a young family and in 2004 he stood down as an MEP. He lectured part-time at Sheffield and Cambridge Universities before being elected as Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam in 2005.
He became Europe spokesman in Charles Kennedy’s shadow cabinet, acting as deputy to Menzies (Ming) Campbell.
When Ming won the 2006 leadership election, he became Shadow Home Secretary. In this position, he led the Liberal Democrats’ defence of civil liberties, proposing a Freedom Bill to repeal unnecessary and illiberal legislation, campaigned against ID Cards and the retention of innocent people’s DNA, and argued against excessive counter-terrorism legislation. Together with my colleagues he also forced the Government into a symbolic defeat in a debate on the lop-sided Trans Atlantic Extradition Treaty signed by Tony Blair’s Government which sacrificed basic safeguards for British citizens.
He was elected leader of the Liberal Democrats in December 2007.
Following the formation of the Coalition Government in May 2010 he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister.
In 2015 after a resounding election defeat for the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg resigned as leader describing the defeat as (in which he lost his own seat) —
“immeasurably more crushing and unkind“
NIck Clegg
In a highly unusual announcement in 2018 having spent over 16 years in politics, it was announced that Nick had been hired as Vice President, Global Affairs & Communications at Facebook where he resides with his family in Menlo Park, USA.
Nick Clegg regularly writes on Medium.com: https://nickclegg.medium.com/