In the new issue of Prospect, novelist Edward Docx interviews Nick Clegg about Coalition in-fighting, his relationship with David Cameron and the meaning of liberalism. Subscribers can click here to read the article in full. Selected highlights below:
Clegg on wanting to be Prime Minister:
“If you really must know, the more I do this job, the more I’d love to be Prime Minister, but I don’t think that’s going to be an instant prospect.”
On the possibility of a Lib Dem-Labour coalition in 2015:
“I just don’t see any evidence that Labour understand what it is to be a post-2008 progressive. They cannot expect to be in government without… understanding that [it] can no longer be about the governance of extravagance in public spending. And that would be my central challenge. I really would not be confident at all of entering into coalition with a Labour Party that doesn’t understand that breaking the bank is a deeply regressive thing do to.”
On the significance of the Coalition:
“The most valuable thing politically about this coalition is that it explodes the myth that we can only be governed by one party. It completely demolishes that, and that is a bazooka politically, with a far greater effect than sort of pea-shooter tactics of whether you leak a letter here or there. And that’s what I keep holding in my mind. And that’s why I have greater pride in being Deputy Prime Minister than people think."
On how globalisation should change the way we think about politics:
“The old distinctions by which politics is still organised in the hands of a lot of commentators are just so out of date. They’re still stuck in [questions like] is it state or market? Is it north or south? Is it employer versus employee? Actually, the big thing, the big dividing line, increasingly, in politics is about how identity politics responds to the very unsettling effect of globalisation. Because globalisation is creating a sense of powerlessness.”
Edward Docx on Clegg:
"Close up Nick Clegg isn’t so much groomed as spruce. He smells of soap. Either he is going grey interestingly late or he uses one of those shampoos that “targets” grey. His features seem at times to be deliberately inexpressive. He’s paler than he looks on television—pasty even—and has the slightly compressed smile of a man forever running for office. George Eliot would have him as an ambitious family doctor."
Click here to read the article in full.
The new issue of Prospect is out now. To subscribe, click here.
